A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

offsets – the fossil economy’s new arena of conflict 299is a good project,’ he stated. ‘People are very impatient to get theirhomes upgraded; they really want this project.’ 163Thus Kuyasa has been held up as an example of the potential of carbontrading both to fight climate change and to improve living conditionsin local communities.Trusha Reddy researchedthe Bisasar Road projectwhile she was an internat the Centre for CivilSociety at the Universityof KwaZulu-Natal andlater, as a freelancejournalist, Climate Care’slight bulb project.Graham Erion of YorkUniversity Facultyof EnvironmentalStudies and OsgoodeHall Law Schoolconducted researchon Sasol, Bellville,Kuyasa and BisasarRoad while a visitingscholar at theUniversity of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre forCivil Society.This has got to be the future of the carbon credit market, then.Unfortunately not. The reality is that rather than being an example ofwhat the CDM can deliver, Kuyasa is a testament to what it can’t.What do you mean?The project can’t survive off carbon finance. Instead, it is financedpredominantly by one-off government grants, as an explicitly ‘publicsector project’. 164Project proponents estimate that carbon money can cover no morethan 20 per cent of the scheme’s costs, depending on the spot marketprice of the Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs) it sells. 165 (Thefirst 10,000 CERs from the project were sold at 15 euros each to theUK to ‘offset’ jet fl ights and other emissions associated with the 2005G8 summit meeting at Gleneagles, Scotland. 166 But ‘very few CERpurchasers will pay upfront’. 167 ) SSN staff member Lester Malengis,who has worked on the scheme for two years, admits: ‘This is first aproject that uplifts Kuyasa, not a carbon project… . That funding isnot sustainable.’ 168The project is possible only because of generous funding from thenational Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism in Pretoria,the Western Cape provincial government, and Electricité deFrance (as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility campaign). 169In addition, SSN and the city of Cape Town have donated hundredsof hours of unremunerated labour. For Richard Worthington of theSouth African Climate Action Network, Kuyasa has only ‘got towhere it got to because it’s been treated as a charity case. It’s beendamned expensive and not at all an example of how to put a projecttogether’. 170Nor, according to Emily Tyler of SouthSouthNorth, who was closelyinvolved in the development of Kuyasa, has registration as a CDMproject helped. ‘The CDM actually adds little value (indeed, it addscosts) to the very sorts of projects it was designed to encourage,’Tyler wrote in a whistle-blowing editorial in February 2006. Thereis, she said, ‘no financial value added by the CDM for the projecttypes which most closely fit the CDM’s avowed objectives.’ Only by