“Carbon neutral” claims revisited: “Scientifically inaccurate” and “misleading”
“Carbon neutral” claims revisited: “Scientifically inaccurate” and “misleading”
Apple’s new watch is still not carbon neutral.
A few weeks ago, in the Financial Times, Kenza Bryan wrote about the problems faced by the voluntary carbon market. The headline was “The death of carbon neutrality”. In September 2020, the EU agreed on rules to ban environmental claims such as “climate neutral” by 2026 in an attempt to stop greenwashing of consumer products.
Human rights abuses and the Southern Cardamom REDD project
Bryan’s article also looked at the Southern Cardamom REDD project in Cambodia, which standards body Verra suspended in June 2023, after receiving a letter from Human Rights Watch.
In a June 2023 statement, Human Rights Watch explained that,
Human Rights Watch began investigating allegations of human rights abuses in the context of the Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project in April 2022. We have shared our preliminary findings with the implementers of the project, the firms that audited the project, and most recently, with Verra.
In August 2023, Bloomberg reported that Trafigura, the world’s largest trader in carbon removal credits, had bought carbon offsets from Southern Cardamom REDD project for a client, a large retailing company. But because of the allegations of human rights abuses, Trafigura offered its client the option of buying offsets from another project.
The client accepted and Trafigura was left with the stranded offsets on its books.
Will companies replace Southern Cardamom REDD carbon offsets?
Bryan spoke to several companies to ask them whether they would be buying new carbon credits to replace those they bought from the Southern Cardamom REDD project, given the accusations of human rights abuses associated with the project.
She wrote that,
None of the companies I contacted would tell me whether human rights issues were enough to cancel the offsets and buy new ones.
Air France said it is “closely monitoring the situation”.
Bayer, the German multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology conglomerate, said it thought nature-based solutions were “important”. Bayer has a target to reduce its emissions by 42% by 2029 compared to 2019.
McKinsey has also bought carbon offsets from the Southern Cardamom REDD project. In its 2022 ESG Report, McKinsey claims that, “The Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project in Cambodia has helped 16,000+ people build more sustainable livelihoods by protecting 442,000 hectares of forests.”
McKinsey declined to comment to the Financial Times.
Bryan asked me for my opinion:
Chris Lang, editor of Redd-Monitor, a website focused on carbon credits, said that buyers should have done more due diligence before using carbon credits with “flawed methodology” or human rights issues. “What they should now be doing is reducing their emissions.”
She also asked Ben Rattenbury of the carbon ratings agency Sylvera, who, predictably enough, had a somewhat different take. Bryan wrote that Rattenbury was “reassured by Apple’s unveiling this week of a ‘carbon neutral’ watch despite recent controversies. ‘This idea that carbon credits overall are rubbish is misplaced,’ he added.”
Apple’s “carbon neutral” claims: “Scientifically inaccurate”
Apple claimed to have bought “high-quality carbon credits” to back up the claim that its new new watch is “carbon neutral”.
But the carbon offsets, as REDD-Monitor pointed out, are deeply flawed. Some of them come from monoculture tree plantations that will feed world’s largest eucalyptus fibre pulp mill, currently under construction by Suzano, a Brazilian pulp and paper giant.
Last week, Bryan took a closer look in the Financial Times at Apple’s “carbon neutral” claims for its watches.
BEUC is an umbrella group for 45 independent consumer organisations from 31 countries. The acronym comes from the French name: Bureau Européen des Unions de Consommateurs. Monique Goyens, the director-general of BEUC, told the Financial Times that,
“Carbon neutral claims are scientifically inaccurate and mislead consumers. The EU’s recent decision to ban carbon neutral claims will rightly clear the market of such bogus messages, and Apple Watches should be no exception.”
And Gilles Dufrasne, at Carbon Market Watch, told the Financial Times that,
“It’s misleading to consumers to give the impression that buying the Watch has no impact on the climate at all. It’s accounting tricks.”
Niklas Kaskeala, chair of the board at the Finnish organisation Compensate Foundation which focusses on reforming the voluntary carbon market, pointed out that offsets based on industrial tree plantations present “systemic flaws”.
Kaskeala told the Financial Times that,
“Trees are turned into pulp and cardboard or toilet paper [and] the carbon stored in these products is released back into the atmosphere very quickly”.
Great article, thanks! Yes, these "accounting tricks" are designed to distract from the need to reduce emissions. And the "systemic flaws" of tree plantations include the loss of soil nutrients in just a few "crop" cycles of tree harvest in tropical lands as well as total wipe-out of original biodiversity.