The Katingan REDD project: How offsetting enables the fossil fuel sociopaths to destroy the planet
The Katingan Peatland Restoration and Conservation is one of the largest REDD projects in the world, covering an area of 150,000 hectares in Indonesia’s Central Kalimantan province. A recent report by Nikkei Asia found that the project “has issued credits up to three times more than the amount of carbon dioxide it is likely to absorb”.
REDD-Monitor has written twice about the Katingan REDD project, first in December 2019:
And again in November 2020:
The counterfactual baseline
In order to sell carbon offsets, the project developers behind any REDD project have to make up a story about what would have happened in the absence of the REDD project. The higher the deforestation in this counterfactual baseline story, the more carbon offsets the project can sell.
In the case of the Katingan REDD project, the Project Description Document explains that,
The project is considered additional, with the most likely and plausible business-as-usual scenario being conversion to industrial acacia plantation.
In 2020, Greenpeace Germany published a report that challenges the assumptions in the Project Description Document. Greenpeace noted the conflict of interest faced by certification bodies, because they are commissioned and paid by project developers.
Greenpeace found that the average area of forest cleared to make way for industrial tree plantations in the entire province of Central Kalimantan between 2001 and 2010 was significantly lower than the project developers anticipated in just the project area.
In addition, all of the plantations established in Central Kalimantan between 2001 and 2010 were on mineral soils. The Katingan REDD project area has peat swamp soils, which would need to be drained before they could be planted with acacia trees. This would considerably increase the cost of establishing plantations in the REDD project area.
Nevertheless, the project developers’ counterfactual baseline story enabled them to estimate that CO2 emissions would be reduced by an average of 7.45 million tons per year.
Katingan’s offsets and Big Polluters
Since 2017, Nikkei reports the project has sold 30 million carbon offsets, bringing in an estimated US$210 million.
Among the buyers of offsets from Katingan are several Big Polluters, including: TotalEnergies, Bentley Motors, Volkswagen, Singapore Airlines, PetroChina International Company, Delta Air Lines, CNOOC Gas & Power Group, and Shell.
Shell has bought more than 2.2 million carbon offsets from the Katingan REDD project. For example, on 19 July 2021, Shell retired 220,149 offsets in order to make the claim that it had delivered “carbon neutral” liquefied fossil gas from Oman LNG to Shell Energy India.
Obviously, the idea of burning fossil fuel and pretending that it is carbon neutral simply because Shell has bought a few thousand carbon offsets is ridiculous. Even Renat Heuberger, the co-founder of carbon finance consulting firm South Pole, admits that carbon neutral fossil fuel is “obvious nonsense”.
In August 2021, Heuberger told Bloomberg Green that,
“It’s such obvious nonsense. Even my 9-year-old daughter will understand that’s not the case. You’re burning fossil fuels and creating CO2 emissions.”
When REDD-Monitor wrote about Greenpeace’s critique of the Katingan REDD project, Dharsono Hartono, the CEO of project developer PT. Rimba Makmure Utama, left a comment arguing that selling carbon offsets is just a “means of financing forest conservation”. He argues that because Greenpeace opposes carbon offsetting, the organisation is making an “ideological point” .
He describes this as “deeply cynical, dangerously irresponsible and seems to run totally contrary to Greenpeace’s own environmental mission”.
But Dharsono is fully aware that the polluting corporations that buy carbon offsets from his project are doing so to continue business as usual. “So they will be buying carbon credits from projects like us, and then they can claim that they are carbon neutral,” he told Channel News Asia in 2018.
And Dharsono is also fully aware that there are two sides to every REDD offset. One side involves raising money, in an attempt to protect forests. But the dark side of REDD (and all other offsetting projects) is the insanity of “carbon neutral” fossil fuels. Carbon offsets allow the oil industry to continue business as usual – which is precisely what is exacerbating the climate crisis.
Overestimating deforestation
Nikkei analysed satellite data from the University of Maryland to look at changes in forest area in Central Kalimantan. Nikkei found that “except for a year of large-scale fires forests without concessions decreased by only about 1% a year”.
Nikkei spoke to David Gaveau, founder of deforestation monitoring database, The Tree Map. Gaveau points out that, “There is one pulp paper concession adjacent to the project area. The concession is inactive.”
Then there’s the moratorium, put in place by the Indonesian government in May 2011. While the moratorium on new forest concessions is deeply flawed, as Nikkei notes, “the possibility of plantation development has been almost fully eliminated by the moratorium”.
Nikkei’s analysis of data on forest development permits compiled by the Indonesian government also shows that by the time the project began in 2010, the area granted for pulp plantation development had already plummeted.
SCS and Verra defend the climate fraud
No prizes for guessing which organisations leapt to the defence of the project developers and the Big Polluters buying carbon offsets from the project: the consulting firm that validated the project, SCS Global Services; and the standard setting organisation, Verra.
Despite the fact that the project was validated under the Verra system in 2016, five years after the moratorium started, the project developer did not adjust the estimates of potential forest destruction in the project area.
Christie Pollet-Young of SCS Global Services told Nikkei that,
“We are required to assess the scenarios and regulations that exist at that time. Since this project has a start date of 2010, we would not have considered regulations that came into place after 2010. While we understand that this was definitely discoverable at the time of validation, it was not in the scope of our assessment services for validation.”
Which amounts, more or less, to an admission that SCS looked the other way. For five years.
Verra, meanwhile, put out a statement in response to the Nikkei article. Verra dismisses the criticisms that the project developer overstated its emission reductions: “Verra strongly refutes this allegation as it is based on incorrect assumptions about the project’s baseline and additionality.”
Verra and SCS are acting as enablers to the fossil fuel addiction of the Big Polluters. In a recent podcast with George Monbiot, climate scientist Peter Kalmus illustrates just how bad enabling the fossil fuel industry is at this stage of the climate crisis:
Can we just say how weird it is that there’s an industry that’s taking down our entire planet, which is run by people, these fossil fuel capitalists who won’t stop. They are already filthy rich, they already have more money than any human could ever know what to do with. And they want more. And they’ll lie, they’ll cheat, they’ll assassinate, they’ll give political bribes, they’ll buy up media corporations, all just to keep the fossil fuel flowing, and to keep those profits flowing.
I agree with Kalmus that this is weird. But at least part of the responsibility must lie with the enablers of the fossil fuel industry. And that includes the carbon offsetting business.
Verra, SCS, and the entire carbon offsetting sector are helping to promote (and profiting from) the greenwash that helps these fossil fuel sociopaths to destroy the planet.