We have already shown you 10 ways carbon projects can be manipulated to obtain higher profits. This misconduct damages climate action and menaces the credibility of voluntary carbon offsets. Here are another 11 possible (and recurring) ways to cheat.
1. Manipulate equations to estimate carbon content: Going from a field measurement of a tree to the amount of carbon it is storing and sequestering requires some math, called allometric equations. The ones used by each project depend on the type of tree and protocol used. As long as the chosen ones are widely used and recognized, variability is not an issue. However, in certain protocols, people are allowed to create their allometric equations, which will lead to choosing equations that favor the issuance of a very high number of credits.
2. Not keeping track of where trees have been planted: This often happens in reforestation projects. Big reforestation projects often lose track of the trees they have planted, with clear consequences on how effective subsequent verification will be. Verification will be carried out by only using a sub-sample since trees might be randomly located in different properties.
3. Change the baseline: Much like changing the project’s boundaries, this is done to make the project look better in the face of proven deforestation. When parts of AD projects are deforested, reassessing baselines to claim that the situation would have been even worse than previously stated enables projects to enjoy the same number of credits as before failing. Verra, for example, allows you to change baselines every ten years.
4. Lack of transparency (no public documentation): Without clear documentation, it becomes hard to check for compliance. Often, projects do not disclose their exact location, making it impossible to find the project via satellite imagery and independently verify its efficacy.
5. Protect trees that aren’t at risk: In the case of AD and IFM, on top of instances where trees are inside parks and other formally protected areas, some more subtle cases are even more common. For example, projects taking place in remote mountain ranges or deep within the Amazon rainforest with no road access may show a baseline of 30% deforestation, while they are at most at 10% risk of being cut down. This causes an overestimation when issuing credits.
6. Baselines are established with no actual proof: In most cases, projects’ baselines require some type of data to be constructed and demonstrated. In the case of some avoided deforestation projects, however, you might need as little as a single piece of paper stating that someone was putting the trees in question at risk to justify a very aggressive baseline. These people might be timber companies, corrupt officials, and so on. Would you trust them?
7. Don’t measure the trees: A lot of projects simply don’t measure the amount of carbon that is in the forest and prefer cutting corners by using regional averages. Not measuring the trees in the area, either remotely or in the field, makes way for further manipulation. Regional averages might be far more generous than the actual carbon content of the forest. Plus, avoiding on-the-ground measurements saves on a lot of expenses that are normally faced by projects.
8. Downplaying fire risk: Some projects are placed in areas that will eventually burn down, especially with climate change and droughts constantly worsening. These projects are far too optimistic, promising the protection of forests for 30, even 100 years without disclosing the extent of risk that projects are under simply due to their location.
9. Baseline curves: In the case of avoided deforestation, baselines are constructed through a model. These models are systemically created using curves that eventually and inevitably lead baseline to estimate the clear-cutting of the area.
10. Baselines using regional averages: Climate Action Reserve put out a map that ascribes different standardized baselines to wide regions of the US. This is causing people to pick areas that have harsher baselines and a very low probability of deforestation to get the most out of their project. This will cause some easier-to-protect areas to be favored over the ones that are at higher risk.
11. Crypto laundering: Hiding credits on a Blockchain makes it impossible to know where those credits are coming from. This increases the opacity of the market, making decision makers unable to differentiate between credits coming from legitimate projects and others coming from projects that used the above-mentioned techniques to cheat. In this way, even the most well-intentioned people will have no way of knowing if they are doing good for the planet.
The protocols that exist today are filled with holes and are often manipulated. However, forests remain the quickest way to scale up climate change mitigation and reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere. The solution to these manipulations is not to abandon all hopes and stop trusting forestry projects. On the contrary, it is important to reward the projects that are actually working and let the market expand even further while denouncing those projects that are cheating. The only way to differentiate between good and bad projects and let climate action multiply? Ensuring monitoring is done transparently by truly independent actors. Join us at Renoster.
