Verra has sacked one-quarter of its staff

Do say, “restructuring”, “realigning”, “streamlining”. Don't say, “sacked”, “fired”, “laid off”.

These are tough times for Verra, the Washington DC-based carbon credit certifying company. A series of investigations has exposed problems with projects on Verra’s Registry including: human rights abuses; sexual harassment; impacts on communities; fraud; carbon cowboys; deforestation; trophy hunting; land rights disputes; conflicts of interest; massive overestimates of carbon credits; junk offsets; and greenwashing.

In May 2023, David Antonioli resigned from his more than US$475,000-a-year position as Verra’s CEO.

In 2023, the voluntary carbon market shrank by 61%, falling from US$1.9 billion in 2022 to US$723 million in 2023. REDD offsets lost 62% of their value between 2022 and 2023.

In 2023, Verra posted its largest ever financial loss, of US$9.3 million. Verra’s revenue has decreased in the past two years, while its expenses have more than doubled.

Verra’s main source of income is a US$0.20 commission that it charges on every carbon credit certified under Verra’s system. From 1 December 2024, Verra will increase this to US$0.23, along with an increase in its other fees.

Clearly, Verra has a financial interest in allowing more credits into its system, rather than reducing the number of credits by painstakingly enforcing its standards.

Mandy Rambharos, Verra’s new CEO

In August 2024, Verra appointed a new CEO, Mandy Rambharos. She previously worked as Vice President Global Climate Cooperation at the Environmental Defense Fund, which is a major promoter of REDD and carbon trading.

Before that, she worked for almost 15 years at Eskom, South Africa’s largest electricity generating corporation. Eskom’s 15 coal-fired power plants result in the company being the country’s biggest source of air pollution.

Rambharos was a UN climate negotiator for South Africa and was involved in the Paris Agreement negotiations of Article 6 — the UN’s proposed global carbon trading mechanism.

This week, in a Verra webinar, Rambharos said,

“I am truly honoured to lead Verra. It’s such a critical time for the carbon market, and the responsibility to strengthen every aspect of the VCM experience from ensuring integrity through rigorous standards to fostering innovation and trust. These are the things that guide the decisions that I make at Verra every day. This is the lubricant that drives us, it is trust, it is integrity.”

25% of Verra’s staff sacked

On 21 October 2024, Rambharos announced “a workforce reduction of roughly 25 percent”.

Verra will not be making a list available of the people it has sacked. “We have to respect the privacy of all of our staff,” Rambharos says.

In the webinar, Rambharos says,

“The cuts became effective this week, so it’s been a really gruelling week for us, at Verra, a really difficult time. And while this has been a very difficult step, it was necessary to align our resources with our core priorities and ensure that we keep Verra agile in a very fast changing landscape.

“By realigning we will ensure that we have better support for our stakeholders, absolutely maintain the rigour of our standards, from an integrity and quality perspective, that does not change, and to address our various challenges, including the speed of our responses.

“Our focus is on streamlining our operations to deliver faster more efficient outcomes and, again, without compromising on our high quality or integrity.”

Obviously, Rambharos does not explain how sacking one-quarter of the company’s staff is compatible with speeding up of outcomes, and improving the enforcement of Verra’s standards.

Instead, she talks about Verra’s “Nature Framework”, to be launched on 29 October 2024. “These will generate nature credits and mobilise critical finance that is required for these activities,” Rambharos says.

And she moves on to Verra’s 2024 “stakeholder survey”, which reveals just how completely deluded the voluntary carbon market’s proponents are:

These concerns do not even begin to address the structural conflicts of interest that are built in to Verra’s certification system. Not to mention the fundamental problems with carbon offsets!

Risk-Based Approach

One of the questions raised during the webinar was how Verra proposes to speed up process times while sacking 25% of staff. Justin Wheler, who recently became Chief Program Management Officer at Verra, explains that Verra is introducing a new Risk-Based Approach:

“The Risk-Based Approach is specifically designed to allocate our existing resources to the reviews, to complete our reviews within the timelines. So we’re still reviewing every project to a different extent, depending on the risk, but we expect the Risk-Based Approach to compensate for the reduction in staff capacity and still be able to hit our SLAs [service-level agreements] by the end of this year.”

Verra will not publish the exact criteria used to establish the risk of individual projects. “That’s not because we’re trying to hide anything,” Wheler says, “but because it is inside baseball. Like the police post a speed limit, but don’t tell them where the speed trap is going to be.”

Wheler also appeals to project developers to help out. In doing so, he inadvertently reveals just how limited Verra’s reviews of problematic projects are — and how incapable Verra is of actually regulating the voluntary carbon market in any meaningful way:

“If you’re doing a project and you’re hiring an auditor, make sure that you’re hiring an auditor that’s qualified for your region and your project type. Give them sufficient time to do their work properly. Give them access to the information and take a close read of all the reports that they’re producing.

“Because that’s what we’re reviewing when we review from our side, so the more scrutiny and clarity you provide upfront, the better the reviews will be on our side.”