Crooked Carbon Business: Carbon offset projects in Portel, Brazil
Communities complain of being “left with nothing, not even the right to do what they’d done before”.
This week’s briefing by Simon Counsell and Jutta Kill looks into three REDD projects in Portel, in the state of Pará, Brazil.1 The briefing can be downloaded here:
Counsell and Kill’s briefing highlights the inconsistencies and alleged illegalities in these three projects:
RMDLT Property Group’s Portel-Pará project;
ADPML’s Pacajaí REDD+ project; and
Brazil AgFor LLC’s Rio Anapu-Pacajá REDD project.
Together with a fourth project, the Ribeirinho REDD+, these projects cover almost 700,000 hectares. That’s more than one-quarter of the Portel municipality.
Auditing firms accredited by carbon certification company, Verra, found the projects in compliance with Verra’s standard. And between them these projects have sold more than 23 million carbon credits.
Buyers of the carbon credits from the Portel REDD projects include Air France, Delta Airlines, German energy company Entega, petrochemical corporation Bayer, and Colombian oil company EcoPetról SA.
The Pacajai REDD project was previously called the ADPML Portel Pará REDD project. The project name changed not long after REDD-Monitor wrote about the project in December 2020. And the company running the project has changed its name to Amazon Forest People Ltd. It’s an extraordinary story:
Improper use of public lands
In November 2022, World Rainforest Movement published a report on the REDD project in Portel. The Intercept Brazil also published a detailed article on the projects. The research pointed to improper use of public lands, implausible assumptions about deforestation risk in the REDD project areas, and, as a result, exaggerated number of carbon credits generated.
In July 2023, the Pará state Public Defender filed legal cases against the proponents of all three REDD project for theft and unauthorised use of public lands. In September 2023, Verra suspended the projects. The Ribeirinho REDD project is also facing legal action. It is listed on Verra’s registry as “under development”.
Verra started a review of the projects which, more than two years later, is still ongoing. Issuance of new credits is suspended.
The carbon credit rating company BeZero gave the RDMLT and ADPML projects a “C” rating, which indicates “a very low likelihood of achieving 1 tonne of CO₂e avoided or removed”. BeZero gave the Rio Anapu-Pacajá REDD project a “B” rating, which indicates “moderately low likelihood of achieving 1 tonne of CO₂e avoided or removed”. In late 2023, the carbon credit rating company Renoster downgraded the Rio Anapu-Pacajá project to a score of “0.0”.
“Left with nothing”
The project description documents for the RMDLT and ADPML projects were prepared by Ecosystem Services LLC. Text is cut and pasted from one project to the other. Both projects aim “to avoid and prevent unplanned deforestation in native forests” by “managing the land in the form of a ‘private conservation reserve’”.
Both projects anticipated that the project would deter 11 “would-be squatter agents” per year from clearing forest inside the project area.
Under the Rio Anapu-Pacajá project, the land used by families would be registered in the Brazilian Environmental Rural Cadaster (CAR) provided the families signed declarations to protect the forest on the land against deforestation. The project proponent claims that the CAR registration will protect the forest against land grabbers intent on clearing forests.
CAR is not a property title. But in the project documentation CAR registration is presented as if it were a process to obtain a land title.
WRM’s 2022 report states that,
Possibly without knowing, by accepting the CAR registration, families are agreeing to the implicit condition that from now on, they need to keep their survival activities restricted to the area of their CAR, without permission to enter the rest of the REDD project areas.
One villager told the Washington Post that, “People thought they were becoming owners and were left with nothing, not even the right to do what they’d done before.”
Baseline fictions
Without the REDD projects, the project proponents argued that the forest would be rapidly destroyed. The without-project story is described in exactly the same words in the project description documents for the RMDLT and ADPML REDD projects.
The reference area used to justify the without-project story is about 11 times as big as the area of the projects themselves. It is next to the Transamazonas Highway (BR-320) and the PA-167 highway. Large-scale deforestation is taking place in this area.
Following World Rainforest Movement’s 2022 report, Brazilian authorities started to investigate the title deeds underlying the three REDD projects. Significant areas of the projects appear to overlap with public lands. And most of the title deeds underlying the REDD projects are invalid. Nevertheless, Verra’s accredited auditors had approved the projects.
This is the fourth in a new collection of posts on REDD-Monitor under the headline “Crooked Carbon Business”. The posts are based on a series of briefings about carbon offset projects written by Simon Counsell and Jutta Kill.