Upsetting the Offset - Transnational Institute

Critiques
journalist with Ethical Consumer magazine describes so well: ‘Offsets are an
imaginary commodity, created by deducting what you hope happens from what
you guess would have happened’. 71 A recent report by Global Witness, ‘Vested
Interests – industrial logging and carbon in tropical forests’, documents how
what the logging industry hopes will happen (or at least says it hopes will
happen) in any case releases large amounts of carbon to the atmosphere.
Reduced impact logging ‘kills 5-10 non-target trees for every target tree cut, and
releases between 10 and 80 tons of carbon per hectare’. Logging also makes
forests more vulnerable to further deforestation and to fire. ‘During the El Niño
events in the late 1990s, 60% of logged forests in Indonesian Borneo went up
in smoke compared with 6% of primary forest’, Global Witness notes. 72
Campaigns Against Trading in Forest Carbon
Several NGOs and networks are campaigning to expose the problems with
trading the carbon stored in forests, including FERN, Friends of the Earth,
Indigenous Environmental Network, the Durban Group, World Rainforest
Movement, Rainforest Action Network, Global Witness, The Wilderness
Society, Greenpeace and the Rainforest Foundation. By creating a huge number
of carbon credits, the trade would allow business as usual to continue in the
North. In an interview with The Guardian in November 2008, Joseph Zacune of
Friends of the Earth explains that ‘there is genuine risk that all of these kinds
of proposals would provide a get out of jail free card to rich nations. It would
allow them to buy their way out of emissions reductions. It would create the
climate regime’s biggest ever loophole and would remove any environmental
integrity from a post 2012 deal’. 73
A Greenpeace report released in March 2009 makes a related point:
‘Including forest protection measures in carbon markets would crash the price
of carbon by up to 75 percent and derail global efforts to tackle global
warming’. The report, which was produced by a New Zealand-based economic
modelling group called KEA3, found that including REDD credits in carbon
markets would reduce investments in clean technologies worldwide, causing a
‘lock in’ effect, leaving high-carbon technologies such as coal-fired power
stations in place for many years to come. In addition, the report points out that
‘significant questions of permanence, leakage, and additionality have been raised
about potential REDD credits; as well as the ability of countries to accurately
measure, monitor, and report on such emissions’. 74
Academics such as Alain Karsenty of CIRAD (the Paris-based International
Centre for Cooperation on Agroforestry Research and Development) also point
out the dangers of trading in forest carbon. In a paper published last year in the
International Forestry Review, 75 Karsenty comments on the uncertainties involved
in establishing the impact of REDD measures, which would ‘essentially force
experts to disentangle an embedded array of factors, isolating what can be the
net impact of policies and measures effectively taken by the authorities to tackle
deforestation (i.e. stringent law enforcement, removal of agricultural subsidies,
etc.) and external factors such as (involuntary) changes in market prices for
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