REDDisms: December 2025
An occasional series of the things people say about carbon trading, the climate crisis, and REDD.
This is the third in REDD-Monitor’s occasional series of REDDisms posts. Each post consists of ten quotations, nine of which are recent and one of which comes from my collection of REDDisms dating back to 2009.
“REDD is an idea dreamt up by economists who have no idea how fucked the developing world is.”
A UK-based forestry analyst, June 2009
“AI is so democratizing. If you think about climate tech, climate change and all the sustainability challenges we’re trying to solve here at COP, which one of those challenges would not be solved better and faster, with more intelligence.”
Josh Parker, Nvidia’s head of sustainability, November 2025
“We have to use AI, we know it. It’s a learning process. In private finance, we can see how the Rio Changemakers is useful. Such a matchmaking platform is an interesting application to bring in more private capital for the three Rio Conventions.”
Felix Wertli, Ambassador for the Environment, Switzerland, November 2025
“Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.”
Gabriel Labbate, UN Environment Programme, November 2025
“COP30 is our moment to demonstrate that high-integrity carbon credits deliver dual value — reducing emissions while growing the economy.”
Hanif Faisol Nurofiq, Indonesia’s Environment Minister, November 2025
“COPs are consensus-based, and in a period of geopolitical divides, consensus is ever harder to reach. I cannot pretend that COP30 has delivered everything that is needed. The gap between where we are and what science demands remains dangerously wide.”
António Guterres, UN secretary general, November 2025
“The evidence of the last 20 years is clear: carbon offsets have not generally achieved the emissions reductions they promised.”
Benedict Probst, Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, December 2025
“Overall, Kariba has been a very successful climate protection project.”
Renat Heuberger, ex-CEO of South Pole, October 2025
“We’re just making a prettier carbon-offset market. It’s lipstick on a pig. Any marine carbon removal, if it’s going to work on a global scale, we’re going to have to make a decision to completely alter some ecosystems . . . we should never, ever do that unless we know exactly what we’re doing, and we are quite far from reaching that point.”
Kristinn Árni L. Hróbjartsson, former general manager in Iceland for Running Tide, December 2025
“The first barrier is therefore technological and consists of being able to quantify the carbon in the soil. Measuring this is one of the keys to the offsetting system. To do this, we must be able to implement low-cost reliable solutions.”
Orange, December 2025