By Chris Lang “Offsets are an imaginary commodity created by deducting what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened.” That’s Dan Welch writing in the magazine Ethical Consumer in 2007.
Tag: Carbon accounting
The Green Climate Fund must reject Arbaro’s industrial tree plantations
By Chris Lang At its 25th board meeting from 10-12 March 2020, the Green Climate Fund is due to decide whether to provide US$25 million to the Arbaro Fund. The money, together with a further US$175 million co-financing largely from other public sources, would be used to establish 75,000 hectares of commercial tree plantations in…
Monitoring deforestation for REDD: Maps, datasets, and above all uncertainty
How do we know whether or not a REDD project is actually reducing deforestation and forest degradation? Satellite data is one increasingly popular answer. Computers can be trained to use the data to detect deforestation and changes in land use and plot the information on easy to read maps.
California’s “lenient leakage accounting” means that emissions reductions from forest offsets may never happen
California’s cap-and-trade scheme has resulted in payments of hundreds of millions of dollars to forest owners. But a recent policy brief by Barbara Haya at the University of California, Berkeley argues that California may have exaggerated the emissions reductions of these forestry projects by as much as 80 million tons of carbon dioxide.
Vision 2050 Forestry in Ghana: The inequities of a carbon credit project
A company called Vision 2050 Forestry claims to be the “leading forestry company in West Africa”. According to the company, between September 2008 and February 2010 more than 300,000 people signed up to Vision 2050 Forestry’s Carbon Credit Project. The company claims that 150 million trees were planted and “five million people are expected to…