Green go-betweens—or companies that connect corporations and governments with reforestation programs to get them to net-zero—are touting carbon credit projects as a “critical intervention” to meet climate goals. But some experts warn that helping heavy polluters greenwash their image could obscure bigger problems, including their unchecked greenhouse gas emissions.
“Carbon credits can help finance projects that reduce or remove GHG emissions from the atmosphere,” says Visual Capitalist in a post sponsored by Carbon Streaming Corporation, promoting various types of carbon projects from improved forest management to reforestation across wetlands, grasslands, and forests.
The post explains that the world’s forests absorb roughly 15.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually—around 40% of the global emissions produced each year—which they store in plants’ roots and leaves, as well as soil. Wetlands are also significant carbon sinks, holding 20 to 30% of all estimated soil carbon, even though they occupy only 5-8% of global land area.
But the world’s tree cover was cut by 10% over the past two decades, writes Visual Capitalist, mostly a result of forestry, commodity-driven deforestation, and wildfires that are threatening the carbon storage capacity of natural ecosystems. The loss of forest cover is so stark that recent research suggests Amazon rainforests now emit more carbon than they absorb.
Carbon credits offer a mechanism for protecting forested areas, they write, by making carbon storage projects economically viable.
Carbon Streaming has two projects that illustrate the potential outcomes of carbon offsetting: In one, they preserved a tropical lowland peat swamp endangered by palm oil production through the Rimba Raya Biodiversity Reserve Project in Indonesia. In the other, the Cerrado Biome Project in Brazil preserves native forests and grasslands and protects them from agricultural expansion. Both projects were supported by carbon credit sales, says Visual Capitalist.
But while protecting land with carbon offsets can seem like a win-win, some groups fear the trading schemes are greenwashing extractive corporate practices.
“The greenwashing aspect is that companies simply offset a large majority of their emissions and then come out and say they’re carbon neutral,” Thiago Chagas, a legal consultant at Climate Focus, told NBC News.
“That’s something that we should not be allowing at this point anymore,” he added. “They need to do their homework. They need to reduce their own emissions internally.”
Such projects also allow polluting states and industries in the global north to take control of carbon stocks in forests of the global south, giving them a “particularly cheap way of compensating for continued Northern fossil-fuel pollution,” say the Indigenous Environment Network (IEN) and the Climate Justice Alliance in their publication Carbon Pricing: A Critical Perspective for Community Resistance [pdf].
The two organizations say carbon offsets allow corporations to avoid systemic changes to reduce emissions, while creating social injustices that affect communities near the eco-projects.
“Such projects tend to be accompanied by the claim that deforestation happens because too little economic value is placed on intact forests, and that providing money for conservation to forested countries in the South will help protect them,” IEN writes. But Indigenous peoples and forest communities have challenged that assertion, warning that carbon credit projects encourage “land grabs” by carbon traders, large companies, and governments.
Still, offset schemes remain attractive land protection tools for some conservationists who also acknowledge the possible harms of carbon trading. Steven Nitah, a senior advisor to the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, and Lorna Harris, a postdoctoral fellow and ecosystem scientist at the University of Alberta, both highlighted carbon markets as a potential pathway to protect endangered peatlands in Canada’s Northwest Territories. But Harris cautioned that it can be dangerous to only put value on carbon when it’s part of a restoration activity for damage done.
Under the current offset system, “you can go in and damage a peatland, and then any reduction in that damage is considered an offset,” she said. “Whereas just leaving the peatland alone, without it being at risk of any damage, there’s no real value given to that.”
