Crooked Carbon Business: Marudi Forest Conservation and Restoration Project, Malaysia
Samling could profit from a carbon project that Indigenous Peoples oppose.
This week’s briefing by Simon Counsell and Jutta Kill looks at the Marudi Forest Conservation and Restoration Project in Sarawak, Malaysia.1 The briefing can be downloaded here:
The Marudi Forest Conservation and Restoration Project is being developed by SaraCarbon, which is a subsidiary of Samling, the notorious Malaysian logging company. Samling has concessions covering a total of about 1.2 million hectares of forest and almost 200,000 hectares of industrial tree plantations in Sarawak.
For decades, Indigenous people in Sarawak have protested against Samling’s destructive logging operations, including building blockades to stop the company entering their territories.
In March 2023, the Sarawak authorities granted SaraCarbon a carbon project license to develop the Marudi offset project. The 25,675 hectare project area was a logging concession. In 1998, Samling obtained a License for Planted Forest [sic] on the land. Since then, Samling has been replacing the forest with acacia monocultures.
In November 2024, SaraCarbon submitted a project design document to the Washington DC-based carbon certifying company, Verra. According to the document, the project started on 15 December 2021, which is the date that Samling’s CEO issued an instruction to “cease land clearance and plantation activities”.
“Avoided planned deforestation”
The project document states that the project plans to carry out two carbon credit generating activities:
Avoided Planned Deforestation and Degradation (APDD) – the project claims it will avoid 21,410 hectares of deforestation for plantations.
Conservation of Intact Wetlands (CIW) – the project claims it will avoid “20,374 ha of plantation development on wetland forest areas” and “3,806 conservation areas in wetland areas”.
The project is currently listed as “Under validation” on Verra’s registry.
Inflated baseline
The project document explains that in the absence of the project, Samling would have continued to clear forest and drain peat swamps to establish acacia plantations. The project crediting period is 60 years. Samling anticipates generating more than 99 million carbon credits. As Counsell and Kill note,
This is an extremely high number of credits, equivalent to more 3,800 tonnes of carbon stored per hectare of project land.
By overlaying the project area on a Global Forest Watch satellite map, Counsell and Kill reveal that there has been “extensive deforestation” since 2013 in two of the project’s forest management blocks. The Batu Belah block, close to the border with Brunei has the most deforestation and has been excluded from the REDD project.
In the 25 years since Samling got the plantation licence the company managed to plant only 9,189 hectares with acacia, or about 368 hectares per year. Clearly, the plantation programme was not going well. Counsell and Kill write that, “Local observers claim that the acacia planting programme had already run into technical problems, with very poor tree growth.”
These difficulties with the plantation programme raise serious questions about the baseline’s credibility.
Community opposition
Communities living near the project are opposed to Samling’s attempts to cash in on carbon. In November 2024, 319 people from 15 villages in the Marudi district signed a letter to SaraCarbon and the prime minister of Sarawak opposing the project.
Villagers have also protested against the project. Sahabat Alam Malaysia has set up a petition against the project. In February 2025, several villagers issued a statement, in which they write that,
As long as our customary land rights and rights to our livelihood are not fully recognized by the government, we are concerned that this project will restrict traditional practices on our territory such as hunting, harvesting forest products and farming.
They also write that there has been “no transparent explanation and no process for granting consent based on prior, free and transparent information”.
Samling is an extremely destructive company. There is nothing in the Verra system,” Counsell and Kill write, “which prohibits a project proponent from selling carbon credits even though its actions elsewhere might be causing high levels of emissions, as is the case with Samling.”
The project highlights the systemic flaws of a carbon standard which allows a company responsible for ongoing massive environmental damage, carbon emissions and destruction of indigenous peoples’ lands to profit hugely from what appear to be very limited measures to supposedly discontinue such practices.
This is the seventh in a 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.