Friends of the Earth new report on biodiversity and climate crises: “REDD is not an effective climate solution”

Governments and corporations are banking on offsets and are locking in emissions.

A new report by Friends of the Earth International explores the links between the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis. “Climate change is affecting biodiversity in multiple ways, while biodiversity loss is simultaneously affecting climate change,” the report notes. FoEI’s study looks at how various climate policies are actually false solutions that undermine the protection of biodiversity.

FoEI’s report is titled, “Climate and Biodiversity in Freefall: How Policy Failures Accelerate the Polycrisis” and the lead author is Nele Marien, Forest and Biodiversity Coordinator at FoEI.

In the report and in an interview with Carbon Pulse, Marien criticises the 2017 paper, “Natural Climate Solutions”.

“The paper formed the basis for the promotion of massive carbon offsetting proposals as ‘nature-based climate solutions’, which has subsequently evolved into NBS,” she tells Carbon Pulse.

“The world’s biggest polluters all use NBS to greenwash their images. Oil companies, airlines, pesticide manufacturers, and palm oil-reliant food producers are all heavily involved in these so-called solutions.”

FoEI’s new report describes the way both the climate and biodiversity crises are accelerating. Increased pest outbreaks are a result of warmer temperatures and droughts that put ecosystems under stress, and the lack of harsh winters to kill off pests. Extreme weather events — droughts, hurricanes, heatwaves, floods, and wildfires — directly harm biodiversity by destroying habitats. Increasing ocean acidification is resulting in the decline of coral reefs with severe impacts on marine life.

Tree planting and monocultures

Planting trees is a popular so-called “solution” to the climate crisis. FoEI’s report gives some examples. A company called Veritree promises to plant trees for companies based on how much they sell. More stuff, more trees. The World Economic Forum is behind one of three “One Trillion Trees” initiatives.

Airlines offer customers the option of “offsetting” their flight emissions, often using tree planting projects.

The Bonn Challenge aims to restore 350 million hectares of deforested and degraded land globally by 2030. But 45% of the promised planting will be monoculture fast-growing tree plantations. Much of the land to be planted with trees is grasslands and savannas. This can actually destroy biodiversity.

Plantations store less carbon than naturally regenerated forests or already existing forests.

Tree plantations are also more vulnerable to wildfires as wells as pest infestations and diseases. As the climate warms, all of these will become more common.

The social and economic impacts on local communities of these massive tree planting schemes is far too often not considered.

The report includes the following on the Great Green Wall project:

In Africa, the ‘Green Wall’ is a large-scale project aimed at combating desertification in the Sahel by planting trees across 12 countries. While the project has increased vegetation density, factors such as limited capacity for upkeep and changing rainfall patterns jeopardise the survival of planted trees. Despite some limited success, only 18% of the originally envisaged 100 million hectares have been restored. Unsurprisingly, initiatives where a variety of tree species have been planted that benefit local communities through non-timber forest products have fared better. Furthermore, the initiative’s social impacts and sustainability have been questioned. The increase in the value of previously degraded lands following tree planting has led to unintended social consequences, including the displacement of local populations, encroachment by non-traditional farmers, and land predation by elites.

Offsets

Governments are banking on offsetting to meet their Paris Agreement commitments. Instead of phasing out the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, many are making “net zero” pledges that rely at least in part on offsets generated by forests and tree plantations.

FoEI’s report refers to the 2022 Land Gap Report that found that,

The combined climate offsetting plans from governments alone would require the dedication of approximately 1.2 billion hectares of land to carbon removal as part of their climate mitigation efforts.

That’s more than two-thirds of the world’s arable land.

Corporations also plan to continue burning fossil fuels and offset the emissions using land-based carbon offsetting.

In 2023, Carbon Brief found that 34 companies bought 38 million carbon credits from 2020 to 2022. The top three users of carbon credits were Shell, Volkswagen, and Chevron. Big Polluters, in other words.

“The amount of land governments and corporations are planning to use for afforestation and reforestation initiatives,” FoEI writes, “is simply not available on our planet.”

REDD: Locking in emissions

FoEI’s report includes a short section on REDD. While REDD may at first glance appear to be beneficial for biodiversity, closer inspection reveals serious problems:

Numerous REDD projects have been shown to generate phantom credits by overestimating the volume of avoided emissions. Projects are sometimes located in forests where no immediate risk of deforestation could be demonstrated (they are not ‘additional’); or they simply push deforestation to other areas (causing ‘leakage’); or their calculations are based on questionable assumptions chosen to maximise carbon generation (implausible baseline choices).

These flaws have resulted in the selling of millions of phantom credits by REDD project proponents and subsequent claims by the buyers of these credits that their emissions were offset when they were in fact not. Additionally, even if forest destruction is reduced through a REDD initiative, there is still a climate risk when the temporary storage of carbon in trees is used to offset the climate impact of fossil carbon. The REDD project cannot guarantee the long-term storage of carbon, with the result that more fossil carbon may eventually accumulate in the atmosphere. This will affect the forests allegedly protected by REDD as well as biodiversity everywhere.

Additionally, the assumption that the carbon captured in forests would otherwise be lost leads to the issuance of carbon credits that allow emissions to occur elsewhere. This effectively locks deforestation emissions into the system, despite scientific consensus on the need to carry out drastic cuts to emissions and to keep forests intact. As a result, REDD projects can lead to higher overall emissions, negatively affecting biodiversity, including in the forests they claim to protect.

“For all these reasons,” FoEI concludes, “REDD is not an effective climate solution.”