WWF finally admits that “carbon credits won't solve the climate crisis”

But still supports carbon trading because WWF will profit from selling fraudulent offsets.

WWF has long supported carbon offsetting. WWF set up the Gold Standard in 2003. It even runs a “carbon offset program” which encourages people to “consider offsetting the carbon emissions from your international flights”.

However, in a recent article for the Thomson Reuters Foundation Fran Price, WWF’s forests lead, and Manuel Pulgar Vidal, WWF’s climate and energy lead, admit that “Carbon credits won’t solve the climate crisis”.

Price and Vidal write that,

Many of the criticisms of the voluntary carbon market are warranted . Poorly planned and executed carbon crediting projects can result in harm to local communities, indigenous peoples and the global climate, as well as low carbon credit prices that are very unlikely to result in the benefits promised.

They also note that, “The world needs companies to prioritise rapid and deep cuts to their emissions.” The cuts should be in line with climate science. And companies should be held accountable.

“The world does not need more companies writing cheques for planting trees just to tick the box that they have offset their carbon footprint. It just isn’t that simple,” Price and Vidal write.

They add that, “Companies are clutching at straws if they believe they can grow enough trees fast enough to offset the modern world’s emissions.”

So far so good. But predictably enough, WWF is not about to start campaigning to get corporations, or anyone else, to reduce their emissions. Firms must “go beyond reducing emissions”, Price and Vidal write. They must “also invest in high-impact nature-based solutions”.

Price and Vidal mention the target of bringing nature loss to “close to zero by 2030”, agreed in December 2022 at the Convention on Biodiversity meeting in Montreal. They argue that “this has zero chance of happening” without pouring huge amounts of money into nature-based solutions.

Obviously, WWF and other international conservation organisations would benefit from this massive increase in funding.

High-integrity credits?

WWF proposes helping companies by “identifying high-integrity credits associated with transformational activities on the ground”. Predictably enough though, Price and Vidal don’t actually name any of the project that generate these supposed “high-integrity credits”.

Instead they point to the Tropical Forest Credit Integrity Guide, which was co-authored by WWF. This guide acknowledges that the “standards” for forest offsets are inadequate and suggests that corporations such do their own due diligence:

“As with any procurement or purchasing decisions, companies should go beyond exclusive reliance on standards to conduct additional due diligence to ensure the social and environmental integrity of their purchases.”

WWF recommends something it calls a “contribution approach”. Corporations implement emissions cuts following science-based targets. Then they cost their remaining emissions with a “true social cost of carbon” which the corporations then invest in nature-based solutions “without making carbon neutrality claims prior to achieving net-zero emissions”.

Price and Vidal write that,

“These investments need not be constrained to carbon credits and can support a broader range of essential measures to address drivers of deforestation.”

Money will pour into landscape-scale projects, “which are co-designed with local communities”. Finance must “support the best management practices for smallholders”, and “enable indigenous peoples and local communities to secure land rights and access sustainable livelihoods”.

Somehow, Price and Vidal forget to mention the corporations that are responsible for destroying the forests, through road-building, dam-building, industrial tree plantations, commercial logging, mining, cattle-ranching, and so on.

Local communities and Indigenous Peoples are tacked on to WWF’s top-down false solutions as an afterthought. Priority number one is to keep the money flowing into WWF’s ever deeper pockets.

“High-quality carbon credits can be part of the solution,” Price and Vidal write. But somehow they forget to mention that high-quality carbon credits are not a solution to the climate crisis. For every carbon credit sold, there is a buyer (often a Big Polluter) that uses the carbon credit to continue burning fossil fuels.

The reality is that Big Polluters - in particular the oil and gas industry - have long used REDD to greenwash their ongoing destruction. Rather than wishing for mythical “high-quality carbon credits” that cannot be verified, WWF would do better to investigate how the oil and gas industry is benefiting from carbon credits. A good place to start would be with Invictus Energy’s claims that it’s Cabora Bassa Basin project is carbon neutral, thanks to WWF’s Ngamo-Gwayi-Sikumi REDD project:

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