PUBLISHED
August 31, 2019
Next month, California
regulators will decide whether to support a plan for tropical forest carbon
offsets, a controversial measure that could allow companies like Chevron, which
is headquartered there, to write off some of their greenhouse gas emissions by
paying people in countries like Brazil to preserve trees. The Amazon rainforest
has long been viewed as a natural testing ground for this proposed Tropical Forest Standard,
which, if approved, would likely expand to countries throughout the world.
Now that record fires
are engulfing
the Amazon, started by humans seeking to log, mine and farm on the land,
supporters are using the international emergency to double down on their case
for offsets. The Environmental Defense Fund posted
a petition urging that state officials endorse the standard: “The
people — and wildlife — who call the Amazon home are running for their lives,”
it said. “The entire world is counting on [the board] taking action.” Ivaneide
Bandeira Cardozo, who helped manage a Brazilian offset project that was derailed
by illegal logging, said, “People who are against carbon credits are
not suffering and don’t want to keep the forest standing.”
But the devastating blaze
encapsulates a key weakness of offsets that scientists have been warning about
for the past decade: that they are too vulnerable to political whims and
disasters like wildfires. As a recent ProPublica
investigation noted, if you give corporations a pass to pollute by
saying their emissions are being canceled out somewhere else, you need a way to
guarantee that continues to be the case.
Because carbon dioxide lingers
in the atmosphere for about 100 years, protected forests must remain intact for
a century to offset the pollution; this requirement is written into the
Tropical Forest Standard. That plan can go up in smoke the moment a country
elects a president like Jair Bolsonaro, who took office in Brazil in January
and de-funded environmental agencies, cut back on
enforcement and encouraged the clearing of the Amazon for beef and soy
production. Indigenous communities who live in the Amazon report a
surge of intruders mining and logging on their land.
People have always exploited
the forest illegally, “but in the last few months, it has increased
significantly,” said Camões Boaventura, a federal prosecutor in the Brazilian
state of Pará. Meanwhile, he said, environmental officials are struggling to pay
for the gas they need to drive around enforcing regulations. Gisele Bleggi, a
federal prosecutor in Rondônia, said Bolsonaro didn’t have to change a single
environmental law to encourage deforestation. “Once you stop giving money for
surveillance … the system it protects will collapse.”
One of the biggest sources of
funding for the rainforest, the Amazon Fund, was suspended after Norway and
Germany withdrew support
worth $72 million. The fund has provided more than $1 billion over the past
decade and is contingent on minimizing deforestation, but it doesn’t provide
offsets that allow others to pollute. The countries suspended their payments
amid a recent spike in deforestation and after Bolsonaro interfered with how
the money would be used. In early August, Bolsonaro fired
the head of the space agency after it released data showing rising
deforestation.
The Amazon fires also showcase
a second hurdle in making offsets work: For them to be a valid reflection of
how much pollution is being canceled out, the math needs to be accurate. This
accounting is especially hard to do after wildfires, because they stifle a
forest’s regrowth far more than previously estimated. Scientists are just starting to
understand this impact, which is hard to quantify and has led the Amazon’s
carbon content to be overestimated,
creating the potential to give offsets more credit than they’re worth.
This month, California state
Sen. Bob Wieckowski urged the state’s Air Resources Board to reject the
Tropical Forest Standard because it “risks producing a landslide of false
credits.” His letter referenced ProPublica’s reporting and academic research
that cited the challenges of ensuring credits are real. His letter followed an
earlier one from California lawmakers who cautiously
supported the standard but told the board to exercise “vigorous and
proactive monitoring” to ensure offsets are valid.
Jeff Conant, who directs the
international forests program at the advocacy group Friends of the Earth, said
Brazil absolutely “should receive some money from the global north,” but not as
offsets that give companies a “loophole” to continue emitting carbon. Conant
said the offsets debate has been “a distraction” from what he considers the
real solution: strong regulations and keeping fossil fuels in the ground.
“We’ve been saying for over a decade that we need regulation, we need
demand-side measures, we need to take responsibility for our own consumption up
here in the north,” he said.
Both the Environmental Defense
Fund and Conant support a California assembly bill designed
to ensure the state government doesn’t buy paper, furniture or other
forest products made from deforestation in the tropics. Companies with state
contracts would need to certify that their products didn’t destroy sensitive
ecosystems like the Amazon.
In Brazil, experts widely
credit regulations as the driving force that brought
deforestation to a record low in 2012; then, the federal government
relaxed its stringent rules and enforcement, and it began to creep up, years
before Bolsonaro took office. Brazil is “going backwards in the bigger
picture,” said Matthew Hansen, a satellite and mapping expert at the University
of Maryland. “I think that’s the bigger story.”
The wildfires have worsened
fears that the Amazon is being pushed toward a tipping point where it will turn
into a savanna, with devastating consequences for climate change and ecosystems.
Luiz Aragão, who heads the remote sensing division at Brazil’s space agency,
said 2019 has seen the highest number of fires since 2010, and it’s just the
start of the fire season, which ends in November. He said the human-set fires —
which were almost all started on agricultural or newly cleared land — will
spread into healthy, intact areas of the rainforest, and it will take time to
figure out how much of the forest is burned. There are no reports yet that any
of the offset projects located in the Amazon are on fire.
Many supporters of offsets,
including Cardozo, who runs an indigenous rights organization in Rondônia, also
support more traditional conservation aid like the Amazon Fund, but they say
offsets are necessary because rich countries aren’t willing to provide enough
funding to preserve forests without getting something in return.
As global leaders discussed
the Amazon over the weekend at the G7 meeting and pledged $22 million to
help fight the fires, prosecutors in Brazil are eyeing measures they can take
even in the face of a hostile presidential administration. Boaventura, who
works for the Public Ministry, a powerful independent federal agency, said his
team is investigating the role that Bolsonaro and national environmental
agencies have had on increasing deforestation and fires.
“Once this link is proven, we
want to hold the agencies and authorities that justified this destructive
action against society accountable,” Boaventura said.
Lisa Song is a reporter covering
the environment, energy and climate change at ProPublica.
No comments:
Post a Comment