What we are observing in these Indonesia–Taiwan cases is not a collection of isolated scandals, but the repeated exploitation of the same structural gap between sovereign carbon governance and the legacy voluntary carbon market.
Indonesia has already made a decisive shift toward a sovereign framework for carbon governance, including national registries (SRN), host-country authorization requirements, and alignment with Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. Projects that fail to meet authorization or corresponding adjustment (CA) requirements are increasingly unable to claim offset status domestically. This reflects a clear policy direction: mitigation outcomes that are not anchored in sovereign accounting no longer qualify as transferable climate assets.
When such projects lose credibility or feasibility on the ground in Indonesia, some are repackaged offshore—most visibly in Taiwan—using narratives such as “spiritual healing,” “music and forests,” promises to plant tens of millions of trees, or the issuance of so-called “carbon coins” and Web3-style tokens. This migration is not accidental. Taiwan currently lacks a clearly defined legal and accounting framework aligned with Article 6, creating a regulatory vacuum in which carbon-related fundraising narratives can circulate with minimal scrutiny.
The AAD case highlights a deeper systemic flaw. The project was originally framed as REDD+ and later shifted to ARR, yet under Verra’s legacy rules it was permitted to change methodologies without changing its project ID. While this may have been acceptable under pre–Article 6 voluntary market logic, it becomes deeply problematic in a sovereign accounting era. REDD+ and ARR differ fundamentally in baseline construction, permanence assumptions, land tenure implications, and NDC treatment. In a Paris-aligned system, such a shift would normally trigger re-identification, re-authorization, and a full reassessment of accounting treatment. Maintaining a single project identity across fundamentally different mitigation categories blurs legal reality and misleads investors into believing they are dealing with one continuous, compliant asset.
When compliance narratives can no longer be sustained, these projects often pivot away from accounting-based claims toward symbolic or speculative products—carbon tokens, NFTs, or so-called “impact coins.” The issue is not art, culture, or philanthropy as such. The problem arises when these instruments implicitly or explicitly claim offsetting value, ESG compliance, or climate neutrality without any sovereign accounting basis. At that point, the activity moves beyond voluntary contribution and into systemic misrepresentation.
These cases are therefore not simply about individual bad actors. They reflect a transition moment in which private standards still allow narrative continuity, while sovereign systems increasingly demand accounting discontinuity. The risk is highest in jurisdictions without Article 6–aligned rules, where projects that fail host-country compliance can still be monetized through storytelling rather than accounting.
There are many fundraising narratives in today’s carbon market, but very few genuinely channel climate finance to the planet. Most primarily enrich intermediaries.
We are no longer in a voluntary storytelling era. We are in a sovereign carbon accounting era. If a project, credit, or instrument does not clearly sit within host-country climate governance—national registries, authorization, and corresponding adjustment—it is not climate finance. It is capital extraction.
Without sovereign accounting, carbon claims are not mitigation assets. They are fundraising tools. In many recent cases, that boundary has already been crossed.
An additional and particularly serious concern is that some of these actors did not merely operate in regulatory gray zones, but actively leveraged the UNFCCC COP28 platform itself to launder credibility. By appearing in side events, fringe sessions, or loosely affiliated showcases around COP28, these projects wrapped themselves in the visual and institutional legitimacy of the UN climate process, despite lacking alignment with sovereign accounting requirements under Article 6.
This tactic exploits a well-known vulnerability in the COP ecosystem: while the UNFCCC sets the rules for intergovernmental accounting, the surrounding conference space allows a wide range of non-state actors to present narratives without formal validation. For unsophisticated investors or corporate audiences, the distinction between “being present at COP” and “being compliant with Paris Agreement accounting” is easily blurred. In these cases, COP visibility was used not to advance climate governance, but to manufacture perceived legitimacy for projects that could not meet host-country or Article 6 standards.
The issue here is not participation in COP per se, but representation. When projects that fail sovereign authorization or corresponding adjustment requirements present themselves under the symbolic umbrella of the UN climate process, the result is a form of institutional arbitrage. It allows legacy voluntary market narratives to survive longer than they should, precisely at a moment when sovereign systems are attempting to assert accounting discipline. This practice risks undermining trust not only in carbon markets, but in the broader multilateral climate framework.
In a sovereign carbon accounting era, COP participation cannot substitute for compliance. Visibility is not verification. Presence is not authorization. And association with the UNFCCC does not transform a non-accounted credit into a mitigation asset.
Additional evidence indicates that these projects were non-compliant not only at the level of Article 6 alignment, but also under Indonesia’s own mandatory national rules.
First, the projects never applied Indonesia’s legally required FREL/FEL (Forest Reference Emission Level / Forest Emission Level) in baseline construction. Instead, project-level baselines were created entirely outside the national framework, despite Indonesia having an officially submitted and approved FREL under the UNFCCC. This alone disqualifies the projects from being considered valid mitigation activities under Indonesian law and international REDD+ norms.
Second, FPIC procedures were demonstrably fabricated. Community representatives presented as independent consent providers were, in several cases, the same individuals holding positions as local forestry officials, creating an obvious conflict of interest and invalidating any claim of free, prior, and informed consent. These irregularities were not corrected or meaningfully investigated.
Third, despite these fundamental defects, VVB CTI failed to flag or investigate the violations and nonetheless issued VVB reports that were submitted to Verra for registration. This process collapsed only on 25 March 2024, when CTI was suspended following its involvement in a separate large-scale fraud case in China. As a result, the project was forced back into “under development” status—not due to substantive corrective action, but due to verifier incapacity.
Critically, this did not lead to remediation. On 30 October 2025, the same project was resubmitted for validation under the guise of an “update,” this time reclassified from REDD+ to ARR. Yet the core violations remained unchanged: FPIC irregularities persisted, national FREL/FEL were still not used, and the project was never properly registered within Indonesia’s national carbon system. The methodological relabeling functioned as a reset of paperwork, not as compliance.
Throughout this period, false representations were actively made to Taiwanese investors and partners. These included claims that the project had already been “registered,” that carbon credits were imminent, and that annual issuance would reach “one million tonnes.” In reality, what existed was at most a preliminary project code or listing, not legal registration, not authorization, and not any completed regulatory process under Indonesian law.
Moreover, Indonesian government documents were allegedly fabricated or misrepresented. At no point were there valid, legally issued Indonesian approvals demonstrating completion of required procedures, host-country authorization, or recognition under national regulations. No lawful basis existed for claiming offset eligibility or future credit issuance.
Taken together, these facts point to a broader structural failure. Verra’s system—despite memoranda of cooperation with Indonesia—has functioned as an enabling environment for misrepresentation, allowing non-compliant projects to circulate internationally, particularly in jurisdictions such as Taiwan where Article 6–aligned oversight is absent. The result is not climate finance, but systematic capital extraction under the appearance of climate action.
This is not an allegation based on disagreement over standards.
It is a documentation of repeated regulatory non-compliance, verifier failure, and factual misrepresentation, none of which were substantively corrected before continued attempts at monetization.
I'm Beatrice Battelli, Director of PR & Communications at Evertreen. Thank you for the detailed piece — we take transparency seriously, so rather than dismiss it, here are the facts with sources anyone can check.
We publish our registries and IDs. The claim that we "give no information about which registry" isn't accurate. Our certified credits come from named projects with public VCS IDs — e.g. Katingan Mentaya (VCS 1477), Tambopata–Bahuaja (VCS 1067), Vida Manglar (VCS 2290), Mikoko Pamoja (VCS 3660), TIST (VCS 2338) — each verifiable on the Verra Registry and retired once with a unique serial. We also publish independent ratings (BeZero, Sylvera, Calyx Global) and state plainly that we are an intermediary that sources and retires credits, not the project developer. (http://evertreen.com/verra-carbon-credits)
The CO₂ figure is lifetime, not annual. The article compares our per-tree number to a mature tree's annual uptake. Ours is the total a tree is expected to sequester across its functional lifespan (often decades), estimated with species-specific allometric equations (GlobAllomeTree, FAO/CIRAD), IPCC 2006 factors and the standard 3.67 CO₂:C ratio — around 0.8 t over a tree's life. Full method: http://evertreen.com/how-we-estimate-tree-co2. Trees and certified credits are separate products; we never merge them.
Pricing is linear. Our corporate plans are £150 (100 trees), £300 (200 trees) and £900 (600 trees) per month — exactly £1.50 per tree at every tier. The £100/£500/£1,000 figures in the article are not our prices. (http://evertreen.com/trees)
Refunds. The "irrevocable waiver" quoted is from a previous version of our terms. Our current terms give a 14-day statutory cooling-off (Clause 7.5) and a full refund at any time before funds are committed to a planting cycle (Clause 7.4).
Monitoring. Every site is GPS-boundary-mapped, with drone mapping, permanent photo points, forest-inventory survivorship plots and community surveys; corporate partners receive the exact GPS of their trees.
On ownership: Synesthesia Colours, one of our shareholders, is registered on the second floor of an office building — the ground-floor restaurant at that street address is an unrelated business.
We've also removed any project a standards body has withdrawn or placed under review. Our full point-by-point response is here: https://www.evertreen.com/transparency . And anyone — including you, Chris — can email partnerships@evertreen.com for registry serials, coordinates or certificates. We would rather be checked than believed.
Let me know if you have additional questions, and if you agree this article was not carefully drafted and should be updated. We are happy to support you with updating it if needed.
— Beatrice Battelli, Director of PR & Communications, Evertreen
What we are observing in these Indonesia–Taiwan cases is not a collection of isolated scandals, but the repeated exploitation of the same structural gap between sovereign carbon governance and the legacy voluntary carbon market.
Indonesia has already made a decisive shift toward a sovereign framework for carbon governance, including national registries (SRN), host-country authorization requirements, and alignment with Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. Projects that fail to meet authorization or corresponding adjustment (CA) requirements are increasingly unable to claim offset status domestically. This reflects a clear policy direction: mitigation outcomes that are not anchored in sovereign accounting no longer qualify as transferable climate assets.
When such projects lose credibility or feasibility on the ground in Indonesia, some are repackaged offshore—most visibly in Taiwan—using narratives such as “spiritual healing,” “music and forests,” promises to plant tens of millions of trees, or the issuance of so-called “carbon coins” and Web3-style tokens. This migration is not accidental. Taiwan currently lacks a clearly defined legal and accounting framework aligned with Article 6, creating a regulatory vacuum in which carbon-related fundraising narratives can circulate with minimal scrutiny.
The AAD case highlights a deeper systemic flaw. The project was originally framed as REDD+ and later shifted to ARR, yet under Verra’s legacy rules it was permitted to change methodologies without changing its project ID. While this may have been acceptable under pre–Article 6 voluntary market logic, it becomes deeply problematic in a sovereign accounting era. REDD+ and ARR differ fundamentally in baseline construction, permanence assumptions, land tenure implications, and NDC treatment. In a Paris-aligned system, such a shift would normally trigger re-identification, re-authorization, and a full reassessment of accounting treatment. Maintaining a single project identity across fundamentally different mitigation categories blurs legal reality and misleads investors into believing they are dealing with one continuous, compliant asset.
When compliance narratives can no longer be sustained, these projects often pivot away from accounting-based claims toward symbolic or speculative products—carbon tokens, NFTs, or so-called “impact coins.” The issue is not art, culture, or philanthropy as such. The problem arises when these instruments implicitly or explicitly claim offsetting value, ESG compliance, or climate neutrality without any sovereign accounting basis. At that point, the activity moves beyond voluntary contribution and into systemic misrepresentation.
These cases are therefore not simply about individual bad actors. They reflect a transition moment in which private standards still allow narrative continuity, while sovereign systems increasingly demand accounting discontinuity. The risk is highest in jurisdictions without Article 6–aligned rules, where projects that fail host-country compliance can still be monetized through storytelling rather than accounting.
There are many fundraising narratives in today’s carbon market, but very few genuinely channel climate finance to the planet. Most primarily enrich intermediaries.
We are no longer in a voluntary storytelling era. We are in a sovereign carbon accounting era. If a project, credit, or instrument does not clearly sit within host-country climate governance—national registries, authorization, and corresponding adjustment—it is not climate finance. It is capital extraction.
Without sovereign accounting, carbon claims are not mitigation assets. They are fundraising tools. In many recent cases, that boundary has already been crossed.
This is not a moral judgment.
It is an accounting conclusion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEt_EqOxQTA&t=32s
Misuse of the UNFCCC COP28 Platform
An additional and particularly serious concern is that some of these actors did not merely operate in regulatory gray zones, but actively leveraged the UNFCCC COP28 platform itself to launder credibility. By appearing in side events, fringe sessions, or loosely affiliated showcases around COP28, these projects wrapped themselves in the visual and institutional legitimacy of the UN climate process, despite lacking alignment with sovereign accounting requirements under Article 6.
This tactic exploits a well-known vulnerability in the COP ecosystem: while the UNFCCC sets the rules for intergovernmental accounting, the surrounding conference space allows a wide range of non-state actors to present narratives without formal validation. For unsophisticated investors or corporate audiences, the distinction between “being present at COP” and “being compliant with Paris Agreement accounting” is easily blurred. In these cases, COP visibility was used not to advance climate governance, but to manufacture perceived legitimacy for projects that could not meet host-country or Article 6 standards.
The issue here is not participation in COP per se, but representation. When projects that fail sovereign authorization or corresponding adjustment requirements present themselves under the symbolic umbrella of the UN climate process, the result is a form of institutional arbitrage. It allows legacy voluntary market narratives to survive longer than they should, precisely at a moment when sovereign systems are attempting to assert accounting discipline. This practice risks undermining trust not only in carbon markets, but in the broader multilateral climate framework.
In a sovereign carbon accounting era, COP participation cannot substitute for compliance. Visibility is not verification. Presence is not authorization. And association with the UNFCCC does not transform a non-accounted credit into a mitigation asset.
https://registry.verra.org/app/projectDetail/VCS/4381?_gl=1*ri7zy*_gcl_au*MTM0OTUzMjAxMS4xNzUxMjQ4MTI2*_ga*ODg2MDUxMTAyLjE3MDE2ODI3NDM.*_ga_2VGK901B6P*czE3NTQ0NTMwNTQkbzM5MiRnMSR0MTc1NDQ1NTU3MiRqNjAkbDAkaDA.
https://registry.verra.org/mymodule/ProjectDoc/Project_ViewFile.asp?FileID=140073&IDKEY=niquwesdfmnk0iei23nnm435oiojnc909dsflk9809adlkmlkf0193160667
Systematic Non-Compliance and Fabrication
Additional evidence indicates that these projects were non-compliant not only at the level of Article 6 alignment, but also under Indonesia’s own mandatory national rules.
First, the projects never applied Indonesia’s legally required FREL/FEL (Forest Reference Emission Level / Forest Emission Level) in baseline construction. Instead, project-level baselines were created entirely outside the national framework, despite Indonesia having an officially submitted and approved FREL under the UNFCCC. This alone disqualifies the projects from being considered valid mitigation activities under Indonesian law and international REDD+ norms.
Second, FPIC procedures were demonstrably fabricated. Community representatives presented as independent consent providers were, in several cases, the same individuals holding positions as local forestry officials, creating an obvious conflict of interest and invalidating any claim of free, prior, and informed consent. These irregularities were not corrected or meaningfully investigated.
Third, despite these fundamental defects, VVB CTI failed to flag or investigate the violations and nonetheless issued VVB reports that were submitted to Verra for registration. This process collapsed only on 25 March 2024, when CTI was suspended following its involvement in a separate large-scale fraud case in China. As a result, the project was forced back into “under development” status—not due to substantive corrective action, but due to verifier incapacity.
Critically, this did not lead to remediation. On 30 October 2025, the same project was resubmitted for validation under the guise of an “update,” this time reclassified from REDD+ to ARR. Yet the core violations remained unchanged: FPIC irregularities persisted, national FREL/FEL were still not used, and the project was never properly registered within Indonesia’s national carbon system. The methodological relabeling functioned as a reset of paperwork, not as compliance.
Throughout this period, false representations were actively made to Taiwanese investors and partners. These included claims that the project had already been “registered,” that carbon credits were imminent, and that annual issuance would reach “one million tonnes.” In reality, what existed was at most a preliminary project code or listing, not legal registration, not authorization, and not any completed regulatory process under Indonesian law.
Moreover, Indonesian government documents were allegedly fabricated or misrepresented. At no point were there valid, legally issued Indonesian approvals demonstrating completion of required procedures, host-country authorization, or recognition under national regulations. No lawful basis existed for claiming offset eligibility or future credit issuance.
Taken together, these facts point to a broader structural failure. Verra’s system—despite memoranda of cooperation with Indonesia—has functioned as an enabling environment for misrepresentation, allowing non-compliant projects to circulate internationally, particularly in jurisdictions such as Taiwan where Article 6–aligned oversight is absent. The result is not climate finance, but systematic capital extraction under the appearance of climate action.
This is not an allegation based on disagreement over standards.
It is a documentation of repeated regulatory non-compliance, verifier failure, and factual misrepresentation, none of which were substantively corrected before continued attempts at monetization.
Dear Chris,
I'm Beatrice Battelli, Director of PR & Communications at Evertreen. Thank you for the detailed piece — we take transparency seriously, so rather than dismiss it, here are the facts with sources anyone can check.
We publish our registries and IDs. The claim that we "give no information about which registry" isn't accurate. Our certified credits come from named projects with public VCS IDs — e.g. Katingan Mentaya (VCS 1477), Tambopata–Bahuaja (VCS 1067), Vida Manglar (VCS 2290), Mikoko Pamoja (VCS 3660), TIST (VCS 2338) — each verifiable on the Verra Registry and retired once with a unique serial. We also publish independent ratings (BeZero, Sylvera, Calyx Global) and state plainly that we are an intermediary that sources and retires credits, not the project developer. (http://evertreen.com/verra-carbon-credits)
The CO₂ figure is lifetime, not annual. The article compares our per-tree number to a mature tree's annual uptake. Ours is the total a tree is expected to sequester across its functional lifespan (often decades), estimated with species-specific allometric equations (GlobAllomeTree, FAO/CIRAD), IPCC 2006 factors and the standard 3.67 CO₂:C ratio — around 0.8 t over a tree's life. Full method: http://evertreen.com/how-we-estimate-tree-co2. Trees and certified credits are separate products; we never merge them.
Pricing is linear. Our corporate plans are £150 (100 trees), £300 (200 trees) and £900 (600 trees) per month — exactly £1.50 per tree at every tier. The £100/£500/£1,000 figures in the article are not our prices. (http://evertreen.com/trees)
Refunds. The "irrevocable waiver" quoted is from a previous version of our terms. Our current terms give a 14-day statutory cooling-off (Clause 7.5) and a full refund at any time before funds are committed to a planting cycle (Clause 7.4).
Monitoring. Every site is GPS-boundary-mapped, with drone mapping, permanent photo points, forest-inventory survivorship plots and community surveys; corporate partners receive the exact GPS of their trees.
On ownership: Synesthesia Colours, one of our shareholders, is registered on the second floor of an office building — the ground-floor restaurant at that street address is an unrelated business.
We've also removed any project a standards body has withdrawn or placed under review. Our full point-by-point response is here: https://www.evertreen.com/transparency . And anyone — including you, Chris — can email partnerships@evertreen.com for registry serials, coordinates or certificates. We would rather be checked than believed.
Let me know if you have additional questions, and if you agree this article was not carefully drafted and should be updated. We are happy to support you with updating it if needed.
— Beatrice Battelli, Director of PR & Communications, Evertreen