Carbon mitigation or carbon offsets is a trading mechanism that enables governments, businesses, or individuals to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions by investing in projects that reduce, avoid, or remove emissions elsewhere. When an entity invests in a carbon mitigation program, it receives carbon credits. These credits are then used to account for net climate benefits from one entity to another. A carbon credit can be bought or sold after certification by a government or, more frequently, by an independent certification body. 

Investigation conclusion: However, experts and researchers have recently found that the carbon market, especially the voluntary carbon market, often only benefits the international traders and emitters rather than achieving true carbon emission sequestration, biodiversity protection and local community well-being. This report has found that VCMs have largely been co-opted by verification and certification companies and traders who have spent much of the last 15 years snapping up and enrolling large tracts of land in Africa, with little care for biodiversity protection and local community rights.

These problems have manifested in South Africa too. As this report will show, not only is the carbon trading system unworkable at an institutional/government level, but there are widespread problems with the nature of verifying organisations such as Verra, the world’s largest carbon certification company, where carbon schemes exaggerate or falsely claim the carbon reduction benefits. These are known as junk credits. There is, further, little local community engagement, a broad lack of transparency and cases of ecological destruction.

Thus, in South Africa and throughout Africa, the carbon market is far from being the win-win solution, where entities that emit carbon as well as developers and verification organisations who claim to promote carbon reduction and biodiversity protection projects, are leaving a track record of exploitation, mismanagement and false claims. These cases show that carbon reduction and biodiversity protection schemes are simply a corporate money-making machine that benefits the developed world over a real intervention sequestering global carbon emissions. 

The published report can be found here.

PUBLISHED ARTICLES:
The great carbon market racket — a drive for the commodification of nature where local communities lose out (Daily Maverick)