The Great Climate Scandal. Part 5: Responses from Verra, Wildlife Alliance, and Carbon Pulse

“Verra welcomes and encourages discussions and examinations of the voluntary carbon market”

This is the fifth post on REDD-Monitor about Channel 4’s documentary “The Great Climate Scandal”. The documentary takes a look into the world of carbon offsetting.

The previous four REDD-Monitor posts are available here:

The responses from Verra and Wildlife Alliance were sent to Channel 4 and are available on Channel 4’s website, as well as being put on screen at the end of the documentary.

Verra

In response to the documentary, a Verra spokesperson told Channel 4:

Verra welcomes and encourages discussions and examinations of the voluntary carbon market (VCM) from stakeholders including communities where projects take place, the media, and the broader scientific community. This documentary misrepresents the VCM and Verra’s role within it and failed to engage with Verra in good faith throughout the production process.

Verra is a mission-driven non-profit organization, committed to integrity and continuous improvement of its Standards and methodologies. This is so that projects upholding these standards can continue the critical work of investing in nature.

Verra has issued over one billion carbon credits since 2009, which have enabled billions of dollars to be channelled to urgent climate action, which is vital to keeping us on track for the Paris Agreement goal.

Verra-certified REDD projects do not over-issue carbon credits. The claims made are based on studies using “synthetic controls” or similar methods that do not account for project-specific factors that cause deforestation. Similarly, it is hazardous to consider satellite images analysis as conclusive evidence that the projects’ data are underestimating deforestation.

In regards to questions about the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project and the Tumring project, Verra could not provide comment as both projects were under review at the time of filming.

Wildlife Alliance

Wildlife Alliance told Channel 4 that they disputed the accuracy of the Human Rights Watch report which they said was misleading and based on a small number of interviews with those involved in illegal environmental activity. Wildlife Alliance stated that the Southern Cardamom REDD project has been validated and verified three times by third party auditors since 2018 and was protecting the area from illegal environmental activity.

Wildlife Alliance told Channel 4 that:

The uncertainty caused by lack of land titling in Cambodia has resulted in the perception of unclear boundaries of community land… Wildlife Alliance has done everything we could to help the people to delineate the community land. 

There have never been any physical violence against any forest offenders. We have provided all the legal documents to HRW proving the legal process of each case.

Rangers are from a multi-disciplinary team and are observed by Wildlife Alliance to make sure that law enforcement is implemented transparently. They have been trained to the highest standards.

Carbon Pulse

Mike Szabo, director and co-founder of Carbon Pulse, sent REDD-Monitor the following response:

Someone from visual content production company Meldrum Dent got in touch with us to request a press pass to Carbon Forward. He told us they were making a documentary aimed at “a younger audience who are concerned with the climate crisis”. We took this to mean it was geared towards teenagers or possibly children, so we acquiesced.

In organising Carbon Forward, we set aside a fixed number of passes for media annually, and we hit capacity for this year shortly after this request. It was only after learning this pass was for Matt Shea, who is not known for filming children’s documentaries but rather hard-hitting exposés, that we reconsidered and decided to rescind his pass and offer it to another industry journalist on our waiting list. We felt somewhat deceived at this point.

For this year’s event, we offered press passes to reporters from the Guardian, FT, Reuters, Bloomberg, WSJ, and other major newspapers – as we do every year.  These outlets have all reported at length about the various scandals gripping carbon offsets markets, thereby demonstrating that Carbon Forward isn’t some private corporate event where the wider press isn’t allowed to attend.

In fact, not only did we invite the Guardian, but we specifically invited Patrick Greenfield, who appears in this documentary and who has written extensively about offsetting. He didn’t end up attending for whatever reason, but a number of other reporters did.

Even if Matt and his team had been doing a documentary aimed at a younger audience, we later decided that our conference and its attendees – industry professionals discussing complex topics like additionality and corresponding adjustments – were arguably not the most appropriate subject matter for such a film.

As it turns out, Matt and two colleagues opted to purchase tickets to our event, but they did so under fake names and representing “ESA Tree Care” – a Welsh aboricultural contracting and consulting service.

As you can see in the video, Matt also misrepresented himself to Robin Rix from Verra and declined to inform Robin that he was a journalist and that he was secretly filming him.

It was brought to our attention shortly after “Kim Callaway” (Matt’s alias) approached Robin that Kim was in fact Matt and that he was misrepresenting himself to attendees and effectively interviewing them for his documentary without their knowledge or consent.

Once we found out, we were very polite and civil in asking Matt and his colleagues to leave.

Matt’s claim in the film that he was “kicked out for asking a reasonable question” is not true. He was kicked out because he lied about his identity and was misrepresenting himself to us and other attendees. We would have escorted out anyone else who did the same, as I think would have other reasonable organisers of private events.

We were not aware of the secret cameras at the time, but filming attendees without their knowledge or consent would have been another reason to expel Matt and his team from the event.

Carbon Forward supports other media reporting on carbon markets, as we believe that transparency, understanding, and scrutiny are critical in preventing ‘greenwashing’ and other practices that exacerbate the climate crisis. Ironically, the Carbon Forward panel discussion briefly featured in the documentary focussed on ways to improve the integrity of the voluntary carbon market and how to hold the industry’s standard-setters to account.

However, misrepresentation and non-consensual recording or filming are things we take very seriously as journalists and we absolutely prohibit our reporters from engaging in this or otherwise lying to get a story. These are widely seen by many media companies as deceptive and unethical journalistic practices.

We would like to emphasise that Carbon Forward is not a private, secretive industry event attended by bankers hellbent on destroying the world and making a profit from it, as seemingly portrayed in this documentary. It is open to anyone who purchases a ticket.  There are many NGOs, established firms, and startups that attend, who are seeking to contribute in the fight against climate change.

The owners of Carbon Forward – Carbon Pulse and Redshaw Advisors – through their respective services of news reporting and risk management, are both widely-regarded as advocates of facilitating more transparency and integrity in the voluntary carbon markets.

Since we launched nearly nine years ago, Carbon Pulse has reported on every single credible allegation (of which we have been made aware) directed at these markets. In fact, I’d argue that no other news outlet (except for REDD-Monitor maybe) publishes more third-party criticism about carbon markets than we do.

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