One of the worst approaches to carbon capital there is.
The folks who, fifteen years ago, were likening carbon credits to the old skool Catholic church selling indulgences to absolve rich parishioners of their sins were not that far off. The credits basically allow you to continue doing what you were doing or, as US climate czar John Kerry said when jetting off to Iceland in his private plane to receive a climate change leadership award:
“If you offset your carbon, it’s the only choice for somebody like me
who is traveling the world to win this battle”
Roger that, only choice, over.
And from the Oakland Institute, a group that, like Farmlandgrab keeps tabs on the land, the headline story:
August 2019
Evicted for Carbon Credits: Norway, Sweden, and Finland Displace Ugandan Farmers for Carbon Trading, brings forward irrefutable evidence that the Norwegian forestry and carbon credit company, Green Resources, forcibly evicted villagers around their plantation in Kachung, Uganda. The establishment of the plantation on land previously used by subsistence farmers precipitated an on-going food security crisis that has not been addressed by the company, its financiers, nor the Ugandan government.
Green Resources has been the subject of two reports published by the Institute in 2014 and 2017. The exposés documented the plantation’s destructive impact on the local population as well as the misleading audit commissioned in 2017 by the Swedish Energy Agency — Green Resources only carbon credit buyer. Company documents released with the briefing paper — including letters threatening the local villagers, corroborate the Institute’s previous findings.
Evicted for Carbon Credits implicates Green Resources’ new majority shareholders, the public development institutions of Norway and Finland — Norfund and Finnfund — which rescued it from bankruptcy in July 2018. These institutions are aware of the land grab, yet continue to finance the project despite Green Resources’ abuse against the communities at Kachung.
The report also exposes the complicity of three prominent international certification bodies — the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), The United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), and the Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA) — that are supposed to verify the company’s compliance with environmental and social standards. Evicted for Carbon Credits analyses how several of their monitoring and assessment reports omitted or downplayed the impacts of the land grab....
....MUCH MORE
The Institute received a lot of blowback from the countries involved.
But, as of March 2020 REDD-Monitor was reporting:
The UN's CDM is a scammy little setup with thousands of projects around the world turning cash into credits. I was asked to invest in a project in Czechia and walked away but got the distinct impression there was a lot of money flowing this way and that.
