Verra has suspended the Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project in Cambodia after receiving a letter from Human Rights Watch
Verra has suspended the Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project in Cambodia after receiving a letter from Human Rights Watch
Since April 2022, Human Rights Watch has been investigating this project.
The Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project covers an area of almost 450,000 hectares in Koh Kong in the southwest of Cambodia. The organisation that runs the project is Wildlife Alliance, a US organisation set up in 1995 under the name Global Survival Network. It was renamed as Wildlife Alliance in 2006.
Wildlife Alliance practices a brutal form of fortress conservation. This has involved burning homes, burning a villager’s tractor, and carrying out paramilitary operations together with government rangers and military police.
REDD-Monitor wrote about this project in July 2021:
“Verra is opening a new review”
On 19 June 2023, Verra’s Chief Programme Management Officer, Farhan Ahmed, wrote to Wildlife Alliance, the Cambodian Ministry of Environment, and SCS Global Services, the company that audited the Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project.
“Verra is opening a new review of project 1748, Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project,” Ahmed wrote. “Verra will conduct the review and while the review is ongoing, any further credit or label issuance is suspended.”
Ahmed explained that,
On 30 May 2023, Verra received stakeholder comments about the Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project. Verra deems these comments to warrant further investigation and, as a result, is opening a new review of the project under the VCS [Verified Carbon Standard], SD VISta [Sustainable Development Verified Impact Standard] and CCBS [Climate, Community & Biodiversity Standards] Programs.
Verra did not say which “stakeholder” sent the comments, or anything about the issues that the comments raised other than the comments “warrant further investigation”.
While Verra’s letter is available on the Verra Registry, the “stakeholder comments” are not.
Human Rights Watch
Journalists Andrew Califf and Seoung Nimol with CamboJA News report that the “stakeholder comments” came from Human Rights Watch.
On 21 June 2023, Luciana Téllez, an environmental researcher at Human Rights Watch, released a statement about the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project:
Human Rights Watch began investigating allegations of human rights abuses in the context of the Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project in April 2022. We have shared our preliminary findings with the implementers of the project, the firms that audited the project, and most recently, with Verra. Verra informed us on June 20, 2023, of its decision to suspend the project following receipt of our letter. We hope Verra’s actions lead to comprehensive remediation of the harms we have documented. Human Rights Watch will release its report when it is ready for publication.
Profiting from human rights abuse?
The project has sold a total of 27,627,237 million carbon credits. But when journalist Gerald Flynn asked Wildlife Alliance’s CEO Suwanna Gauntlett in 2021 how much the project had raised she “declined to comment”.
According to Wildlife Alliance Inc’s 2019 tax filing (which is the most recent filing available on the US Internal Revenue Service website) the company made US$4,816,833 from sales of carbon credits in that year.
In the company’s tax filings, Gauntlett’s reportable compensation from Wildlife Alliance is “0”, except in 2016, when it was US$120,000.
Buyers of carbon credits from the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project include Delta Air Lines, Air France, Stella McCartney, Bayer, Boeing, Bursa Malaysia Berhad, Origin Energy Limited, Interface, and McKinsey.
New Forests Pty Ltd (in which Al Gore’s investment company Generation Investment Management bought an equity share in 2008) bought 924 carbon credits from the project, which appear to be for sale as NFTs on a website called “Meta Carbon”. Clicking on the “T&CS” button on Meta Carbon’s website takes us to Stand for Trees’ Terms and Conditions web page.
Stand for Trees is supported by USAID. The United States Fish & Wildlife Service was among Wildlife Alliance’s donors in 2018 and 2019 (the only annual reports that Wildlife Alliance makes available on its website). In its annual reports Wildlife Alliance states that the US Fish & Wildlife Service gave more than US$100,000.
In October 2020, the US government announced that it was stopping funding to WWF and Wildlife Conservation Society and other conservation organisations because of human rights abuses. This followed an investigation by the US Government Accountability Office into human rights abuses carried out in the name of conservation with funding from the US government.
Excellent reporting, finding that Human Rights letter! Cambodia needs some real peace, not this type of colonialism that was partly funded by US agencies.
The late Anthony Bourdain wrote in 2001 that “once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”
So could the dirty fingers of capitalism please stay out of there?