In Brazil, three carbon offset projects accused of “fraud”

2023-11-20 05:10:03

Acai palm trees in a reforestation area on the farm of Brazilian farmer Manoel Jose Leite, in Anapu, in the northern Brazilian state of Para, June 1, 2012. This low-carbon farming operation makes part of environmental projects in the State of Para. EVARISTO SA / AFP

Almost four years ago, on December 23, 2019, Air France announced in a press release to compensate “100% of its carbon emissions from domestic flights” (i.e. those in mainland France), by purchasing carbon credits from six environmental projects spread across South America, Africa and Asia. Among them, the Portel-Para project, located in the municipality of Portel (63,000 inhabitants), in the Brazilian Amazon, in the north of the country, was to make it possible to avoid the emission of “22 million tonnes of CO equivalent₂ ».

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Like the airline, many foreign companies (Boeing, Bayer, Toshiba, Takeda, Samsung, Kingston, etc.) or French companies (Veolia, Havas, Prisma Media, LCL) have supported carbon offsetting projects at Portel (whether of Portel-Para, Rio Anapu-Pacaja or Pacajai), in order to reduce their ecological footprint.

These private initiatives, resulting from the international mechanism of reduction of emissions linked to deforestation and forest degradation (REDD +) created by the United Nations in 2005, were to finance the protection of the forest in Portel. The three projects in Portel were certified by the NGO Verra, the main international carbon credit certification body, located in Washington.

“Fraudulent projects”

Except that in fact, corporate emissions have not been offset. “These projects are fraudulent, assures Nilson Corrêa da Silva, 29, general secretary of the Portel Rural Workers’ Union, which represents nearly 5,000 people. Those who buy these credits believe they are contributing to the fight once morest climate change. But this is not the case: in practice, these projects do not exist. »

In his press release, Air France promised that, thanks to Portel-Para, “the fauna and flora will[aie]not protected » and “jobs will be[aie]nt created through the support of entrepreneurship projects for the creation of a local agroforestry sector”. More “none of this was done”assures M. Corrêa da Silva: “Only ecological cookers, food baskets and T-shirts were distributed » to the local population.

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Already in September 2020, a study published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences had questioned the effect on deforestation of twelve REDD + projects (including the Portel-Para project), in the Brazilian Amazon, between 2008 and 2017. “By comparing the current rate of deforestation to that which would have occurred in the same areas in the absence of carbon offset programs (…), we found that they have very little impact”, explains Andreas Kontoleon, one of the study’s authors and professor of environmental economics and public policy at the University of Cambridge, UK.

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