“In practice, these projects don’t exist.” The Portel REDD projects in Brazil face accusations of “fraud” and “land grabbing”
No surprise, really. REDD is unregulated and riddled with conflicts of interest.
On 23 December 2019, Air France announced that the company would “proactively offset the emissions of its domestic flights”. Air France even went as far as claiming that flying within France would be “carbon neutral”:
As of 1st January 2020, Air France customers will be able to travel throughout mainland France in a carbon-neutral way thanks to 100% offset emissions. Concretely, the CO₂ emissions of 450 flights per day and 57,000 customers will be offset.
France, of course, is a country that can, without too much trouble, be travelled by train. Flying and offsetting emissions is the opposite of meaninful climate action.
Air France partnered with EcoAct, a climate consulting firm, to buy carbon offsets from projects in Brazil, Peru, Kenya, India, and Cambodia.
The project in Brazil is the REDD RMDLT Portel-Pará project in the municipality of Portel, in the state of Pará. Between 2019 and 2021, Air France bought a total of 308,334 carbon offsets from the REDD RMDLT Portel-Pará project.
The project is one of four REDD projects in Portel. The Washington DC-based carbon certification firm, Verra, has suspended three of the projects (REDD RMDLT Portel-Pará, Pacajai REDD+ Project, and Rio Anapu-Pacajá REDD) and the fourth (Ribeirinho REDD+) is currently “Under development”.
Three carbon offset projects in Brazil accused of being scams
Today, Anne-Dominique Correa, a journalist with the French newspaper Le Monde, has written about the three suspended projects, under the headline “Three carbon offset projects in Brazil accused of being scams”.
Other companies buying carbon offsets from the Portel REDD projects include Boeing, Bayer, Toshiba, Takeda, Samsung, and Kingston. Le Monde highlights the French companies in addition to Air France that have bought offsets: Veolia, Havas, Prisma Media, and LCL.
In its December 2019 press release, Air France calls the REDD RMDLT Portel-Pará the Floresta de Portel initiative. Here’s what Air France claimed about that project:
Air France will thus support, for example, the Floresta de Portel initiative in North-West Brazil, whose mission is to prevent deforestation and protect one of the planet’s richest ecosystems with the support of the local populations, with 22 million tons of CO₂ equivalent at stake. Wildlife and plants will be protected and jobs created by supporting entrepreneurial projects for the creation of a local agroforestry sector.
“None of this has been done,” Nilson Corrêa da Silva, the general secretary of the Portel Rural Workers’ Union, told Le Monde. “Only environmentally-friendly stoves, food baskets and T-shirts have been distributed.”
Air France’s press release is no longer available, but an archived copy is here.
“Fraudulent”
Nilson continued, telling Le Monde that,
“These projects are fraudulent. Those who buy these credits think they are helping combat climate change. But that’s not the case: In practice, these projects don’t exist.”
The REDD RMDLT Portel-Pará project was one of 12 REDD projects in the Brazil Amazon that were included in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in September 2020. Andreas Kontoleon, one of the authors of the study explained to Le Monde that,
“By comparing the current rate of deforestation with that which would have occurred in the same areas in the absence of the carbon offset programs . . . we found that they have very little impact.”
In the early 2000s, the average rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon was 19,000 square kilometres. Under Lula da Silva’s first presidency, a series of measures were put in place to reduce deforestation. These succeeded in reducing deforestation massively by the time the first REDD projects started.
But REDD project developers did not account for the reductions in deforestation achieved by Lula’s regulation when they wrote their stories about what would have happened in the absence of the project. Thales West, the study’s lead author told Mongabay that,
“When we isolated those impacts in our study, we found no general evidence suggesting that the REDD+ projects we evaluated have significantly contributed to the reduction of deforestation in their project areas.”
Land grabbing
In July 2023, the public prosecutor’s office in Para started four lawsuits against eight companies running the REDD projects in Portel. They are accused of “monopolising public land”.
Correa spoke to Andréia Macedo Barreto, a lawyer at the Public Defender’s Office of Pará. “These projects are being developed on public land that they have declared as private,” she said.
Verra did not respond to Le Monde’s request for an interview.
Correa asked the companies that bought carbon offsets from the Portel REDD project why these “irregularities” went unnoticed? The companies replied that they were unaware of any problems when they bought the offsets.
Conflicts of interest
Correa writes that, “In most cases, the selection of carbon offset projects is delegated to specialised firms such as EcoAct.”
That is a serious problem.
The voluntary carbon market is unregulated and riddled with conflicts of interest.
Verra charges 10 cents for every credit that it verifies. The more credits verified, the more money Verra has. Verra’s largest source of income is the commission it charges on carbon credits. That’s a clear conflict of interest.
And while Verra points out that it is a non-profit organisation, at the end of 2021, Verra had US$46.5 million on its books.
The auditing firms that inspect REDD projects to confirm whether or not they comply with Verra’s standards are paid by the project developer. That’s another conflict of interest.
Meanwhile, EcoAct makes its money by selling carbon credits. The company’s interest is to buy credits as cheaply as possible and to convince buyers to pay much more for the credits.
And EcoAct has sold carbon credits from what might be the worst REDD project in the world.
EcoAct’s “due diligence”
One of EcoAct’s offsetting projects was the Madre de Dios Amazon REDD+ Project in Peru. This REDD project consists of two logging concessions in a remote area near the border with Brazil.
The argument that logging a forest can generate carbon offsets may seem counter-intuitive to anyone outside the world of carbon offsets. The carbon offset proponents argument is that the concessions are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council and therefore cause less damage to the forest than might otherwise be the case.
This is a version of the myth of sustainable forest management - otherwise known as logging.
The project developers made up a fake baseline about what would have happened in the absence of the project by selecting a reference area that included a town and the land on either side of the Interoceanic Highway, the construction of which resulted in a massive increase in deforestation.
The project also overlaps the territory of the Mashco Piro Indigenous People, who are living in voluntary isolation. Both FSC and REDD proponents claim to respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples.
But a fundamental right enshrined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is the right to free, prior and informed consent.
In the case of Indigenous Peoples living in voluntary isolation, this is simply impossible. Indigenous Peoples who chose to live in isolation have the right not to be contacted. And (obviously) not to have logging operations or REDD projects established on their territories.
In 2021, IUCN bought carbon offsets from the project to offset the emissions from the IUCN World Conservation Congress which took place in Marseille the previous year.
EcoAct produced a glossy brochure about the Madre de Dios Amazon REDD+ project which is available on the IUCN Congress website.
Obviously, the brochure makes no mention of Indigenous Peoples living in voluntary isolation. Or the fake baseline. Or the industrial logging operations taking place inside the REDD project.
EcoAct also sold offsets from the Madre de Dios Amazon REDD+ project to easyJet - a total of 1,132,146 fake carbon offsets in 2020:
In September 2022, easyJet announced that it was ending its carbon offsetting scheme:
In September 2022, I wrote to EcoAct to ask about the “due diligence” the company carried out before deciding to sell carbon offsets from the Madre de Dios Amazon REDD+ project.
EcoAct calls its due diligence process “EcoScore©”. I asked for a copy of the EcoScore© report that EcoAct produced for the Madre de Dios Amazon REDD+ project.
I asked whether this due diligence process included a visit by EcoAct staff to the project in Peru. And if a visit had taken place, I requested a copy of the report about the visit.
But answer came there none.
Neither the Madre de Dios Amazon REDD+ Project nor the REDD RMDLT Portel-Pará project are currently listed on EcoAct’s website.
Great reporting - thank you! What do CO2 and offsets have in common? Both a lot of hot air.