Response from Jo Anderson, Carbon Tanzania: “I would ask that you kindly take the article down”

“There are some factual errors in the original Trouw reporting which we are addressing through a legal process with Trouw.”

PHOTO Credit: Carbon Tanzania’s co-founders, Jo Anderson and Marc Baker.

Earlier this month, REDD-Monitor wrote a post about the Yaeda-Eyasi Landscape REDD project in Tanzania. The post was based on reporting by Marcel Hooft van Huysduynen and Janneke Juffermans in the Dutch publication Trouw.

Their article documented how the project was set up, how carbon credits are sold to Singita, a luxury safari company. Singita claims that “Carbon offsetting allows our guests as well as our business to mitigate the impact of emissions.”

The Trouw article revealed that many of the Hadzabe did not fully understand the carbon trading project and could not have made an informed decision about the project before it started. “Very few Hadzabe understand the carbon project,” a worker at a local NGO told Trouw’s journalists. “This is a new form of colonialism.”

Today, REDD-Monitor received the following email from Jo Anderson, co-founder of Carbon Tanzania, the UK-incorporated company behind the Yaeda-Eyasi Landscape REDD project.

From: Jo Anderson
Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2024
Subject: Article about Yaeda Eyasi REDD Project and Carbon Tanzania
To: REDD-Monitor

Dear Chris,

I hope this mail finds you and the team at REDD Monitor well?

We note the publication of your article (link below) based on the Trouw article that was published a couple of weeks ago.

Your efforts to expose poor practice in nature markets and REDD in particular is important, and we respect all good investigative journalism (I was a journalist myself!) — there is certainly a lot of confusion in the space and the specifics of how individual REDD projects operate are many and varied.

Unfortunately there are some factual errors in the original Trouw reporting which we are addressing through a legal process with Trouw, so I would ask that you kindly take the article down until the corrected Trouw piece is available.

Many thanks in advance,

Yours, Jo Anderson.

Obviously, I am happy to correct any factual errors in the post on REDD-Monitor.

Equally obviously, I am not going to remove a post from REDD-Monitor just because a project developer asks me to “kindly take the article down”.

Anderson did not point out any factual errors in the post on REDD-Monitor.

Trouw’s article is still online. If and when Trouw publishes any corrections, updates, or additional information, I will, of course, update the post on REDD-Monitor.

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Update - 16 January 2025: Anderson wrote again on 9 January 2025. You can read his email and REDD-Monitor’s response here:

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