Notorious logging company Samling hopes to cash in on carbon in Sarawak, Malaysia

Sarawak Report highlights the dangers of Samling’s proposed carbon project.

PHOTO Credit: The Borneo Project.

Samling is the biggest and most destructive logging company in the state of Sarawak in Malaysia. Since the company was founded in 1963, it has been logging Sarawak’s forests. The company has concessions covering about 1.2 million hectares of forest and nearly 200,000 hectares of industrial tree plantations in Sarawak. In addition, Samling and its related companies have logged in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Guyana.

Indigenous people in Sarawak have protested against Samling’s logging operations for decades. They have built massive blockades to stop the logging company from wrecking their forests.

Samling had a close relationship to the former Sarawak governor, Abdul Taib Mahmud. Sarawak Report notes that Taib, “handed the crony company numerous timber and plantation concessions along with major construction contracts over many decades”.

In addition, Samling sold two mansions in the US to the Taib family, for just US$1. In his 2014 book, “Money Logging,” Lukas Straumann, the director of the Bruno Manser Fund, calculates that Taib’s family has profited from the destruction of Sarawak’s forests to the tune of US$15 billion.

Samling’s new venture: Carbon credits

After decades of destruction, Samling is now hoping to profit from carbon credits. Yesterday, Sarawak Report wrote about the company’s new venture.

The Marudi Forest Conservation and Restoration Project is listed on Verra’s registry as “under development”. The project developer is a Samling subsidiary called SaraCarbon.

Under the Sarawak state government’s 2022 Forest Ordnance legislation, only 5% of any income from sales of carbon credits would go to the government, in addition to a US$55 per hectare royalty.

Simon Counsell, former director of Rainforest Foundation UK and now an adviser to Survival International, told Sarawak Report that,

“In what looks like a blatant mechanism to maximise the profit of corporations, the government tax on carbon credit sales is set at a mere 5%, many times lower than other governments are setting in their own legislation.”

In August 2023, the government of Zimbabwe passed a regulation to ensure that forest carbon project developers pay a 30% environmental levy for the first decade of the project. This followed the scandal of the Kariba REDD project in the country, where only a small fraction of the money from the project went to local communities.

Money for nothing

In December 1998, Samling obtained a “Licensed for Planted Forest [sic] (LPF)” on an area of 39,000 hectares.

As I commented to Sarawak Report,

Samling got the LPF licence in December 1998 – about 25 years ago. In all that time, they have managed to plant only 9,189 hectares with acacia.

That’s about 368 hectares per year. Obviously, the acacia plantation idea is not going particularly well.

Yet Samling claims it can generate 1,765,482 carbon credits per year by not converting 31,707 hectares of logged over forest to acacia plantations and reforesting 608 hectares.

At the current rate of conversion it would take Samling 86 years to establish 31,707 hectares of acacia.

Samling is inflating the baseline (i.e. massively exaggerating the story about what would happen in the absence of the carbon credits project). That means that the project will result in yet more junk carbon credits in a voluntary carbon markets that is already flooded with junk credits.

Samling is hoping to cash in on carbon for not carrying out its industrial timber plantations. It is money for “essentially doing nothing”, as Counsell pointed out to Sarawak Report.

Samling anticipates generating a total of 106 million carbon credits over the 60 year project - but the project document doesn’t seem to come up with any explanation how that figure was arrived at.

Counsell told Sarawak Report that,

This is an extremely high level [of VCUs], equivalent to more than 3,000 tons/hectare…  it almost certainly mostly rests on assumptions primarily about the peat swamp areas, as these are the only ecosystems on Earth that contain anything like such high stocks of carbon.

It will likely assume Samling would have completely destroyed what must be peat deposits of probably at least three metres in depth.

Since the project was launched in 2021, the price of carbon credits has crashed, “not least because of media exposes of how worthless they really are in terms of helping mitigate climate change,” as Counsell points out.

No free, prior and informed consent

Researchers for the Bruno Manser Fund have visited the area. Annina Aeberli, a senior campaigner for the Bruno Manser Fund told Sarawak Report that,

“The visited community expressed that they still did not comprehend the concepts of climate change and carbon trading after the session with Samling. Consequently, they did not understand the purpose of the carbon project affecting them.

”After some explanations of the idea behind it, they criticized that this is yet another mechanism for companies to profit from Indigenous land.

“BMF is very worried that Samling is repeating its mistakes in community engagement yet again. Historically, the company has repeatedly failed to properly consult communities affected by their extractive activities.”

Deforestation and leakage

Counsell points out that there are “strong moral arguments about whether a company responsible for mass environmental damage, carbon emissions and destruction of indigenous lands should now potentially profit hugely from what appear to be very limited measures to supposedly discontinue such practices.”

SaraCarbon’s project description document states that “No clearing or conversion has occurred within the last 10 years”. But Counsell told Sarawak Report that,

Analysis of the project area using Global Forest Watch suggests the statement is inaccurate . . . [it] shows, there has been extensive deforestation since 2013 in the Marau and Tasong blocks of the licence area.

Even if the logging in the four blocks of the project area were to stop, Samling could shift its logging operations to its many other concessions that the Sarawak government has handed over to the company. Counsell explained that,

“Some of the largest offset projects probably have leakage as high as 100% . . . it might be that, whilst profiting greatly from this offset scheme, Samling would simply carry out comparable destruction elsewhere [with] the potential global environmental cost of 100 million possibly worthless carbon credits being put onto the carbon markets in the future, and thus arguably adding to the problem of climate change.”

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