“Problems under every stone we turned.” New report on REDD by the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project finds massive exaggerations of emissions reductions

“REDD+ is ill-suited to the generation of carbon credits for use as offsets”

A report published today assesses Verra’s four main crediting methodologies that have generated almost all REDD credits to date. The report, published by the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project at the University of California, Berkeley, states that,

We found that current REDD+ methodologies generate credits that represent a small fraction of their claimed climate benefit. Estimates of emissions reductions were exaggerated across all quantification factors we reviewed when compared to the published literature and our independent quantitative assessment.

A team of 14 researchers contributed to the report. The lead author of the report is Barbara Haya, Director of the the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project.

Haya told Bloomberg that,

“Many of the researchers have been studying carbon-offset quality for many years, and even we were surprised. We found problems under every stone we turned.”

“We do not have time for false solutions,” she added.

“An entirely different approach is needed to reduce deforestation and cut emissions,” she told The Guardian.

The report focusses on five aspects of REDD projects:

• Baselines: deforestation that likely would have occurred in the absence of the project intervention that is reduced and credited by the project

• Leakage: the increase in carbon emissions outside project boundaries due to project activities, such as from conservation activities that displace rather than reduce production of a product, such as timber

• Forest carbon accounting: estimates of carbon per hectare in forests conserved

• Durability: the risk that forest carbon conserved by the project will be released into the atmosphere from natural disturbance, such as wildfire, or from human activities

• Safeguards: criteria and procedures for mitigating risks and minimizing harm to forest communities

These are problems that REDD has faced from the beginning. As this new report clearly illustrates, the problems are far from resolved.

Carbon Market Watch, which funded the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project report, has published a briefing paper based on the research, titled “Error Log: Exposing the methodological failures of REDD+ forestry projects”.

In a statement, Carbon Market Watch’s Inigo Wyburd, comments that,

“When only one in every 13 carbon credits represents a real emissions reduction, their action is lost in the forest.”

Safeguards “treated as a check-box activity”

The Berkeley Carbon Trading Project report notes that almost all REDD projects are focussed on changing the behaviour of some of the world’s poorest communities. Many projects aim to improve the lives of forest communities, but restrictions on communities’ livelihoods have the most serious impacts on more vulnerable households and communities.

The authors found that in the worst cases, these restrictions “have resulted in displacement or dispossession”. And safeguard policies have, in practice, been treated as voluntary guidance:

While Verra’s safeguard standards are presented as assurance that projects will not cause harm to local communities, in practice they are commonly treated as a check-box activity by both developers and auditors.

Meanwhile, the authors write, REDD is not designed to prevent commercial drivers of deforestation, which they list as: politically and economically powerful large-scale agriculture, cattle ranching, logging, and mining.

The authors point out that,

Companies buy these inflated carbon credits to sell “carbon neutral” flights and fuel, call themselves carbon neutral to investors, employees, and customers, and justify their own continued emissions. These credit purchases take funds and attention away from more effective climate mitigation and forest protection measures.

“Significant flexibility”

The authors found that Verra offers project developers “significant flexibility” in estimating emissions reductions and applying safeguards. Project developers use this flexibility to over-estimate project benefits. These over-estimates tend not to be picked up by auditors.

The authors explain that project auditors are hired by project developers and therefore have an incentive to be lenient, in order to be hired again. Auditors “did not adequately enforce compliance with Verra’s standards”, the authors found.

Examples of failure to enforce compliance include an auditor approving a zero fire risk rating for the Ntakata Mountains REDD project in Tanzania despite having actually seen a fire during the site visit.

And at the Alto Mayo REDD+ project in Peru, where the project restricts coffee growers moving into the project area, the auditor allowed a zero risk of leakage. The Berkeley Carbon Trading Project report authors write that,

In other words, the developer claimed that individuals who would have migrated into the project area to clear forest to grow coffee were assumed to not migrate elsewhere for that purpose, and that the reduction in coffee production because of project restrictions would not result in increased coffee production elsewhere to meet demand for this globally traded product.

“A race to the bottom”

The report is damning. The market system creates “a race to the bottom that is hard to emerge from”, the authors write. Buyers of carbon credits look for cheap credits, which are often the most over-credited. Even worse, “the market values carbon over people by design”.

The report concludes that,

When considering all evidence together, our overall conclusion is that REDD+ is ill-suited to the generation of carbon credits for use as offsets. The logic of the voluntary carbon market is to create a financial incentive for private actors to find the lowest-cost carbon emissions reductions and removals. But all decision-makers involved in the creation and use of carbon credits benefit financially from excess crediting. The methodologies used to estimate project benefits and credits awarded are developed by companies and organizations that go on to use them to develop projects and sell credits. Developers benefit from selling more credits for doing less, credit buyers seek inexpensive credits, and the auditors tasked with ensuring quality have conflicts of interest because they are hired directly by the project developers. Verra itself competes for market share with the other carbon credit registries. High levels of over-crediting come from the compounding of decisions made throughout the carbon credit lifecycle, all of which lean toward generating more credits.

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