The allegations of sexual abuse at the Kasigau REDD project confirm that the REDD auditing system is “not fit for purpose”

Six auditing firms visited Kasigau without uncovering systemic abuse of power

Wildlife Works, the US-based company running the Kasigau REDD project in Kenya, faces accusations of serious, systemic sexual harassment and abuse. A new report by SOMO (the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations based in the Netherlands) and the Kenya Human Rights Commission reveals systemic abuse of power going back to 2011.

REDD-Monitor wrote about the report earlier this week:

“Not fit for purpose”

A Bloomberg opinion piece about the allegations comments that,

What’s chilling is that Kasigau has been held in extremely high esteem, with credits purchased by large corporations including Kering SA, Shell Plc and Netflix Inc. The system clearly isn’t fit for purpose.

Lara Williams, the Bloomberg journalist who wrote the opinion piece, points out that the key problem is that the voluntary carbon market is self-regulated.

Wildlife Works, the project developer, profits from the sale of carbon credits. Verra, the certification company, earns revenue by granting certifications and from a commission on the sale of carbon credits from its registry.

Auditing firms are supposed to check that project comply with Verra’s standards, which include respecting human rights. But the auditing firms are paid by the project developer. “That introduces a problematic client relationship that could compromise the integrity of an audit’s findings,” Williams writes.

“It’s a regulatory system that works like an M.C. Escher staircase,” Luciana Téllez Chávez, environment researcher at Human Rights Watch, told Bloomberg.

“Put it this way,” Williams writes, “Would you be happy eating at a restaurant that paid for its own food-safety inspector?”

“Limits of the auditing system”

In their report, SOMO and the Kenya Human Rights Commission write that,

The abuses we describe in this report are first and foremost a failure of oversight on the part of Wildlife Works. But they also illuminate the serious limits of the auditing system that is supposed to check that carbon offset projects meet the requirements of Verra’s standards.

The auditing firms that have produced monitoring and verification reports on the Kasigau REDD project failed to uncover the abuse that was going on. This is despite the fact that the auditors claim to have interviewed dozens of employees and community members. And despite the fact, as the report shows, that the abuse was widely known among employees and community members for many years.

SOMO and KHRC’s report states that,

A review of the audit reports issued by these firms shows that the auditors found no major problems and, in all cases, gave the company a clear pass. Often, they simply repeated marketing claims made by Wildlife Works.

Here, for example, is what S&A Carbon wrote in their June 2020 Verification Report:

Based on verifier observations made throughout the field audit and the sentiment shared by members of the communities interviewed, the verifiers found the project to be overwhelmingly having positive impacts to the local communities.

S&A Carbon was apparently so confident in this statement, that it is repeated a few sentences later in the 93-page report.

S&A Carbon was one of six auditing firms that carried out audits of the Kasigau REDD project. The others were AENOR Internacional S.A.U, SCS Global Services, Aster Global Environmental Solutions, Environmental Services, Inc., and Det Norske Veritas (U.S.A.), Inc.

Wildlife Works staff “seemed unable to speak freely” to auditors

In 2023, SOMO interviewed several social and environmental auditors of carbon offsetting projects. The auditors admitted that the conflict of interest in the auditing system limits their ability to carry out proper investigative research into human rights concerns in offsetting projects.

One of the auditors had assessed the Kasigau project. The auditor spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. The auditor told SOMO that, “they had heard disturbing stories of sexual harassment and abuses during their conversations with staff”.

For example, a woman employed by Wildlife Works had asked for an advance on her salary and was told that “she had to ‘earn it’ by providing sexual favours”.

In another case, a woman had allegedly been “pressure repeatedly to sleep with a more senior colleague”.

The auditor tried without success to get interviewees to speak on the record about these and other problems. SOMO quotes the auditor as saying that staff members,

“and especially junior staff seemed unable to speak freely. I had the impression that they had been told what to tell us and were afraid to defy these instructions. While I tried to convince them that they could share problems with me, I left those interviews feeling they were afraid to open up.”

“A whole new layer of harms inflicted by REDD+”

Jens Friis Lund is a professor of political ecology at Copenhagen University. In 2016, he was a co-author of a paper about inequity in the Kasigau REDD project:

Lund told SOMO that, “The legitimacy of the entire offsetting system depends, to a huge extent, on the auditors’ green light.”

Recently Carbon Brief analysed the impacts of carbon offsetting projects around the world. They found that, “many of these schemes can come with devastating impacts for Indigenous peoples and local communities”.

Carbon Brief found reports of Indigenous communities being forcibly removed from their land to make way for offsetting projects in the Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Kenya, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Lund commented that SOMO’s findings add to an “already damning picture”:

“We’ve known for some time that REDD+ projects have helped create a false sense that the climate crisis can be averted through offsets. We’ve also known that poor people tend to lose out when these projects are implemented. However, this evidence adds a whole new layer of harms inflicted by REDD+ and points to a frightening indifference amongst project proponents about their responsibility in all of this.”

---