Despite high deforestation Tumring REDD project in Cambodia is still selling carbon credits

And Verra claims “high quality standards” as well as “credibility and oversight”

PHOTO Credit: The Tumring REDD project is within the black line. Climate Home News

The Tumring REDD project in Cambodia is supposed to be protecting an area of 67,791 hectares of forest on the southwestern edge of the Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary in Cambodia.

Dr. Keo Omaliss, Director General of Cambodia’s Forestry Administration, states that the project “is the most successful and predominant REDD+ project working with community forestry groups to reduce small-scale deforestation and forest degradation”.

But in August 2021, a report published by the Korean Federation for Environment Movement (KFEM), revealed that large-scale deforestation has taken place since the project started.

The research for the report was led by Ouch Leng, winner of the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize, and head of the Cambodia Human Rights Task Force.

Deforestation and carbon credits

Nevertheless, the project has issued a total of 645,410 carbon credits since it started in 2015.

The project is implemented by Cambodia’s Forestry Administration with funding from the Korea Forest Service. Some of the carbon credits are to be shared between Cambodia and Korea to meet the countries’ targets under their UNFCCC Nationally Determined Contributions. The remainder are to be sold on the voluntary carbon market.

The project is registered by the Washington DC-based carbon standards organisation Verra.

Verra’s database gives only the following information about the buyers of these carbon credits:

• On 26 May 2022, the US-based Marathon Oil Corporation retired 6,515 carbon credits from the Tumring REDD project; and

• On 23 September 2022, Australian carbon broker Viridios Capital retired 200 carbon credits from Tumring on behalf of an investment company called Roc Partners.

New investigation confirms deforestation

A new investigation by Climate Home News and Unearthed, Greenpeace’s investigative journalism project, confirms the findings of the 2021 report. “Tumring is experiencing dramatic deforestation, which is largely undeclared in official monitoring reports,” Unearthed writes.

The investigation found that Tumring appears to have lost more than a fifth of all trees in the project area, while forest loss was four times higher than recorded in official monitoring reports between 2015 and 2019. 

The researchers used forest data from Global Forest Watch and Forest Observations (Forobs). Using Global Forest Watch, they identified 14,000 hectares of deforestation in the Tumring project area between 2015 and 2019. Forobs indicated an even higher rate of forest loss.

Meanwhile project documents identify only 3,450 hectares of forest loss in the same period.

Unearthed explains that,

The Tumring project’s official filings use national land cover data produced by Cambodia’s environment ministry. This data is not available publicly, making it difficult to check, and it has a low tree cover threshold. This means an area needs as little as 10% tree cover to be counted as forested. This means that an area could be 90% deforested and still be reported as intact in the project’s official documentation.

The Korean government told Unearthed and Climate Home News that it would only use credits from 2021 onwards to offset national emissions.

Wildlife Works Carbon worked as a technical consultant for project validation and verification, but told Unearthed and Climate Home News that it “had no connection to the project”.

The Cambodian government did not respond to requests for comment from Unearthed and Climate Home News.

Verra has no credibility

Meanwhile Verra told Unearthed and Climate Home News that it

“works directly with Validation and Verification Bodies, the project auditors who provide third-party oversight to all projects submitted to the Verra Registry, to ensure high quality standards and processes that bring credibility and oversight.”

But Verra has no credibility at this stage. The companies hired to audit REDD projects are paid for by the project developers. There is a clear conflict of interest since the auditors do not want to risk ensure future work by being too picky with their clients’ reports.

Verra also has a conflict of interest. A large part of Verra’s income comes from a commission on every carbon credit issued on its registry. The more carbon credits, the more money for Verra.

In the case of the Tumring REDD project, Verra is helping to legitimate carbon credits from a project that is facing massive deforestation. And the biggest buyer of these fake credits is Marathon Oil, a company with proven reserves of 1.3 billion barrels of oil equivalent.

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