REDD and Carbon Projects: Communities on Alert
New report by the World Rainforest Movement.
World Rainforest Movement has launched a new booklet for communities and activists about the threats that carbon projects present to their territories and ways of life. The booklet is titled “REDD and Carbon Projects: Communities on Alert.”
World Rainforest Movement writes that,
REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and the Degradation of forests) and carbon projects have been presented as a quick and cheap way to help solve the climate crisis. But in reality, these projects neither help solve the climate crisis nor do they halt deforestation. Even worse, they create conflict and threaten the ways of life of Indigenous Peoples and forest-dependent communities.
The booklet is written in three parts. Part one provides background information on what’s wrong with carbon projects, what they are, and the organisations that benefit from them. Part two gives 11 alerts, highlighting the dangers that come with carbon projects. The alerts are based on the experiences of communities and illustrate how carbon projects create conflicts and pose threat to communities’ food sovereignty and autonomy. Part three looks at the actions that communities have taken to oppose these projects.
In 2012, World Rainforest Movement published a booklet with the title, “10 things communities should know about REDD”. The aim was to alert community activists and grassroots organisations about the growing threat of REDD. “Since then,” WRM writes, “communities, organizations, networks, researchers and journalists have exposed the contradictions, violence and colonial ideology of REDD and carbon markets. Despite this, more carbon projects are being set up, and carbon markets are expanding.”
Fossil fuels and REDD
The new WRM booklet starts with a fundamental critique of REDD and carbon trading. Although carbon trading proponents present REDD as a solution to the crisis, the reality is that carbon projects are not a solution. “To avoid even more severe climate chaos, the extraction and burning of fossil fuels must end,” WRM writes.
That is not what is happening.
WRM points out that,
The big beneficiaries of capitalism – corporations, industrialised countries and elites – refuse to drastically cut their fossil fuel consumption. To do so would reduce the power and profits they derive from this destructive system, especially in the Global North. There, factories, cars, trucks, big container ships, and planes consume enormous quantities of oil and gas. Ending fossil fuel burning would put this business model at risk.
REDD is one of the tactics that the beneficiaries of capitalism use to delay the end of the fossil fuel industry. By buying carbon offsets, corporations and governments can give the appearance of taking action to address the climate crisis, while in fact they are continuing business as usual — based on continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels.
Of course, fossil fuel companies such as Shell, TotalEnergies, Eni, and Chevron are amongst the biggest buyers of carbon offsets. Along with mining companies, the aviation industry, agribusiness companies, and Big Tech and AI companies. These corporations use carbon offsets to greenwash their polluting and destructive activities.
Warning signs
WRM highlights a series of early warning signs that developers are setting up a carbon project on a community’s land. These include:
Talk of ‘carbon’ or of carbon credits in the community, and new people who are not from the community coming to talk regularly with some individuals in the community.
People from outside the community meet with community leaders who, all of a sudden, are going to more meetings without telling others much about these meetings. Sometimes, these meetings are taking place outside the village and, generally, women do not attend them.
People talk about carbon, but no-one can explain well why the carbon project is taking place in your community or what the carbon project really is about.
When meetings with the wider community are held, project promoters say that the project will bring ‘development’, jobs, and that people in the community will be paid for taking care of the forest as they have always done. But when people ask what carbon credits are, or who is paying for them, they get no straight answers and the carbon company may even start to isolate the ones who make questions, saying that they want to keep ‘development’ and jobs from the community.
The carbon company may at first only talk about an ‘environmental project’, say that they want to help the community ‘take care of the environment’, or that they want to plant trees to ‘help save the climate’, or to restore land they call ‘degraded’. Some communities have said that they were left in the dark about the project being a carbon project, that carbon was not even mentioned in the first meetings.
The report is a valuable overview of what’s wrong with REDD and how communities can resist proposed REDD projects on their territories. It includes many concrete examples of where REDD has gone wrong.
WRM concludes that,
Collective experience with carbon projects for more than 20 years has shown that the beneficiaries of REDD and other carbon projects are rich countries, polluting companies, elites, and a group of climate crisis profiteers – not communities.
The good news, WRM writes, is that resistance to carbon projects and carbon trading is growing. The report ends with a series of links to recommended materials. The first is WRM’s 2024 documentary, “NO to REDD and Carbon Markets”:
