Skip to content
Menu
REDD-Monitor
  • Start here
  • About REDD-Monitor
  • REDD: An introduction
  • Contact
REDD-Monitor

Brazil: The Suruí REDD project has been suspended indefinitely

Posted on 20 September 2018

The Suruí Forest Carbon Project in Brazil has been suspended indefinitely as a result of illegal diamond and gold mining, as well as illegal logging, inside the 248,147 hectare territory of the Suruí.

The Suruí REDD project and carbon credits

The Suruí REDD project started on 9 June 2009 and was validated under the Verified Carbon Standard Programme in 2012. During the period 2009 to 2012, the project generated a total of 299,895 carbon credits.

48,366 of these carbon credits were put in the VCS “pooled buffer account” – which VCS describes as follows:

The pooled buffer account is a reserve of nontradable credits that serves as a shared insurance pool for all VCS AFOLU [Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use] projects. If carbon stocks are lost in an individual project as a result of unforeseen events such as fire, disease or encroachment by outside actors, buffer credits may be cancelled from the buffer account to compensate for the loss.

The Suruí sold the remaining 251,529 carbon credits (that’s 299,895 minus 48,366).

There were two main buyers. In 2013, the project sold 120,000 carbon credits to Natura, a Brazilian cosmetics firm. In 2014, it sold the same number of carbon credits to FIFA to “offset” emissions from the World Cup. All these carbon credits have now been retired.

The Suruí used the money from the sale of carbon credits for six projects. These included chicken farming, a tree nursery, handicrafts, and capacity building of more than 20 indigenous people to work on “biomonitoring and surveillance expeditions” in the Suruí territory, according to the VCS loss event report, dated 15 June 2018.

Carbon credits “on hold”

The loss event report estimates that illegal logging, together with diamond and gold mining, resulted in the release of 452,554 tonnes of CO2e, above the baseline scenario.

In February 2018, VCS changed its name to Verra. According to Verra’s rules, when forest inside a REDD project is destroyed and carbon is released, “Verra will put buffer credits on hold in an amount equivalent to the estimated loss stated in the loss event report”.

But in the case of the Suruí Forest Carbon Project, Verra will not be doing this.

Here’s how Verra explains why not:

[I]n this situation, since the loss event was estimated as an amount larger than the total amount of VCUs issued to the project to-date, the amount of the buffer credits Verra has put on hold is equivalent to the total amount of VCUs issued to the project to-date (251,529). The rationale for this is that the purpose of putting buffer credits on hold is to “set aside” buffer credits in the event they need to be cancelled as a means to ensure the permanence of VCUs issued to the project. It would therefore be illogical and unnecessary to put buffer credits on hold in an amount greater than the amount of VCUs issued to the project to-date.

Verra’s stinginess with its buffer credits is perhaps surprising, particularly given the fact that Verra’s pooled buffer account holds 27.4 million carbon credits.

The 251,529 credits in the buffer pool will be cancelled if the Suruí do not submit a new verification report in the next 15 years. The buffer credits could also be cancelled if a future verification of the project confirms the loss from deforestation.

In a statement, Verra’s CEO David Antonioli assures us that the VCS buffer account “ensures the environmental integrity” of the carbon credits.

But in the period 2013 to 2017, deforestation in the REDD project area resulted in 452,554 tons of CO2 emissions, above the baseline scenario.

Verra seems keen to pretend that these emissions just didn’t happen.

How the deforestation took place

The VCS loss event report describes what happened as follows (the Suruí’s land is called the Sete de Setembro Indigenous Land, abbreviated as TISS, in Portuguese):

As of 2015, the dynamics of deforestation in the territory got worse. Local conflicts between villages and indigenous leaderships and the increasing presence of external actors interested in exploiting the TISS’s natural resources and expanding the activities of informal mining (known as ‘garimpo’, in Portuguese), illegal logging and opening of areas for pasture – in an irregular and unsustainable way – have ended up generating deforestation rates higher than those projected in the reference scenario (generating loss events).

In 2013, 116 hectares of the Suruí’s land was deforested. This was still below the 238.7 hectares deforestation projected in the baseline scenario of the project.

But then in 2014, illegal gold and diamond mining started on the Suruí’s land.

In 2015, 2016, and 2017 the deforestation totalled more than 1,800 hectares. That’s more than 1,000 hectares above the baseline scenario.

The loss event report states that,

In the first instance, the social conflicts that worsened in the TISS prevented the continuity of surveillance activities conducted by the indigenous monitoring agents. Some areas of Indigenous Land committed by informal mining activities and illegal logging have become inaccessible to the project proponents.

As far back as 2012, Almir Suruí, the Suruí chief, wrote an open letter asking for “urgent action” from the authorities to help stop logging in the Suruí territory. In the letter Almir notes that the loggers had given some of the Suruí firearms.

The loss event report notes that the reaction from the government agencies FUNAI and IBAMA was “minimal”, despite several letters from the Suruí.

Forest Trends’ Beto Borges was one of the designers of the Suruí Forest Carbon Project. He told Mongabay that before the REDD project started, “it was common to see 100 logging trucks coming in and out of TISS every day”.

That number reduced massively in the first years of the project, but in October 2016, Almir Suruí issued an emergency appeal for help to save the forest.

“Every day, 300 trucks leave our territory filled with wood”, Almir wrote.
 


PHOTO Credit: IBAMA (via Climate Home News).
 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

SUBSCRIBE!

Recent themes
30x30
Natural Climate Solutions
WWF's conservation scandals
Aviation and offsetting
Conservation Watch

Recent Comments

  • Ben on Response from Kurt Kaiser, Director of Compass Carbon: “Your article was of great concern to us”. And some questions for Kaiser from REDD-Monitor
  • James Mewa Kamaya on Papua New Guinea’s Forest Authority cancels Mayur Resources’ Kamula Doso REDD project
  • Benedikt von Butler on Switzerland’s offsetting deal with Peru excludes REDD. It will still not reduce emissions
  • Chris Ibe on Bar Works: The return of Renwick Haddow
  • Xindia on Bar Works: The return of Renwick Haddow

Recent Posts

  • REDD-Monitor is moving to Substack
  • REDD Project in Brazil Nut concessions in Madre de Dios, Peru finally started paying communities a decade after the project started. “I’m still lacking money,” says one community member
  • REDD-Monitor’s top ten posts in 2022
  • The harsh reality of 30×30: The EU is keen to allow extractivism in the 30×30 target – but not Indigenous Peoples’ territories
  • Human rights abuses against Indigenous Peoples and the proposed “30×30” target

Recent Comments

  • Ben on Response from Kurt Kaiser, Director of Compass Carbon: “Your article was of great concern to us”. And some questions for Kaiser from REDD-Monitor
  • James Mewa Kamaya on Papua New Guinea’s Forest Authority cancels Mayur Resources’ Kamula Doso REDD project
  • Benedikt von Butler on Switzerland’s offsetting deal with Peru excludes REDD. It will still not reduce emissions
  • Chris Ibe on Bar Works: The return of Renwick Haddow
  • Xindia on Bar Works: The return of Renwick Haddow

Issues and Organisations

30x30 AB 32 Andes Amazon Boiler rooms California Can REDD save ... ? Carbon accounting Carbon Credits Carbon Offsets CDM Conservation-Watch Conservation International COP21 Paris Cryptocurrency Deforestation EcoPlanet Bamboo Evictions FCPF Financing REDD Fossil fuels FSC Green Climate Fund Greenpeace Guest post Human rights ICAO Illegal logging Indigenous Peoples Natural Climate Solutions NGO statements Plantations R-M interview REDD and rights REDD in the news Risk RSPO-Watch Safeguards Sengwer The Nature Conservancy UN-REDD UNFCCC Verra World Bank WRM WWF

Countries

Australia Bolivia Brazil Cambodia Cameroon Canada China Colombia Congo Basin region Costa Rica DR Congo Ecuador El Salvador European Union France Gabon Germany Guyana Honduras India Indonesia Kenya Luxembourg Madagascar Malaysia Mexico Netherlands Nicaragua Norway Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Republic of Congo Sierra Leone Spain Sweden Tanzania Thailand Uganda UK Uncategorized United Arab Emirates USA West Papua
©2025 REDD-Monitor | Powered by SuperbThemes!