Forestry researchers raise serious concerns about REDD: Focus on carbon markets leading to “lesser scrutiny of safeguards”

“What have we learned from 15 years of REDD+ policy research?”

PHOTO Credit: Isaac Cordal.

In a recent article published by Mongabay, Maria Brockhaus, Grace Wong, and Moira Moeliono raise serious concerns about REDD. The article is titled, “What have we learned from 15 years of REDD+ policy research?” and concludes that power imbalances in REDD has resulted in a failure to move away from “business-as-usual” deforestation in the tropics.

Maria Brockhaus is a professor in the Department of Forest Sciences at the University of Helsinki. Grace Wong is an associate professor at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto, Japan. Moira Moeliono is a senior associate at the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Bogor, Indonesia. Brockhaus and Wong also previously worked at CIFOR.

Since 2009, CIFOR has been running the Global Comparative Study on REDD+, a research project looking into REDD, deforestation, politics, and how REDD implementation impacts equity in the 22 countries studied.

Brockhaus, Wong, and Moeliono take an optimistic view of what REDD is supposed to achieve. They write that,

REDD+ is supposed to channel a global willingness to pay for forest conservation through public funds or carbon markets, providing participating countries and jurisdictions in the Global South with incentives for forest protection.

But REDD has always been a carbon trading mechanism. When the World Bank launched the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility at COP13 in Bali in 2007, the Bank’s press release stated that,

The facility’s ultimate goal is to jump-start a forest carbon market that tips the economic balance in favor of conserving forests, says Benoit Bosquet, a World Bank senior natural resources management specialist who has led the development of the facility.

In their article, Brockhaus, Wong, and Moeliono do not consider the implications of trading the carbon stored in forests against continued emissions from burning fossil fuels. Even if REDD did work — and Brockhaus, Wong, and Moeliono’s research over the past 15 years makes clear that this is far from the case — it would not solve the climate crisis, the main driver of which is burning fossil fuels.

Quick and inexpensive?

The authors link to The Stern Review and write that, “Initially, REDD+ was considered a ‘low-hanging-fruit’ approach to mitigate climate change — a quick and inexpensive scheme.”

The Stern Review states that, “Curbing deforestation is a highly cost-effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and has the potential to offer significant reductions fairly quickly.” In 2012, REDD-Monitor wrote to Nicholas Stern, the ex-World Bank economist who authored the report, to ask whether he still believed that REDD would be quick and inexpensive.

Stern did not reply.

Brockhaus, Wong, and Moeliono note that, “a large body of research has, unsurprisingly, shown that REDD+ is much costlier and more contested than expected.”

Has deforestation reduced?

The authors write that while there have been some positive outcomes in certain contexts,

transformational change away from ‘business-as-usual’ deforestation in the tropics still seems to be out of reach. Politics and power relations persistently hamper efforts for change.

They write that one of the lessons learned in 15 years of REDD research is that “there are many ways that the program and related projects can fall short. These include lack of transparency; broken promises to serve communities, to keep forests and trees standing, and to cut emissions; land-rights conflicts; and even outright project failures”.

Brockhaus, Wong, and Moeliono point to the more than 80% reduction of deforestation in Brazil from 2004 to 2012. However, they fail to explain that this had nothing to do with REDD — not least because the vast majority of the reduction in deforestation took place before REDD even started.

And, as the authors note, “these efforts did not endure over longer periods and successive political regimes”. In 2019, deforestation in Brazil reached the highest rate since 2008.

Forest governance?

Brockhaus, Wong, and Moeliono argue that REDD has led to important policy reforms in Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But they add that,

these reforms have had little visible or lasting effect on keeping forests standing, and recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ concerns have not led to the transfer of rights over forests and lands in the REDD+ countries. In Brazil and Indonesia, for example, there have been periods of reduced deforestation, demonstrating that it is possible to change course. But those changes are difficult to maintain. Identifying mechanisms that foster permanence remains one of the biggest challenges to tackling deforestation through programs such as REDD+.

Equity?

The distribution of REDD “benefits” was supposed to contribute to a more “equitable forest”, according to Brockhaus, Wong, and Moeliono. In the process, forest rights, land rights, and carbon rights would be upheld and strengthened.

“As REDD+ evolves, however, it still affects only a small part of the overall land, forest and resources within a country,” Brockhaus, Wong, and Moeliono write, “and equity concerns tend to get lost within the clamor of competing interests and broader national goals.”

They add that,

invisible or hidden powers that are not captured by databases or registries are increasingly influencing the direction and ambition of REDD+. This is exemplified by the new Indonesian law on employment creation that aims to facilitate business activities by lifting environmental requirements while making it more difficult for citizens to act. This will undoubtedly have an impact on forests and the hard-fought REDD+ policy reforms by easing access to forest lands for large-scale land conversion.

And they raise the concern that the focus on carbon markets is undermining safeguards and governance:

The evolution of REDD+ from a results-based incentive to reduce deforestation to a commodity traded on carbon markets is likely leading to lesser scrutiny of safeguards and displaces the negotiated promise of a global governance architecture.

Carbon markets

REDD has become more market-oriented, “focusing less on emissions and equity, and more on credits, capital, money and markets,” Brockhaus, Wong, and Moeliono write.

This is within the context of the strengthening of neoliberal economics that has led to “an embrace of financialization and marketization of nature, undermining the use of forests as a commons, managed and governed by Indigenous and local communities”.

“Since REDD+ was initiated,” Brockhaus, Wong, and Moeliono write, “there has been a ‘transformation’ toward program designs in which the private sector and finance mechanisms that have historically driven deforestation are now positioned as the leading agents of sustainable change”.

I’m less than convinced about a “transformation” in REDD since the early days. In 2009, Agus Purnomo, the executive secretary of the National Council on Climate Change, told Voice of America, that,

“So over time, five years, seven years, perhaps 10 years, then we will have all the elements of REDD in place, then we can come up with high quality REDD projects for the carbon market to pay.”

From the beginning, then, REDD was all about generating carbon credits that would be bought up by Big Polluters. Purnomo also made clear back in 2009, that REDD was little more than a dangerous distraction from the need to massively reduce deforestation and stop burning fossil fuels:

“We are not hinting that that Indonesia needs to stop breathing, or need to stop cutting trees, no., or needs to stop using coal as power plant, no! We are not in any legal standard required to cut emissions.”

Brockhaus, Wong, and Moeliono write that,

The ambitions of ‘transformation’ are at risk of being co-opted by actors that stand to benefit from maintaining the status quo. What was once an agenda for transformational change could itself be transformed back to business as usual, with ever-increasing deforestation, forest degradation and emissions.

This is, at best, a touch naive. REDD was never an agenda for transformational change. The oil industry was firmly on board with REDD right from the beginning.

In December 2007, Norway announced a strategy to prevent deforestation at a meeting in Oslo. The three people who presented the strategy were: Jens Stoltenberg, Norway’s then-prime minister; Erik Solheim, then-Minister of the Environment and International Development; and Åslaug Haga, then-Minister of Petroleum and Energy.

The first meeting of the International Emissions Trading Association was held in 1999. The meeting took place in Shell’s headquarters.

One of the most insightful early descriptions of REDD came from Marc Stuart of the carbon trading company EcoSecurities. In May 2009, Stuart wrote that,

Avoiding tropical deforestation — or REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) in the parlance of the emerging policy dynamic — is the most mind twistingly complex endeavor in the carbon game. The fact is that REDD involves scientific uncertainties, technical challenges, heterogeneous non-contiguous asset classes, multi-decade performance guarantees, local land tenure issues, brutal potential for gaming and the fact that getting it wrong means that scam artists will get unimaginably rich while emissions don’t change a bit.