ORF documentary investigates the Katingan REDD project in Indonesia: “We are no longer allowed to use the forest. We are no longer allowed to grow anything”
The REDD project prevents villagers from growing crops on their land.
Recently Austrian TV programme ORF travelled to Indonesia to investigate two REDD projects: the Rimba Raya REDD project and the Katingan REDD project, both in Central Kalimantan. The journalists also travelled to Kenya to the Northern Rangelands Trust project and a cookstove project in Nairobi.
In a previous post, REDD-Monitor summarised the documentary team’s findings about the Rimba Raya REDD project:
This post is based on ORF’s reporting on the Katingan REDD project in Central Kalimantan.
ORF’s journalist, Vanessa Böttcher, notes that Shell, one of the world’s most polluting oil corporations, buys carbon credits from the Katingan REDD project. Shell has bought a total of almost 9 million carbon credits from Katingan.
Other Big Polluters that have bought carbon credits from Katingan include Delta Air Lines, Volkswagen, Tokyo Gas, PetroChina International Company, and Boeing.
In Berlin, ORF interviews Jutta Kill of the World Rainforest Movement. She explains one of the fundamental problems with generating carbon credits from forest projects:
“Once fossil carbon has been released, it affects the climate for hundreds and thousands of years. However, this contrasts with a forest project where the operator cannot guarantee at all that the carbon will be stored over such a long period of time. This temporal discrepancy means that no forest protection project can fulfil the promise of offsetting emissions.”
“We still wanted to use our land”
Together with Indonesian environmentalist Habibi Mohammed, ORF’s journalist Vanessa Böttcher visits a village right next to the Katingan REDD project. They meet Lilli, the former village headwoman who tells them that,
“The company simply said that the forest here would become a nature reserve. We then submitted an application to the district administration stating that we still wanted to use our land, that we farm on.”
Lilli’s husband, Karman, shows ORF the documents. He says,
“I have everything here, this is the letter from the regional administration. The government has given us the land use rights so that we can farm there, everyone has signed and now? Now the project operators are forbidding us to go there and grow anything.
“We are no longer allowed to use the forest. We are no longer allowed to grow anything and we are no longer allowed to get wood to build our houses. That is strictly forbidden. If we cut down a tree, they arrest us.”
They travel with Lilli inside the REDD project to where she and her husband had their farmland. On a few hectares they had planted oil palms to sell the fruit in local markets. Lilli says that,
“We don’t have any jobs, the only way we can earn money is by selling our fruit and vegetables, that's why we need the land. I really hope that we can find a solution together with the project operators.”
Additionality?
In Jakarta, Böttcher meets Arie Rompas of Greenpeace Southeast Asia. He has worked for many years on forest protection projects in Indonesia. He explains that carbon credits can only be sold when there were previously concrete plans to clear the forest.
In 2020, Greenpeace produced a critical report on the Katingan REDD project which includes an analysis of the baseline and questions the additionality of the project:
Rompas tells ORF that,
“We noticed inconsistencies during the development phase of this project. It was said that a company in the region wanted to clear the forest for a plantation. We then found out that this company had its headquarters in the same building as the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry here in Jakarta.”
Böttcher points out that the same Ministry decided to approve a REDD project in that area. Rompas still doubts that there were really any plans to establish a plantation there. He says that,
“The business is only about companies making profits, not about protecting forests. They could be protected without certificates, for example if the government passed the relevant laws.”
Shell’s response
ORF wanted to speak to someone from Shell about the carbon credits the company has bought from the Katingan REDD project. But Shell did not want to give an interview. Instead, in a statement, Shell wrote that,
“The projects follow the most widely used international standard for REDD projects, the Verified Carbon Standard, which is managed by Verra, a global standards body. . . . To be able to award credible carbon credits, the project must comply with the rules and requirements . . . and undergo thorough, regular reviews by experts independent of the project developer.”
What Shell doesn’t say is that the “independent” experts that audit the project are paid directly by the project developer. The auditors have a clear financial interest in not raising too many problems about the project, otherwise the project developer would turn to one of their competitors for future audits.
ORF also contacted Verra to ask them some questions about the Katingan REDD project. Verra did not reply.
This is seriously insane. We’ve spent decades trying to get governments and corporations to take climate change and deforestation seriously, now that some are finally beginning to take notice, activities that are actually making a difference are being torn apart by those who claim to care about these issues.
These charges against the Katingan Mentaya Project are false, it’s disinformation. Those pushing them – Greenpeace, ORF, WRM, and Redd Monitor – either haven’t bothered to understand the project properly or have and decided that pesky facts shouldn’t stand in the way of a headline-grabbing story about corporate exploitation and greenwashing.
If anyone is even the least bit interested in what is actually happening on the ground, the publicly available PDD and monitoring reports set out how the project was design and what its achieving https://registry.verra.org/app/projectDetail/VCS/1477 .
The PDD details the consultation process the project held with representatives from ALL surrounding communities prior to launch.
The project was designed and implemented to fully recognise customary rights and community land tenure. It facilitated participatory land-use mapping and demarcated land-use boundaries in project-zone villages based on these customary rights. It establish formal consensus on the project area and helped local communities resolve conflicts within the broader project zone.
Participatory planning fundamentally shaped how the project worked with and supported local communities. It employed two tenure-based methods: participatory community mapping and village planning. Participatory community mapping transparently compiled critical spatial information about project-zone villages. This included village boundaries, the extent of cultivated land owned by community members, other land uses, and relevant thematic data. All data points were collaboratively validated with the communities, recorded using GPS, and integrated into spatial maps. The finalised maps were then presented to the communities for review and approval to ensure transparent and collective agreement.
No one was kicked off their land and no has had land taken away from them. But that’s hardly a story to rile up readers or to petition for more donations.
As for the Greenpeace accusations: https://permianglobal.com/news/permian-global-analysis-of-greenpeace-report/. Apparently, Greenpeace will happily watch a forest burn if it helps spread misinformation about a successful REDD+ project.
Instead of repeating Greenpeace’s lines, it might be helpful if journalists questioned why an international organisation that rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars each year might campaign so aggressively against an alternative form of financing conservation and climate action.
And if all that was just far too many words. Then how about this gif https://permianglobal.com/news/katingan-mentaya-project/ which uses publicly available historical Landsat optical satellite constellation data (NASA-Landsat mission). See if you can spot the Katingan Mentaya Project. I'll give you a clue, it's the dark green shape increasingly isolated against the devastation of land clearance around it. But sure, keep shouting about no threat, no additionality.
Of course, there are projects run by bad actors trying to make an easy buck. There are examples of data fudging and inflated baselines and damn right there are more than enough companies that just want to greenwash their quarterly returns as the world goes up in flames. All of that must called out and nailed to the wall.
But the absolute blind determination by some in the media to automatically see failings and corruption in any and all projects like these is not honest reporting, it’s a fiction, an easy narrative to work up some righteous anger. Worse than that, it’s making it harder for conservation to happen. It’s playing right into the hands of those who profit from destroying forests and converting the land.
As for the NGOs that knowingly spread lies about genuine and effective forest conservation because it doesn’t fit their ideological model, well, there’s just not a lot that can be done against such callous cynicism.
Great report, thanks! This is how this "Shell" game works - conflicts of interest, quick profits, funds moving around to quickly to track, no real emissions reductions and lots of displaced people. What's not to like?