Tag: Article News Analysis

As with any bureaucratic process, submitting the INDCs (Intended Nationally-Determined Contributions  ) to the UN has been tied up in delays, extensions and some fudging. But earlier this week, the World Resources Institute launched the CAIT Paris Contributions Map to translate the submissions from wonkspeak into plain language, and also to map them in a way that will help us all keep score.

This story has been adapted from a WRI blog post by Jenna Blumenthal, Mengpin Ge, Johannes Friedrich and Thomas Damassa. Click here to view the original. This article was also posted on the AnthropoZine.

27 March 2015 | Earlier this week, the World Resources Institute (WRI) launched its CAIT Paris Contributions Map, a new tool on the CAIT Climate Data Explorer for tracking and analyzing intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs), which are the national climate action plans that will form the basis of a new international climate change agreement, set to be finalized during a high-level climate summit in Paris in December (COP 21).

Countries are supposed to submit their plans to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) by the end of March, with an automatic extension to mid-year for those unable to meet the deadline. To shine a light on the process, WRI will be watching the UNFCCC web site for new INDCs and then translating the mitigation-related elements of country plans into a uniform format on the map, making it easy for users to explore what information countries have submitted, how countries’ plans compare to one another and where more information can be helpful.

Try out the tool below or open it in a new window

Analyzing the Current INDCs

Only Switzerland and the European Union (EU) have released their INDCs thus far. Other major economies are expected to announce their INDCs by the end of the month. Already, some initial findings are emerging:

Switzerland plans to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and has additional emissions-reduction goals in 2025 and 2050. Its contribution is quite transparent in detailing how the country plans to achieve its 2030 target. For example, it specifies that the country will use credits from international market mechanisms, such as offsets, and how it seeks to avoid“double counting” reductions inside and outside its borders. It also generally describes how the country’s contribution can be considered fair and ambitious in the global effort to limit Earth’s overall temperature rise to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) compared to pre-industrial levels, thus preventing some of the worst impacts of climate change.

Likewise, the EU transparently addresses many critical aspects for how it will achieve its goal of reducing its emissions at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. The contribution provides a list of the sectors and gases covered, and includes methodologies for estimating emissions.

However, a few key elements of the EU INDC could use more detail. In particular, further clarity on assumed accounting approaches for emissions and reductions from the land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector would strengthen the contribution. This lack of transparency can have implications for interpreting the contribution’s expected outcomes. For example, there is a debate as to whether including LULUCF in the 2030 target—and counting carbon sequestration—could make it easier for other sectors, such as buildings and transport, to make less serious cuts in their emissions.

Transparency Matters

INDCs are the primary mechanism for governments to communicate their climate plans to the rest of the world prior to the Paris summit. What countries put in them–and whether or not they follow through on their plans–has implications for us all. The ability to clearly understand countries’ INDCs and what they mean for future emissions and climate impacts is critical for ensuring success.

The interactive map creates transparency around these INDCs, which can help:

• Build trust and accountability among countries. Governments and other stakeholders can see what other countries hope to achieve with their INDCs.

• Encourage others to track and build momentum in the run-up to Paris. Transparent INDCs are likely to inform and influence what other countries submit. As INDCs are announced, some countries may become inspired to mirror approaches that others propose.

• Assess ambition. Once more countries—particularly large emitters like the United States, China and India—submit their contributions, analysts can use information from the map to assess whether collective reductions are sufficient to limit global average temperature rise to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F).

In the weeks and months to come, we will continuously update the CAIT Paris Contributions Map so it can serve as the go-to place for learning about countries’ mitigation contributions. In the meantime, users can explore the CAIT Pre-2020 Pledges Map, which profiles mitigation pledges that countries submitted to the UNFCCC in 2009 and 2010 and are working to implement through 2020.

A new Ecosystem Marketplace report set out to determine how carbon offsetting fits into corporate carbon strategies and found that 14% of businesses disclosing climate change information purchased offsets. Among many significant findings, the report dispels the myth that companies buying carbon offsets do so to avoid making climate commitments.

This article was originally posted in the V-Carbon newsletter. Click here to read the original.

March 26 2015 | What do automaker General Motors, bank Barclays, cosmetics company Natura Cosméticos, and retailer Marks & Spencer have in common? They’re all leading voluntary buyers of carbon offsets, investing in emissions reductions projects outside of their immediate operations.

Fourteen percent of all companies publicly disclosing climate change information to CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) purchased offsets in 2013 and 2014, according to a new report by Ecosystem Marketplace. The Bottom Line: Taking Stock of the Role of Offsets in Corporate Carbon Strategies looked at data from 1,882 corporate climate disclosures to better understand the prevalence of offsetting and how it fits into companies’ overall carbon management strategies.

The results dispel the misguided myth that offsetting is a way for companies to dodge climate commitments. In fact, offset buyers tracked by CDP spent $41 billion in 2013 on emissions reductions other than offsetting, undertaking all of these carbon-saving initiatives – from energy efficiency in buildings to employee engagement programs – at a higher rate compared to companies that didn’t purchase offsets. The typical offset buyer slashed almost 17% of their Scope 1 (direct) emissions while non-offset buyers reduced Scope 1 emissions by less than 5% in the same year.

“There’s a common misperception that offsetting is a way for companies to ‘buy their way out of the problem,'” said Allie Goldstein, Senior Carbon Associate at Ecosystem Marketplace and the author of the report. “But when you dig into the CDP data, it’s clear that offset buyers are actually just using more tools at their disposal to reduce emissions, and they’re investing in these activities at a higher rate compared to companies that don’t offset.”

Offset buyers have disproportionately large Scope 3 (indirect) emissions, the report finds, and offset purchases may be a way to address “upstream” supply chain emissions and “downstream” product use emissions that are difficult to get at in other ways. Customers’ use of sold products – encompassing everything from burning gas to operating computers to refrigerating food products to even using inhalers – accounts for more than 70% of Scope 3 emissions, according to CDP disclosures.

To fund emissions reductions projects, many companies – such as Japanese camera-maker Canon – have dedicated budgets for their offset portfolios. Forty-five offset buyers – including Microsoft, The Walt Disney Company, TD Bank, Aviva, and Barclays – have set an internal price on carbon, charging their business divisions according to their respective emissions. Offset buyers are five times as likely as non-offset buyers to use an internal price on carbon to drive emissions reductions within their company.

On average, offset buyers are also more concerned about regulatory and reputational risk. Nedbank, the first carbon neutral bank in Africa and an investor in Africa-based avoided deforestation offsets, reports that “climate change ignorance will translate into reduced shareholder value.”

A similar set of motivations may be driving the hundreds of companies that have committed to eliminate tropical deforestation from their supply chains. Join us this Wednesday, March 25th for the launch of Supply-Change.Org, which documents companies’ public pledges to source palm oil, soy, cattle, and timber & pulp without chopping the world’s remaining rainforests. Supply-Change is convened by Forest Trends, with Ecosystem Marketplace, CDP and WWF as strategic partners. The webinar launch event will include speakers from all three organizations as well as representatives from Marks & Spencer, Calvert Investments, and others.

More news from the voluntary carbon markets is summarized below, so keep reading!

—The Editors

Supporting Subscribers request

If you value what you read in this news brief, consider supporting Ecosystem Marketplace’s Carbon Program as a Supporting Subscriber. Readers’ contributions help us keep the lights on and continue to deliver voluntary carbon market news and insights to your inbox biweekly and free of charge. For a suggested US$150/year donation, you or your company can be listed as a V-Carbon News Supporting Subscriber (with weblink) for one year (~24 issues). Reach out to inboxes worldwide and make your contribution here (select “Support for Voluntary Carbon News Briefs” in the drop-down menu).

For comments or questions, please email: [email protected]

Additional resources

25 March 2015 | The earth loses more than 6 million hectares of tropical rainforest – an area the size of Sri Lanka – every year, and two-thirds of it goes to meet demand for palm oil, soybeans, beef, and wood products, according to environmental NGO Forest Trends. At the same time, new Forest Trends research finds that companies worth nearly US$4 trillion have promised to reverse their role in degrading the world’s critical ecosystems. At least one third of these new pledges were made in 2014, nearly doubling 2013’s announcements.

These private sector actions are encouraging, but how realistic are the promises? How many of these promises are being kept? What challenges are businesses encountering?

To answer that, Forest Trends’ new platform Supply-Change.org lets users track the actions that companies are reporting against the promises they’ve made – in near – real time. Initial findings are summarized in “Supply Change: Corporations, Commodities, and Commitments that Count”, an easy-to-read, 32-page report based on the project’s current inventory of over 300 unique commitments – about one-third of which are targeted for achievement this year – from almost as many companies.

Mining Supply-Change.Org’s growing dataset, the report finds that well over half of forest-risk commodity commitments are tracked from companies in the food and beverage industry. The data also shows that corporate leadership has a multiplier effect: one commitment from a major retailer (think Walmart or Marks and Spencer) spurs another three commitments from their suppliers upstream.

The project, launched by the Forest Trends initiative Ecosystem Marketplace in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), combines Forest Trends’ environmental markets expertise with WWF’s experience in supply-chain sustainability and CDP’s global collection of corporate environmental data.

“Transparency through public disclosure is a valuable tool for the world to gauge the corporate community’s progress in eradicating deforestation from key agricultural inputs,” says Michael Jenkins, Forest Trends Founding President and CEO. “These new relationships that underlie Supply Change harness the strength of our complementary skills to provide investors and other decision-makers with free access to information that will accelerate the transition to a zero deforestation economy.”

“We are seeing increasing awareness of the impact on businesses of deforestation risk and recently a growing trend for commitments to combat this. We are delighted that this new initiative further underlines the need for consistent corporate disclosure to CDP on the impacts of deforestation,” says CDP’s chief executive officer Paul Simpson.

“We believe that consumers should only have sustainable choices. To accomplish this, we need to completely rethink the way products are made, from the bottom up,” says Jason Clay, senior vice president of markets at WWF. “Corporate supply chain commitments send an unmistakable signal: ‘If you want to work with our company, the environment must be top-of-mind.’ Large corporations have the greatest leverage to shift whole industries, which is why supply chain commitments are so critical to our evolution to a market place full of sustainable choices.”

The Supply Change web platform (www.supply-change.org), including pilot company profiles and an initial findings report –Supply Change: Corporations, Commodities, and Commitments that Count – will be publicly launched on March 25, 2015.

Supply Change is powered by CDP and WWF data and insights; and financially supported by the Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA), Earth Innovation Institute, Global Environment Facility, JPMorgan Chase & Co., the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, and the World Bank’s Program on Forests.

Additional resources

2 April 2015 | King Arthur is supposed to have invented it, and he and his Knights are believed to have congregated around it: the table that has no head so that everybody at the table has equal status – the Roundtable.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and Roundtables are springing up like mushrooms – particularly in the world of sustainability, where we have the Roundtable for Responsible Palm Oil (RSPO), the Roundtable for Responsible Soy, the Global Roundtable on Sustainable Beef (GRSB), the Better Sugar Cane Initiative (Bonsucro), the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels, and the Better Cotton Initiative – to name just a few. They’ve been in existence for nearly a decade, and are designed to forge consensus on how to more sustainably harvest some of the planet’s most environmentally destructive but economically lucrative crops.

Their track record is mixed, and critics argue that the standards they set are “low and ambiguous”, not binding, and that market transformation becomes too industry-friendly or, in the case of Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil, are not even worthy of being called “sustainable”  as they do not effectively protect secondary areas and peat swamps from the risk of deforestation.

Even those creating the standards will admit that they present the bare minimum of what is necessary, but producers – both smallholders and large-scale producers – hold the view that the requirements are too tough.

Still, the RSPO gained credibility as a self-regulatory organization earlier this month when it disciplined over 100 members who failed to submit an annual report. Fifteen of them were expelled immediately because they hadn’t submitted reports for three years or more, and 62 others were given 30-day warnings for going two years without filing.

“We hope that this is a sign that the RSPO and its membership are now taking seriously not only the need to report progress but also to show progress” said Adam Harrison, WWF’s lead on palm oil. “The duty to continuously improve performance is central to the founding vision of the RSPO, and this applies not only to the organization as a whole but more importantly to its individual members.”

He added, however, that only 57 of the 119 registered growers in the RSPO have any certified mills.

“That leaves more than half of them making no progress on their commitments,” he said. ”Additionally, only a little over two-thirds of the 1500 RSPO supply chain member companies are currently certified to actually use CSPO.”

The Roundtable Concept

At the root of these Roundtables lies the recognition that with global population said to be approaching 9 billion by 2050, the demand for food, fuel, feed, and fiber is continuously and relentlessly increasing – and with it the need to ensure these resources remain available in the future.

Since these resources are used by 7 billion consumers and produced by 1.4 billion producers, influencing the sustainable production is no small feat. Enter the commodity roundtables which, instead, target those companies that control a significant portion of the commodities demand trade, leveraging almost half of the production. To streamline this process even further, the idea was born to convene groups as a platform for convening different stakeholders – producers, processors/traders, manufacturers, retailers, bankers/investors, members of civil society to develop and implement standards for the sustainable production of their respective commodities – around the concept of sustainable commodity production.

Beyond this common goal, the work of the various roundtables differs considerably.

Different Approaches

Some of these efforts, such as the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, limit their goals to facilitating “a global dialogue to advance continuous improvement in the sustainability of the global beef value chain.” Others, such as the Roundtable for Responsible Palm Oil and the Round Table on Responsible Soy, include development of standards for responsible production of their respective commodities; they also develop a certification system that indicates which products were sustainably produced and work to build the market for these commodities.

To comply with the standard the Roundtable on Responsible Soy, for example, producers must not covert areas with high conservation value for production purposes, they also must use the best management practices, ensure fair working conditions, and respect land tenure claims;. Whether or not producers adhere to these standards is verified by third-party auditors; and Chain-of-Custody Standards allow for the verification that products in the marketplace really do contain responsibly-produced soy.

The Role of the Consumer – The  Missing Link? Or the Weak Link?

Some have argued that the multi-stakeholder model is not “multi” enough, that having civil society at the table will not create the pressure that is needed to create standards that truly bring about sustainability.

Others, including Darrel Webber, Secretary General of the RSPO, argue that, with a few exceptions, uptake of certified products by consumers has been too slow and has not been creating the additional pressure needed from that end of the spectrum to speed up the sluggish pace of change.

Regardless of who is right, both sides seem to agree on the fact that the consumer plays a critical role in all of this – a notion that seems to be underpinned by the fact that those companies that most recently made drastic changes/commitments to sustainability in their supply chain are consumer goods companies.

A Strategic Approach to Sustainable Supply Chains

Anne Thiel is the Communications Coordinator for Forest Trends. Prior to joining Forest Trends, she worked at the World Resources Institute as executive assistant, development coordinator, and project management associate. She can be reached at [email protected].

24 March 2015 | When the Tolo River People of Colombia wanted to save their forest, they used a financing mechanism known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) to fund their conservation by generating carbon offsets for the carbon sequestered in their trees. When the rubber tappers of the Rio Preto Extractivist Reserve (Reserva Extrativista Rio Preto) wanted to stave off deforestation in the Jacundí¡ National Park (Floresta Nacional de Jacundí¡), they also tapped the carbon markets – and they soon hope to join roughly 40 other community-based forest carbon projects identified in the latest State of the Forest Carbon Markets report, which found hundreds of projects globally, covering enough forests to fill the entire country of Vietnam.

REDD is a massive conservation success – arguably the biggest of all time; but it’s nowhere near big enough to halt the soaring greenhouse-gas emissions from deforestation. To really fix the mess, we must attack both demand and supply: we must, in other words, stifle our own ravenous appetite for consumer goods that drive deforestation, and we must create an environment on the ground to ensure that commodities are harvested legally and sustainably.

REDD has proven effective on the supply front, but can it be scaled up? And if so, what aspects of “project-based” REDD can work at the “jurisdictional” – or statewide level?

The Limits of Project-Based REDD

Isolated REDD projects have been used to rescue endangered patches of forestat around the world, but often the loggers and cattlemen who are denied access in one location simply move down the road – an activity that carbon accountants call “leakage”. Project developers do account for it, and in theory they subtract the leakage from their total offsets, but the only way to eliminate leakage is to spread carbon accounting and control across entire jurisdictions.

“That’s how it was always supposed to be,” says Dan Nepstad, Executive Director and Senior Scientist at the Earth Innovation Institute. “No one ever wanted all these scattered, isolated projects dotting the forest, and even in the 1990s, it was a given that we needed jurisdictional programs to have a real impact.”

Jurisdictional REDD: A Dream Deferred

REDD was on the United Nations agenda as early as the First Conference of the Parties (COP 1) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Berlin in 1995, but it had a different name: Avoided Deforestation, or “AD”.

The premise, however, wasn’t much different than it is now: Governments would first measure their historic rates of deforestation across their entire jurisdiction, then they’d negotiate agreement on which actions impact it, and they’d come up with a way to pay for reduced deforestation across the entire jurisdiction, with individual projects “nesting” within those jurisdictions to test new methods that work and reward early action.

The basic science was already there too, because timber companies and foresters had been using allometric equations to estimate the amount of wood in a forest for decades, and it wasn’t a big leap to extrapolate the amount of carbon. The fuzzy part, scientifically, was calculating the “carbon flows” over time and determining reference levels for deforestation and then figuring out which actions could be rewarded for changing it. Socially, there were fears that sudden flows of money into the forest would accelerate rather than counter the land-grabs that were pushing indigenous people aside, or that indigenous people would be frozen out of traditional hunting grounds while cattlemen continued to chop forests at will.

To say there were loose ends is an understatement, but climate talks were there to tie them up. Yet, when the Kyoto Protocol emerged from COP 3 in Kyoto, Japan in 1997, REDD was off the UN table and relegated to voluntary markets, where it continued to evolve under real-world conditions. Over the next 15 years, carbon accounting proved to be incredibly robust, and standards like those developed under the Climate, Community & Biodiversity Alliance emerged to ensure indigenous rights. At the same time, forest communities that embraced REDD found themselves able to earn income from their stewardship of the land.

As a result, and in response to calls for pilot initiatives, individual projects proliferated – with valuable patches of forest, often at the frontiers of deforestation, being saved as swathes were being destroyed to make way for palm-oil plantations and cattle grazing.

The Return of Jurisdictional REDD

Within the UNFCCC, REDD stayed on ice until Papua New Guinea wrangled it back onto the agenda at the 2005 Climate Talks in Montreal (COP 11) – but even then, talks languished. In 2010, REDD was the sole bright spot in the otherwise dismal Copenhagen Accord, and by 2011, governments around the world were harvesting the lessons of the voluntary carbon markets to launch jurisdictional REDD initiatives which allowed for individual nested projects within them – a process that’s relatively easy from a carbon-accounting perspective.

“When we talk about setting an integrated approach for REDD+ for the Amazon states that is nested at the national level, it might seem difficult, but it’s actually much simpler than trying to set the baseline for a project or smaller area,” says Pedro Soares, Climate Change Program Coordinator for Manaus-based NGO Instituto de Conservaçí£o e Desenvolvimento Sustentí¡vel do Amazonas (IDESAM), which was recently hired by the Brazilian state of Rondí´nia to help it advance a jurisdictional REDD program there.

The UNFCCC and World Bank, however, steered clear of anything involving offsets and drifted towards purely jurisdictional approaches that left individual projects in the lurch.

Then, at the 2013 climate talks in Warsaw, the UNFCCC finally agreed on a REDD Rulebook for jurisdictional REDD that had substantially less rigor than that of voluntary markets, opening the door to a renewed interest in nesting. Also in Warsaw, the US, UK, and Norway launched a financing mechanism for jurisdictional REDD initiatives that support commodity-certification programs.

For more on nested REDD, read Peruvians Hope Nested Approach Today Will Halt Deforestation Tomorrow

For more on Acre’s jurisdictional REDD program, read Acre and Goliath: One Brazilian State Struggles To End Deforestation

For more on the interplay between palm oil and forest carbon, read How A Primatologist, An Industrialist, And An Ecosystem Entrepreneur Took On Big Palm Oil And Won

Since then, nesting has come back, at least in theory. The Indonesian government, for example, said last year it was exploring the possibility of acting as a buyer of last resort for REDD offsets, which it may aggregate and sell them on the market with a state guarantee, although that program is on hold as the country restructures its REDD regime.

Brazilian States Move Forward

Back in Brazil, Rondí´nia’s neighbor, Mato Grosso, has slashed its deforestation rates 90% and created the country’s most advanced regime for keeping track of REDD payments.

By far the most innovative, however, is Acre, which has completely reinvented the jurisdictional REDD concept, with a comprehensive program that is involving indigenous people across the state. Today, nearly 90 percent of Acre’s forest cover remains intact, thanks to its innovative approaches to forest management. But success moving forward for Acre will mean diminishing its dependence on an ever-expanding beef industry.

According to a 2012 study, more than 80 percent of Acre’s deforestation is driven by the beef and dairy sectors, and these industries aren’t going away. Beef and ranching alone supply 92 percent of the state’s total export revenues, and they are expected to grow even further in the years to come thanks to efforts to intensify activities on the existing land footprint.

But Acre also became the first Brazilian state to fully implement a management plan – which divided the entire land base into geographical zones that restrict specific extractive activities; at the same time the state government supported the growth of natural rubber, furniture, flooring, and Brazil nut processing industries.

A number of forces pushed Acre into action. As reported in Ecosystem Marketplace, the 1980s saw marginalized rubber tapper communities losing their lands to ranchers and logging interests, but forest leader Chico Mendes pushed for the establishment of reserves to maintain the forest economy. His actions cost him his life in 1988, but in his absence, a movement lives on in his name.

REDD and PES

Acre is conducting a massive experiment in jurisdictional REDD – one through which the state receives payments for reducing deforestation across its entire jurisdiction, but then distributes the money as payments for other ecosystem services – such as river maintenance – or simply to support sustainable land-use practices once common among indigenous people.

Driving it is the 2010 SISA (Sistema de Incentivos para Servicos Ambientais) legislation, which established the foundation for financing the maintenance and restoration of environmental services across the state, including a framework to establish linkages with emerging markets for environmental ecosystem services. This framework means indigenous people, rubber tappers, and small farmers can earn Payments for Environmental Services (PES) by practicing sustainable agriculture and protecting endangered rainforest. For indigenous people, SISA explicitly aims to support traditional methods of farming and forest management that have proven to be more suitable for the rainforest than are the western methods brought by the newcomers.

In 2012, the German REDD Early Movers Programme (REM) made in its first transaction – paying cash to “retire emission reductions” from avoided deforestation in Acre. Commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and implemented by the KfW Development Bank and the Gesellschaft fí¼r Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), the REM program promotes forest conservation and is designed to strengthen performance-based payments for demonstrated emission reductions – providing “bridging finance” for countries engaged in mitigating climate change.

A REDD Financing Solution for Pristine Igarapé Lourdes?

What makes the concept of PES so promising is that it provides a potential, albeit less lucrative avenue to bring funding into an indigenous territory where the people have been good stewards to the land. Take the Igarapé Lourdes territory in Rondí´nia, where the prospects of earning carbon offsets are murky given that there is little actual deforestation, but where indigenous people have a proven history of maintaining the forest. Prior to the November election, Rondí´nia ‘s State Secretary of Environment launched a series of meetings in four separate municipalities to introduce the concepts of climate change, REDD+, and the potential to implement state-level regulations for REDD+.

“The former governor of Rondí´nia was re-elected in November, which is really good for REDD and climate issues, because he supported the Surui project,” says Pedro Soares.

It’s still early days for jurisdictional REDD across the rest of the Amazon states of Brazil. The first step will be to figure out how to establish, for each state, a baseline and a benefit-sharing mechanism and monitoring strategy that will fit under the national requirements.

“Under a state level law, the Igarapé Lourdes is going to receive a certain amount of credits by their forest area, and by their forest area condition,” says Pedro Soares.

What that means here is that they may not have significant deforestation pressure, but they will be able to secure some REDD funding to develop their life plan, the roadmap from which their forest-sustaining economy of the future can begin.

“How we can push money into the indigenous areas, and how can we how we lead this to the market, and how will it be applied?” asks Soares. “These are the questions we are most concerned about.”

Discussions about implementing jurisdictional REDD at the state level in Brazil could lead to something much bigger. A plan currently exists, led by NGOs like IDESAM, to implement a “jurisdictional” REDD system across the entire Brazilian Amazon, with a vision to eventually nest both individual REDD projects and state-level REDD within the Brazilian national government’s Brazil’s National Climate Change Plan, which is part of a national policy that established official Amazon deforestation targets of 80 percent by 2020. The ultimate goal is to create an integrated approach for REDD+ for the Amazon states that is nested at the national level.

Additional resources

15 April March 2015 | When you think of clean cookstoves, Marks and Spencer (M&S) is not the first name that comes to mind. And yet the UK-based retailer is the first in its sector to commit to increase the focus on clean cooking with the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, building off its positive experience with a UNICEF-developed improved cookstove project in Bangladesh.

This commitment to clean cookstoves is the latest offshoot of the company’s sustainability plan, known as Plan A. The company launched Plan A in January 2007, establishing 100 commitments to achieve in five years, including a carbon neutrality goal. The plan has since been updated to Plan A 2020, with the company setting a goal of becoming the world’s most sustainable retailer.

“Climate change is a big issue for business, especially retail that relies in raw materials being available to sell,” said Carmel McQuaid, head of sustainable business, Plan A at M&S. “There was always a focal point on how to become carbon neutral.”

The retailer began implementing its Plan A goals by looking for opportunities to lower emissions within its own operations, such as energy efficiency improvements and the use of renewable energy. Efficiency improvements alone – including in stores and across its fleet of trucks – account for reductions of around 16,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year in the company’s UK and Ireland operations, according to the firm’s website. The company’s gross global CO2 emissions for 2013 were 566,000 tonnes, according to its Plan A report 2014.

By 2012, McQuaid said progress was evident. “But there’s only so far energy efficiency and renewable energy can go to deliver reductions in the timeframe science indicates is required,” she added.

The firm turned to the voluntary carbon offset market to help meet its carbon neutrality target, working with The CarbonNeutral Company – and in the process, becoming the fifth-largest voluntary buyer of offsets, according to a new Ecosystem Marketplace report that analyzes CDP data.

M&S has purchased carbon offsets from the Kasigau Sustainable Farming project in Kenya developed according to a Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) methodology, the VCS Sabah rainforest rehabilitation project in Borneo and a VCS waste-to-energy project in Wuhe, China, among others.

“Ideally, we would have wanted to buy from projects closely related to our business, but there’s not a lot [of offsets] in the market via supply chains,” McQuaid said.

Once M&S signed the contract to work with The CarbonNeutral Company, the retailer said it was also keen to work with an NGO partner to find ways of making the carbon finance go further and bring more benefits to the communities, she said.

“M&S asked its NGO partners if they had any interest in carbon finance to extend their programs, and UNICEF stuck its hand up,” said Rebecca Fay, London-based global marketing director for The CarbonNeutral Company. The NGO presented a couple of clean cookstove projects, and the Bangladesh one was deemed “the best fit, in terms of what was already in place to get the project developed and its alignment with M&S’s business,” she said.

Over the next 12-18 months, the three organizations worked closely together, with UNICEF new to the carbon finance sector and M&S new to clean cookstoves. This learning process was a real eye-opener for M&S, McQuaid said.

“Because we worked so closely with them [UNICEF], we really realized the benefits of [improved] cookstoves that, if someone had just walked in with a marketing brochure, we wouldn’t have realized,” she added. Improved cookstoves use less fuel wood than traditional stoves, reducing the risk of pollution-related ailments and lessening the need for woman to embark on often-dangerous trips in search of fuel.

The investment by M&S allowed the project to get off the ground and enabled the first 40,000 stoves to be installed – a process completed by November 2014 – and the first verification under the Gold Standard is imminent, Fay said.

Beyond this initial investment, however, M&S officials want to raise awareness of the sector among other corporates so officials decided to join the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves rather than duplicate its outreach efforts. Its commitment, announced at the Alliance’s inaugural Commitment Roundtable, as part of its Cookstoves Future Summit in November in New York, comprises three parts: to work with its suppliers to understand how employees of M&S suppliers of products such as textiles, coffee and food currently use cookstoves; to promote the UNICEF project; and to work with the UK government’s Department for International Development to raise awareness and share its experiences.

The retailer started working on these pledges even before the November summit. Together with The CarbonNeutral Company, M&S organized a roundtable in April 2014 – which included a BBQ using cookstoves – with executives from about 15 firms to showcase the Bangladesh project and encourage others to get involved.

M&S is also working with the Alliance to increase the uptake of clean cookstoves, particularly in its key supply chain countries of Kenya, Uganda and Ghana. By working with its suppliers, the firm wants to identify the barriers to clean cooking, including cost, awareness and education. While the company is open to participating in the development of more cookstove projects, the focus is on recognizing these barriers and determining who can best intervene, McQuaid said.

“If we can align it with our supply chain, that’s also good,” she said.

Katie Kouchakji is a freelance journalist covering the carbon markets based in the United Kingdom.

Additional resources

21 March 2014 | The Colorado utility Denver Water delivers clean drinking water to 1.3 million people spread across more than 335 square miles, and most of that water comes from rivers and reservoirs that capture run-off from forest-covered hills in clearly-delineated watersheds. The forests both protect the steep slopes from erosion and regulate the flows of water by mopping it up and then releasing it slowly over time.

But climate change has extended summers in Colorado just enough to give the northern pine beetle the comfort it needs to multiply like never before. The bug has taken full advantage – devouring bark at a rate ten times higher than ever recorded, killing trees and leaving them scattered like kindling for wildfires.

And those fires now take hold with increasing frequency, reducing the forest to lumps of silt and sludge. Lush slopes degenerate into unstable masses of goo. The water upon which the city depends becomes muddy and irregular, which makes it more difficult – and expensive – to assure people they can turn on their faucets and trust the drinking water that comes out.

Enter the US Forest Service (USFS), which is charged, in part, with ensuring clean headwaters by maintaining healthy forests.

Both the USFS and Denver Water are struggling to meet their budgets in the face of these challenges, so in August of 2010 the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain office cut a $33 million deal with the Denver utility to proactively manage 38,000 critical acres in five key watersheds – if Denver Water comes up with half the money.

Denver Water took the offer, despite – or perhaps because of – its own struggles with a slew of disaster-related expenses, including a $26 million bill to remove silt and mud from a reservoir in just one wildfire-damaged watershed.

Convinced that spending money now will save money in the long run, the utility agreed to finance the removal of dead trees in sensitive areas among other activities that will halt the beetle’s massive tree-eating ventures by implementing water fees that will amount to about $27 dollars per household over the next five years.

Five years on, the project is operating under budget, and it’s expanded in both scope and ambition, says program manager Don Kennedy.

More Coverage, Less Cost, and a New Partner

The initial objective of 38,000 acres has since risen to 46,000, but the program only spent $14.5 million – versus the allocated $16.5 million – on the necessary fuel treatments (mechanical underbrush removal to lessen the intensity of fire), restoration and prescribed burning.

With the extra funds, the program was able to partner with the Colorado State Forest Service, a longtime partner of Denver Water, along with the Coalition for the Upper South Platte, a nonprofit conservation organization. The extra partnership meant additional treatment in sensitive areas that further protect the region’s water supply.

And for the most part, it appears residents understand that protecting this water supply means a slight increase in their water bill. Out of 1.3 million people Denver Water serves, Kennedy says he only got one call from a customer. And he was just asking for more information regarding the costs. “We’ve been actively informing our customers about our relationship with the USFS and the work that we’ve been doing,” Kennedy says.

Payments for Ecosystem Services

This type of targeted spending is typical of Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs, which aim to finance the preservation of nature by recognizing the economic value of nature’s services, and then convincing beneficiaries of those services to pay those who deliver them. Such mechanisms offer more transparency and accountability than do normal governmental structures – a key selling point in any economic climate.

In this case, the ecosystems are the watersheds being protected, and the ecosystem service is the provision of water. More specifically, Denver Water’s program is an investments in watershed services (IWS) scheme or investments in nature-based solutions.

The city of New York runs one of the best-knows IWS programs, which involves payments to rural landowners in the Catskill Mountains. This program has saved the city an estimated $10 billion since its inception in the 1990s.

Opportunity for Rural Poor

Water utilities in developing-world cities like Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, have investigated the use of IWS schemes to preserve their water flow, while Latin American cities like Heredia in Costa Rica and Saltillo in Mexico have implemented successful programs that pay small-scale farmers to maintain the watershed. The result is clean, reliable water at a fraction of what it would cost to develop modern filtration facilities.

Embracing the Natural Way

In 2010, when the From Forests to Faucets partnership was launching, Ecosystem Marketplace published a report documenting nearly 300 of these types of programs occurring all over the world that amounted to $10 billion in transactions in 2008 alone. Three years later, investments in nature-based solutions such as the From Forests to Faucets program has amounted to over $12 billion globally.

Spreading the Word

These programs have attracted interest from other places struggling with similar water challenges. The From Forests to Faucets program has influenced several other such partnerships with the USFS in Colorado. These include a program with Aurora Water – a major provider in Colorado’s Front Range region – and one for the Big Thompson reservoir that encompasses not only forest and watershed health but also maintaining hydropower facilities.

The From Forests to Faucet program’s reach has even extended outside the state. Kennedy mentioned other municipalities within the US West have reached out to him. Santa Ana, the densely populated California city, consulted with Kennedy and is seriously considering a partnership with the USFS along the same line as Denver’s. Kennedy also met with representatives from the Salt River Project, Phoenix’s water and electric power utility. The entity has since launched a partnership with the National Forest Foundation-the nonprofit arm of the USFS-that funds watershed-restoration activities through donations from water users.

Kennedy says the Forests to Faucets IWS model is adaptable to regions outside of the US as well although differences in ecosystems would, of course, have to be factored in.

Making IWS Work

For IWS schemes to work anywhere, buyers have to understand what they’re paying for, and sellers have to understand what they’re delivering. That’s not always easy when the area being protected – whether a forest or a wetland – is hundreds of miles away from the city receiving the water.

“The concept of a ‘protection forest’ is nothing new, really,” says University of Massachusetts Professor Paul Barten. “The first written record of a community establishing something like this dates from 1342 in Switzerland, but back then the source of the water was closer to the users, so you didn’t need these kind of financing schemes.”

Both the Mexican and Costa Rican programs employed clever marketing to raise awareness, and Denver is no different. The name “From Forests to Faucets” borrows the name of a joint USFS/University of Massachusetts research project that Barten helped spearhead in the Northeast a decade ago.

“We came up with the name to make the connection,” says Barten. “We found that the larger the municipality, the more distant the supply of water – and the greater the tendency for it to remain out of sight and out of mind.”

And that lack of awareness cannot continue – especially in light of current demographics.

“We have twice as much forest in the Northeast as we did when the Forest Service was founded,” he says. “But we have three times as many people – and they consume ten times as much water.”

Another Five Years?

As for the From Forests to Faucets Partnership, there is no end in sight. While its future-in terms of finance-lies in the hands of Denver Water’s board, Kennedy thinks the program will continue to have funding because it makes sense. There’s still much to be done; primary objectives for the next few years include addressing the zones of concern that are at high risk of catastrophic wildfire and assessing more USFS land that may be beneficial to Denver Water.

And there’s always maintenance. “It’s like mowing your lawn,” Kennedy says. “You mow the lawn and then you have to trim bushes and so on. You’re never really done.” The thinning treatments and restoration work are effective for a period but they need to be followed-up on and maintained.

So it will always be something of a work in progress. But Kennedy is more than pleased with the program’s first five years. “It’s exciting because it’s almost all been really positive,” he says. “How often can you say that?”

The four-year-old government of Myanmar came in with a big promise to boost the economy, in part by ramping up agricultural production. But so far, all it’s ramped up is deforestation – destroying some of the most biodiverse land in the world, and then not even planting the farms it had planned to develop.

20 March 2015 | When Myanmar President U Thein Sein took office in March 2011, he had big plans for economic reforms. In particular, the new government wanted to promote industrial agricultural development to attract both domestic and foreign investment and to help boost the country’s economy.

Between 2010 and 2013, the land areas awarded for agriculture purposes increased at an unprecedented rate – 170 percent – and this number is likely a conservative one, as it includes only areas allocated by the central government, and not those “provincial, military, and/or non-state authorities” might have given away. To most, it seemed like the old story of short-term economic gain trumping long-term environmental – and economic – stability.

Recent research by Ecosystem Marketplace publisher Forest Trends, however, casts doubt on the efficacy of these efforts. A new report, Commercial Agricultural Expansion in Myanmar, released last week, is the first of its kind to investigate the various ramifications of these shifts in land use in the country. As it turns out, they are backfiring – on more than one level – and it is local forests and the people that live in them and depend on them that are being hit the hardest.

For one, the land that has to be made available for agricultural development is not coming from nowhere. It is coming from the clearing of forest lands – of which each year the country is now losing about 1.15 million acres. And not just any type of forest, but “some of Southeast Asia’s last remaining High Conservation Value Forests.” These are forests that are home to house a large variety of fauna and flora – things on which it is hard to put a dollar value – as opposed to the logged timber on which you certainly can, as trade statistics show: timber exports increased from 2.7 to over 3.3 million m3 in just two years (between 2011 and 2013) and the value of these exports rose from $US 1 billion to $US 1.6 billion.

Whether or not the agriculture sector is growing at the same rate as timber exports is unclear – and actually doubtful. As it turns out, of all the land the government is allocating for industrial agriculture, only a quarter was actually planted with agricultural crops. The Forest Trends report takes a particularly close look at two areas, Kachin State and Tanintharyi region, where plantings are especially low (12 and 19 percent respectively), to investigate the underlying dynamics of this phenomenon.

In Tanintharyi region, large swaths of land were designated for the planting of rubber and for oil palm development, partly to meet the domestic demand, partly for export. However, of the 1.9 million acres allocated for oil palm development, only 360,000 have been actually used for it, while it’s unclear how much rubber was actually planted.

In Kachin state on the China-Myanmar border, which has long been a focal point in the news as a result of its precarious geographic position, Chinese – and not domestic – business interests are dominating the situation and Chinese demand for agricultural commodities is the main driving factor for the increased area of land being used for commercial agricultural development. In Kachin, 1.4 million acres were designated for commercial agricultural development – but so far less than 175,000 acres have been actually planted.

The processes by which these land areas are being allocated for agricultural development are, according to the report, “rife with legal loopholes, special permits, and/or exemptions.” Restrictions that the laws may impose can easily be overridden by government authorities. As a result, while timber being harvested from these lands can indeed be considered legal, the ways in which the land areas are being allocated for agricultural development – and the consequential logging of timber – are coming more and more under scrutiny.

An important reason for this is that these processes do not have any social safeguards in place, i.e., they do not provide any way to lessen the consequences these changes in land use have for local communities that live in and depend on these forested areas. It therefore probably comes as no surprise that conflicts around land rights have increased hand in hand with the growing allocation of land areas for industrial agriculture development. Communities lose their land and have not legal recourse for claiming it – and with it the base for their subsistence – back.

If the promised and hoped-for economic growth is supposed to happen and hold up, the obvious tension between commercial agricultural development and sustainable management of Myanmar’s forests has to be resolved. For starters, the agencies that oversee both, the Ministry of Environmental Conservation and the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation Policy, the report argues, need to have clarified priorities and roles.

In addition, with the logging of these precious trees largely driven by the desire to export, international standards and processes – such as forest certification or the emerging Forest Law, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) – might be able to influence change by trying to address murky/grey areas such as the trade of timber that may have been felled as a result of dubious logging permits.

Anne Thiel is the Communications Manager at Forest Trends. She can be reached at [email protected].

Additional resources

For the first time ever, India is including forest cover in its tax allocation formula earmarking $6 billion for results-based forest conservation-more than any other nation in the world. This means the portion of tax revenue state governments receive is partially dependent on how much forestland they maintain.

This article was originally published in the Forest Carbon newsletter. Click here to read the original.

20 March 2015 | Here at the office we are gearing up for March Madness, ready with our brackets, hoping for Cinderella stories to make it to the final four. Over in India, the central government has geared up its own form of a bracket, allocating $6 billion a year in tax revenue for results-based forest conservation within individual states. This announcement comes after the Narendra Modi government realized its pledge to treat states as partners in long-term development, and will transfer 42% of taxes collected by the Central government to states.

The formula for tax allocation to states will, for the first time ever, include forest cover.

India’s 14th Finance Commission, which is appointed every five years to define the financial relations between India’s central government and states, recommended adding forest cover to the formula because: “In our view, forests, a global public good, should not be seen as a handicap but as a national resource to be preserved and expanded to full potential, including afforestation in degraded forests or forests with low density cover. Maintaining a green cover, and adding to it, would also enable the nation to meet its international obligations on environment-related measures.”

Within the tax formula, forest cover has been given a weight of 7.5% within the overall formula, accompanying population in 1971 (17.5%), population in 2011 (10 %), fiscal capacity  (50%) and land area (15%).  This means that the share of tax revenue that each state receives will depend in part on how much forest they have maintained, as monitored by India’s 2013 Forest Survey.

To put the tax transfer in context, $6 billion is “more results-based finance for forest conservation than any other country in the world, including the current biggest spender Norway,” notes Jonah Busch, Research Fellow at the Center for Global Development, in a recent analysis. Since 2008, Norway has offered around $3 billion for reducing emissions from deforestation (REDD+) through bilateral agreements with Brazil, Indonesia, Guyana, and others.

India reports that its re-growing forests remove more than 200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere every year, which offsets about 15% of its greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, the tax transfer works out to about $120 per hectare per year, which is a larger payment than many other payments-for-ecosystem services programs provide. For example, carbon finance from offset sales flowing to REDD projects averaged $5.2 per hectare globally in 2013, according to Ecosystem Markplace data.

More stories from the forest carbon market are summarized below, so keep reading.

Ecosystem Marketplace is closely tracking developments in the forest carbon markets for our brand-new North America report, as well as our annual State of the Voluntary Carbon Market reports. But publication of these reports is contingent on receiving sufficient support so contact Gloria Gonzalez if you are interested in sponsoring one or both of these reports.

Sponsors benefit from exposure – logo placement on reports that are downloaded tens of thousands of times and shout-outs in this news brief – as well as further insight into our findings through tailored briefings. And that’s not to mention influence: Ecosystem Marketplace’s reports have been cited in the development of emerging carbon pricing programs from South Africa to South Korea, and supporting our research is a good opportunity to influence these discussions.

—The Ecosystem Marketplace Team

If you have comments or would like to submit news stories, write to us at [email protected].

Additional resources

19 March 2015 | Automaker General Motors, financial institution Barclays and cosmetics company Natura Cosméticos couldn’t be more different companies. But they all have one thing in common: they are top voluntary buyers of carbon offsets and pursue these purchases as part of comprehensive carbon management strategies.

A new Ecosystem Marketplace report called The Bottom Line: Taking Stock of the Role of Offsets in Corporate Carbon Strategies dispels the myth that companies purchase carbon offsets to avoid taking responsibility for their contributions to climate change.

Rather, 14% percent of companies publically disclosing climate change information to the CDP’s (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) annual survey practice “offset-inclusive carbon management,” meaning that they are investing in hundreds of unique emissions reduction projects in addition to directly reducing their climate impact through energy efficiency, improved product design and other measures. Offset buyers tracked by CDP spent $41 billion in 2013 to make their buildings and processes more energy efficient, install low-carbon energy, switch to cleaner transportation, design more sustainable products, and engage customers and employees around behavior change.

“There’s a common misperception that offsetting is a way for companies to ‘buy their way out of the problem,’” says Allie Goldstein, Senior Associate at Ecosystem Marketplace and the author of the report. “But when you dig into the CDP data, it’s clear that offset buyers are actually just using more of the tools at their disposal to reduce emissions, and they’re investing in these activities at a higher rate compared to companies that don’t offset.”

This new report analyzed data from 1,882 corporate climate performance disclosures collected by CDP in 2013 and 2014.

Offsetting is an indicator of a deeper climate commitment, with offset buyers engaged in activities that reduce their internal emissions at a higher rate than companies that do not buy offsets, according to the report. The typical offset buyer slashed almost 17% of their Scope 1 (direct) emissions in 2013 while non-buyers only reduced Scope 1 emissions by less than 5% in the same year. Offset purchases are one way to neutralize Scope 3 (indirect) emissions that occur upstream in a company’s supply chain or downstream in consumer’s use of the company’s products – emissions that are difficult to reduce by other means.

The majority of companies (214) offset emissions voluntarily, compared to 56 CDP-reporting companies that purchased offsets to comply with regulations. Companies based in regions with regulatory carbon pricing programs were more likely to buy carbon offsets, even on a voluntary basis, than companies based in locations without a cap-and-trade system or carbon tax. The European Union, home of the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), hosts the largest number of buyers – both compliance-driven and voluntary – since even companies in unregulated sectors are more familiar with market-based mechanisms for emissions reductions.

Voluntarily taking the lead

CDP disclosers voluntarily purchased 16.5 million tonnes in 2013, according to the report, representing about a third of primary market demand as tracked by Ecosystem Marketplace’s State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets 2014 report.

US-based automaker General Motors topped the list of voluntary buyers of carbon offsets, purchasing 4.6 million tonnes of offsets over the 2012-2013 timeframe. Its Chevrolet division has been a leading buyer of carbon offsets as part of its commitment to reduce its emissions by up to eight million tonnes of carbon – at an estimated cost of $40 million. Chevrolet has also promoted widespread adoption of a new methodology financed by the automaker that aims to reward US-based colleges and universities for renewable energy and energy efficiency projects, purchasing the first 500,000 offsets generated by these projects.

U.K.-based Barclays was second on the list of top voluntary buyers with 2.1 million tonnes purchased, including from an avoided deforestation project in Kenya and renewable energy projects in India and China. In its CDP disclosure, the bank noted its anticipation that tropical cyclones will alter the credit profile of some of its clients.

California-based utility Pacific Gas & Electric and Brazil-based Natura Cosméticos tied for third place on the list of top voluntary buyers at about 1.4 million tonnes.

Natura has reduced its relative greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by 33.2% over the 2007 to 2013 time period and offset all the emissions it couldn’t avoid through the acquisition of carbon offsets from reforestation, energy efficiency, fuel substitution, waste treatment and REDD+ (reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation), according to a company spokeswoman. The company prioritizes projects that generate other environmental benefits such as improvements in water quality, erosion control and promotion of biodiversity and social benefits in addition to offsetting carbon, she said.

In 2013, Natura purchased 120,000 tons of carbon offsets from the Paiter-Suruí­, an indigenous people of the Amazon who in June of that year became the first indigenous people to generate offsets by saving endangered rainforest using the Verified Carbon Standard’s REDD protocol.

Delta Air Lines is also on the top 10 list of voluntary buyers of carbon offsets and expressed concern in its CDP disclosure that rising temperatures could affect plane take-offs and that sea level rise may encroach on coastal airports.

The airline’s GHG emissions are primarily related to the amount of fuel it uses, which accounts for more than 98.5% of its total carbon footprint and almost one third of its total operating cost. This creates a major incentive to reduce its fuel consumption and costs through internal initiatives such as retiring smaller, inefficient 50-seat jets and replacing them with larger, more efficient aircraft, according to the airline.

Despite its fuel saving initiatives, Delta experienced a net increase in fuel consumption from 2012 levels due to growth in flying, leading the company to purchase and retire carbon offsets against its 2013 and 2014 emissions to achieve its voluntary goal of carbon neutral growth compared to 2012. The company’s offsetting strategy evolved from initially partnering with The Nature Conservancy to allow customers to purchase offsets to cover their travel emissions – Delta matches customer and employee offset purchases up to $25,000 every year – to purchasing offsets directly to achieve the airline’s voluntary goals.

Following the compliance rules

CDP-reporting companies purchased 32 million tonnes for compliance purposes in 2013, according to the report. These disclosures account for a subset of total primary market compliance demand, which the World Bank Group estimated at 174 million tonnes that year.

ExxonMobil was the top dog on the compliance side, purchasing 10.2 million tonnes of offsets in 2012-2013 – about 3 million more tonnes than Mexico-based cement manufacturer CEMEX – from dozens of projects developed under the Clean Development Mechanism. ExxonMobil is regulated under cap-and-trade programs such as the EU ETS, New Zealand’s ETS, and California cap-and-trade but has publicly advocated for a revenue-neutral carbon tax as the “more effective policy option.”

“Cap-and-trade systems inevitably introduce unnecessary cost and complexity, as well as unpredictable price volatility, as evidenced recently by the EU ETS,” the company wrote in its CDP disclosure. “It is important to remember that a cap-and-trade system requires a new market infrastructure for traders to trade emissions allowances.”

ExxonMobil mimics the effect of a tax through using a proxy cost of carbon embedded in its Outlook for Energy report. “Our proxy cost, which in some areas may approach $80/ton over our Outlook period, is our effort to quantify what we believe government policies could cost to our investment opportunities,” the company disclosed.

Delta has also been a compliance buyer of offsets, but sees the longer-term risk to the airline industry of neutralizing growing international emissions after 2020 through the International Commercial Aviation Organization’s (ICAO) development of a market-based program. As part of the International Air Transport Association, the trade association of the world’s airlines, Delta said it is currently engaged with ICAO in the development of a carbon offset approach to address the risk.

“With our current offset program, we are gaining experience in the carbon market,” a company spokeswoman says.

Additional resources

17 March 2015 | Quick! What do Italian jackets, British beef, and French chickens have in common?

Answer: they’re overwhelmingly dependent on imports of illegally-harvested products driving deforestation across the developing world, according to a new report called Stolen Goods: the EU’s Complicity in Illegal Tropical Deforestation, released today by the environmental NGO Fern.

The group found that leather from cattle raised on illegally-deforested land tends to end up in Italy, while the beef ends up in the United Kingdom, and the soy ends up in France-mostly to feed the country’s chickens and pigs. The Netherlands and Germany are the largest importers of deforestation-linked palm oil, which goes into a variety of consumer products including cosmetics and food products.

The findings dovetail with those of Ecosystem Marketplace publisher Forest Trends, which found last year that agriculture is driving deforestation around the world, and almost half of global deforestation takes place illegally.

The report highlights the global forces driving deforestation and – ultimately – climate change, and it comes as governments and companies around the world pledge to slow or eliminate practices that drive deforestation. Next week, Ecosystem Marketplace, together with WWF and CDP, will launch a new site called Supply-Change.org to help people track the actions companies are taking to reduce deforestation.

What Constitutes “Illegal”?

Illegality is defined according to producer country laws. In some country that means converting forests to land for commercial agriculture without the right to clear the land, or using permits that were illegally issued or obtained to convert land. In some cases, even when companies have the right to convert land, they have been found to clear more forest than permitted, or to neglect agreed‐to payments to local communities or the government.

Gateway Netherlands

Globally, Fern says, the European Union imports 25% of all soy and 18% of all palm oil harvested on illegally-deforested land, 15% of all such beef and 31% of all such leather.

The Netherlands is the point of entry for one-third of all these products entering the EU, but much of that flows on to other countries. Still, combined, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, France and the UK imported 75% and consumed 63% of the forest-risk products imported into the EU.

Indonesia and Brazil: Leaders in Illegality

The study says that more than half of the forest-risk products originate in Brazil, where it is estimated that some 90% of deforestation is illegal, while a quarter comes from Indonesia, where some 80% of deforestation is estimated to be illegal. Malaysia and Paraguay are among a number of other important source countries.

“EU consumption does more than devastate the environment and contribute to climate change,” said Sam Lawson, author of the report. “The illegal nature of the deforestation means it is also driving corruption, and leading to lost revenues, violence and human rights abuses. Those seeking to halt the illegal deforestation have been threatened, attacked or even killed.”

What to Do?

The report recommends that the EU ramp up its Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade program (EU-FLEGT), which is designed to combat illegal deforestation.

“Demand for forest‐risk commodities is being driven by a number of different EU policies, such as agriculture, trade and energy policy,” says FERN co-founder Saskia Ozinga. “We urgently need an Action Plan to make these different policies coherent, reduce EU consumption and ensure we only import legal and sustainably produced commodities.”

It was a good month for conservation finance as a study on the potential of wetland carbon offsets in Louisiana found that the state’s blue carbon could be worth between $540 million and $1.6 billion over a five year period. And in California, farmers may be able to leverage finance from both the carbon market and a habitat exchange.

This article was originally posted in the Mitigation Mail newsletter. Click here to read the original.

17 March 2015 | Greetings! Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost an area of wetlands equivalent to the size of Delaware, and it continues to lose a football field of wetlands every hour. If current loss rates continue, by the year 2040 more than one million acres – or nearly another Delaware – of wetlands will be gone – and the carbon stored in these ecosystems will be released into the atmosphere.
But a new study says it’s possible to not only restore the wetlands – but generate a lot of money doing so: Wetland restoration in Louisiana could be worth between $540 million and $1.6 billion dollars over the next five decades, according to the Louisiana Blue Carbon study.

The study, supported by Entergy Corporation through their Environmental Initiatives Fund, and prepared in partnership by New Orleans-based Tierra Resources and Portland-based nonprofit The Climate Trust, looks at Louisiana’s potential to produce blue carbon offsets.

But the high costs of wetland restoration may surpass the value of carbon finance in projects – which means that project developers are looking at pooling finance from other quarters: stacking environmental credits, eligible types of conservation easements, and federal funds are all on the table.

Leveraging finance across ecosystem markets and funding sources is like a unicorn: often talked-about but rarely seen. But activities in the Gulf – and in California, where rice farmers this year for the first time may be able to draw finance for conservation from both a new habitat exchange and the California carbon market – suggest that we may be getting closer to a successful sighting.

Conservation finance got more good news with the launch of the European Investment Bank’s new Natural Capital Financing Facility, which will seek to support sustainable ventures – and attract additional investors – with an initial US$135M purse.

And it wouldn’t be Mitmail without some lawsuits and colorful language. This month, they’re in New South Wales, California, and Alaska.

Enjoy!

—The Ecosystem Marketplace Team

If you have comments or would like to submit news stories, write to us at [email protected].

Sustainably produced forest products have the potential to mitigate climate change, preserve biodiversity and enhance local livelihoods. But their value is underappreciated. Now, an online network called CanopyBridge, which brings together the sustainable sellers with interested buyers, is bringing these products to global markets.

This article was originally posted on Huffington Post. Click here to read the original.

16 March 2015 | Deep in the tropical rainforests of Latin America, a seed the size of a marble grows in abundance. Amid the many visual splendors of the rainforest, neither the tree from which the seed comes, Brosimum alicastrum, nor the seed itself seem of particular note. Indeed, though the seed (and leaves, sap, and wood) have been critical to the survival of people who have lived in the forest for years, it has been largely ignored outside of its native habitat.

Yet this seed–like other products of the rainforest–may be central to a shift in the universal understanding of how we fight climate change.

The thin, citrus-flavored skin of the seed covers an edible, highly nutritious “nut.” Known as the Maya Nut, this “superfood” was once a diet staple of forest dwellers, and in recent years, the Maya Nut Institute has been working to bring this ancient food back to prominence, and its production has already greatly improved the livelihoods and the health of forest dwellers.

The Maya Nut, like myriad other products of the world’s rainforests, has the potential for even greater impact, however, particularly for the value it adds to the world’s perception of the forests in which they grow–namely, that a forest is worth more alive than dead.

The forests of our planet, on the frontlines of climate-change mitigation because of their ability to store massive amounts of carbon, are in real danger from deforestation and degradation. But what if it were known, on a global level, that these forests contained value not just because of their timber, but because they contained sustainable and marketable products that could greatly impact lives–and keep the forests healthy and alive?

The Long Road to Market

Because it is harvested exclusively in the wild–deep in the forest–the Maya Nut, however, has a long way to go before gaining the global acceptance enjoyed by other superfoods like quinoa.

Making that journey a bit easier is CanopyBridge, an online global network that connects sellers of sustainable, wild-harvested products with international buyers. The site “allows members from around the world to list, describe, discover and learn more about natural products and the people behind them.”

The site aims to bring together small-scale producers–such as the Maya Nut Institute–and businesses looking to source such unique products and make the transaction process between them easy and transparent. “The world has about 400,000 plant species, but 90% of our food comes from only about 100 of these,” says Jacob Olander, director of EcoDecision, an environmental consultancy, and a founder of CanopyBridge. “There’s this vast storehouse of diversity and local traditions still waiting to be discovered, and there are literally millions of local producers whose livelihoods depend on finding better markets for their products. But it’s still really difficult to connect that potential supply with demand–both for buyers looking for new sustainably sourced products and for producers trying to reach broader markets.”

The Maya Nut Institute joins a long list of sellers connecting with buyers, such as restaurants looking for innovative menu items, boutique chocolatiers looking for single-origin cocoa beans, people looking for the next acai, or perhaps someone developing a new power bar. Smaller producers–many in the rainforest, for example–simply don’t have the advocates or the funds to go to an international trade fair and make the connections necessary to bring their products to a global market.

“We’ve got producers of alpaca fibers on the site,” says Olander. “We’ve got people who are purchasing ingredients for energy drinks. Then we’ve got Shea nut producers from West Africa. The idea is really that there’s a vast world of possible ingredients out there that should be discovered, and we want to create a space where you can find all that.”

Olander and Marta Echavarria founded EcoDecision, a company based in Ecuador, in 1995. EcoDecision is a pioneer in the emerging markets of ecosystem services. These markets work on the premise that natural ecosystems generate more value alive than dead. A swamp, for example, filters water and acts as a floodplain, while a forest sucks carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and mangroves protect the coasts. All ecosystems, meanwhile, support biodiversity–and all of these services are lost when swamps are drained for farming, forests are cleared for timber, and mangroves become pricey resorts.

Some products can still be harvested from the forest without destroying it, and it was in their exploration of the non-timber values that a forest could provide that Olander and Echavarria hit upon the idea for CanopyBridge, an offshoot of EcoDecision.

“We were looking at the products coming out of projects that are related to conservation in some way, where additional income from sustainable crops or wild-harvested ingredients can make the financial difference between keeping or clearing a forest,” says Olander. “And we realized that the process of sustainability-minded buyers and sellers finding each other was really inefficient.

“We realized that if you’re a business and you’re looking to source these products, there is no easy way to find these things. There’s no community out there that somehow brings buyers and sellers committed to conservation together. Finding your market or finding your supplier still largely depends on personal contacts, word of mouth and chance.”

Of course there’s Google, Olander explains, and “the Internet in all of its breadth and depths,” but if you were looking for sustainable products, across a range of certifications and around the world, and if you needed to know the origins of the product, such a site did not exist. CanopyBridge was born of this need, and they settled on the name to communicate “the idea of building a connection between the sheltering forest, the forest canopy, and all that it contains, and building a bridge between the producers there and buyers who are using these products around the world.”

The products on CanopyBridge reflect these original goals in that they are produced in such a way that they protect nature and foster healthy communities. Runa, a Brooklyn, N.Y., and Ecuador-based seller on the site, makes energy drinks from the guayusa leaf, and is certified organic, Fair Trade, non-GMO and kosher, and the company itself is a B Corp.

“We’re huge fans of Runa, and we’re proud that they’re on our site,” says Olander. “We think they’re a great example of a company that’s working with one of the literally hundreds of thousands of potential ingredients that are out there in these natural ecosystems in the tropics that’s had a traditional use, and using it in a way that brings it to a new market, and at the same time reinforces its traditional value within the communities where they work.”

To use the site, buyers and suppliers create a profile for free, which provides detailed information about the product being sold or the potential selling venue. Although CanopyBridge does not require its members to hold a specific certification or follow a certain standard, it looks for users with a strong commitment to sustainability who are open and transparent about their products or services.

“Behind each of these products are wonderful stories,” says Echavarria. “Both from a human standpoint, but also from a biological standpoint.”

Focus on Food

The emphasis at CanopyBridge is on ingredients for either foods or cosmetics, or with medicinal and supplemental uses. With its focus on food, CanopyBridge is tapping into the burgeoning connection being made between conservation groups and the food industry. Superstar chefs like Pedro Miguel Schiaffino, of ímaz and Malabar restaurants in Lima, Peru, are sourcing and cooking with unusual and delicious ingredients from the Amazon, many of which are listed sellers on CanopyBridge. This kind of work is pushing the envelope on modern cuisine–and taking a big step in the preservation of the planet’s biodiversity.

“There are some fantastic ingredients out there,” says Olander. “You’ve got this wild fruit called camu camu, which makes this beautiful pink juice and grows on the river banks [of the Amazon]. It’s one of the world’s highest, most concentrated sources of vitamin C. Sacha inchi or Inca peanut from Peru is a great source of Omega-3s and protein. From Indonesia, several varieties of palm sugar, sweeteners that are not available or commonly used yet that I think have a huge potential. Baobab is coming into its own as an antioxidant superfruit from southern Africa. The list just goes on and on.”

CanopyBridge presents a tremendous opportunity for valuing biodiversity–these products are now given explicit market value–with potential for significant livelihood benefits for the producers of rainforest products as well as along the value chain.

Small Site With Far-Reaching Potential

As with the Maya Nut seed, the implications of what CanopyBridge is doing may not at first be apparent. But CanopyBridge is far more than simply a “Match.com” type site bringing vendors and producers together. By bringing sustainable, scalable products out of the forest into a global market, CanopyBridge is making an enormous ripple in the pond of biodiversity conservation, local livelihoods, and climate change mitigation. And according to Jacob Olander, such a ripple is vital.

“I got my start with non-timber forest products years ago, researching the potential for new ornamental plants from the rainforests of Costa Rica when I was in grad school,” says Olander. “There’s all this great stuff out there, these products that complement these other objectives of valuing nature and keeping communities healthy and prosperous. Paying for watershed services alone or paying for carbon alone is never going to get us [to climate-change mitigation].”

“If you start to look at how much the economy is already moving in these other kinds of sustainable products, it’s an astounding volume of trade, probably greater than the total amount of development aid globally. [CanopyBridge] just seemed like a really logical fit while we were looking for new ways to finance the protection of ecosystems. If we can bring all the pieces together–farmers, forest peoples, companies and consumers committed to sustainability–that’s a really, really powerful combination.”

Both in the forest and in business, big things grow from a single seed.

Ann Clark Espuelas is a writer for Forest Trends.

Additional resources

In the two years since the implementation of California’s carbon market, the state’s Gross Domestic Product grew 2% while emissions in capped sectors dropped 3.8%. Across the pond, China has taken note. The nation is working closely with the Golden State through a number of partnerships-perhaps the most prominent being between the Air Resources Board and its Chinese counterpart known as the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

This article was originally posted in the V-Carbon newsletter. Click here to read the original.

13 March 2015 | All eyes have been on the West Coast of the United States, with the recent completion of California’s second joint auction with trading partner Québec and the launch of two reports about the state’s cap-and-trade program.

The latest auction sold out its 73.6 million allowances, at an average $12.2 per allowance, for more than $1 billion total. However, another aspect of the cap-and-trade program – carbon offsets – have so far been underutilized. Under California’s AB 32, the state law mandating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions, regulated companies may purchase up to 8% of their compliance obligations through offsets. As of last November, companies turned in only 1.7 million offsets out of a theoretical 11.6 million that could have been purchased.

Sales from the allowances will be reinvested in alternative energy sources, public transportation and other carbon-lowering activities through the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Additionally, 25% of the fund’s money will be spent on reducing pollution in disadvantaged communities that are disproportionately affected by bad air quality.

Aside from the lackluster offsetting, a recent assessment of California’s carbon market regarded the system as a tentative success. In the two years since implementation, the state’s Gross Domestic Product grew 2% while emissions in capped sectors dropped 3.8%.

Across the (other) pond, China has taken note. According to the recent Asia Society report, A Vital Partnership, China is working closely with the Golden State through a number of partnerships. Perhaps the most prominent exists between the California Air Resources Board (ARB) and its Chinese counterpart known as the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

Before signing the agreement, California Governor Jerry Brown said: “I see the partnership between China, between provinces in China, and the state of California as a catalyst and as a lever to change policies in the United States and ultimately change policies throughout the world.”

Additional pilot projects have occurred at Chinese jurisdictional or province levels with U.S. civil society organizations like The Energy Foundation and The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). EDF’s Mobile Source Emissions Trading System Integration project is a five-year project launched last year with the Shenzhen Low Carbon Development Foundation that will focus on reducing air pollution from “mobile” transportation sources such as cars and buses. Currently, such sources account for nearly 30% of the city’s total emissions.

Read more about those projects here.

Ecosystem Marketplace is closely tracking these and other developments in California in preparation for our brand-new North America carbon markets report. But this latest report is still missing a vital ingredient – your support! The North America and State of the Voluntary Carbon Market reports are contingent on receiving sufficient support.

To sponsor one of these exciting Ecosystem Marketplace products, contact Gloria Gonzalez.

Sponsors benefit from exposure – logo placement on reports that are downloaded tens of thousands of times and shout-outs in this news brief – as well as further insight into our findings through tailored briefings. And that’s not to mention influence: Ecosystem Marketplace’s reports have been cited in the development of emerging carbon pricing programs from South Africa to South Korea, and supporting our research is a good opportunity to influence these discussions.

More news from the voluntary carbon marketplace is summarized below, so keep reading!

—The Editors

Supporting Subscribers request

If you value what you read in this news brief, consider supporting Ecosystem Marketplace’s Carbon Program as a Supporting Subscriber. Readers’ contributions help us keep the lights on and continue to deliver voluntary carbon market news and insights to your inbox biweekly and free of charge. For a suggested US$150/year donation, you or your company can be listed as a V-Carbon News Supporting Subscriber (with weblink) for one year (~24 issues). Reach out to inboxes worldwide and make your contribution here (select “Support for Voluntary Carbon News Briefs” in the drop-down menu).

For comments or questions, please email: [email protected]

Additional resources

This article was originally published on the AnthropoZine. Click here to read the original.

12 March 2015 | Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost an area of wetlands equivalent to the size of Delaware, and it continues to lose a football field of wetlands every hour. If current loss rates continue, by the year 2040 more than one million acres of wetlands will be gone – and the carbon stored in these ecosystems will be released into the atmosphere.

But what if there is another way? While a large degree of wetland loss in the Gulf of Mexico is inevitable due to the dual forces of land subsidence and sea level rise, project developer Tierra Resources and utility Entergy are optimistic that wetland restoration is possible in some areas. Tierra Resources estimated that Louisiana has the potential to produce 1.8 million carbon offsets per year, or almost 92 million offsets over 50 years, according to the Louisiana Blue Carbon study.

Wetland restoration in Louisiana could be worth between $540 million and $1.6 billion dollars over the next five decades. The study uses $4.4 per tonne as its lowest estimated price – based on the average historical price of a voluntary carbon offset developed under the American Carbon Registry (ACR). The study featured $10.8 per tonne as the high price – based on the higher value of offsets sold into compliance markets such as California’s cap-and-trade system.

Ultimately, the hope is that wetland projects will become eligible for the California market so that the Louisiana-based offsets can be traded there, said Brent Dorsey, director of environmental programs at Entergy. But the Golden State requires a 100- year project lifespan for land-based projects, compared to ACR’s 40-year timeframe, so additional hurdles remain, observed Sarah Mack, President and CEO of Tierra Resources.

Carbon Opportunities

Entergy has advocated and supported market-based solutions to environmental risks since 1998, when it became involved in the initial development of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the carbon trading program of nine Northeastern states, some of them home to Entergy facilities.

Using its Environmental Initiatives Fund, Entergy financed Tierra Resources’ study of wetland restoration techniques and development of a new blue carbon accounting methodology under ACR. The Louisiana Blue Carbon project was a partnership between Entergy energy, Tierra Resources, and the Climate Trust. The goal was to develop opportunities for financially viable wetland offset projects in Louisiana.

The methodology that was developed focuses on four million acres of wetlands in the coastal zone of Louisiana, with a small amount of coast in Mississippi and Texas. They focused on scalable restoration methods that show commercialization potential as wetland offset projects to determine the carbon impact of incorporating prevented wetland loss in carbon accounting, determine the state’s offset potential, and what the financial estimates are of the blue carbon.

Tierra Resources reviewed restoration techniques featured in the “Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast ” and researched additional restoration techniques, wetland assimilation and mangrove planting. The company then evaluated the commercial wetland offset potential for long-term enhancement of wetlands, scalability, and cost effectiveness. The Master Plan used a 50-year projection for the future of wetlands in Louisiana, which was also employed by Tierra Resources as the basis for its analysis to determine annual offsets and value, as well as long-term potential.

The study evaluated different types of wetland restoration, including mangrove planting, wetland assimilation – the introduction of treated municipal effluent into impounded and degraded wetlands to provide freshwater and nutrients for restoration purposes, and river diversion – use of new channels and/or structures to divert sediment and freshwater from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers into adjacent basins. The latter two techniques offer opportunities to stack carbon offsets with other mechanisms such as water quality credits, if those markets develop. Wetland assimilation offers the greatest net offset yield per acre: about seven tons of carbon for forested wetlands.

However, for land in Louisiana, mangrove planting (two tons per acre) and river diversions (3.8 tons per acre) are the most feasible options.

The challenges facing wetland restoration as a viable mechanism for carbon sequestration include the high costs of wetland restoration, which may surpass the value of carbon finance in projects, which necessitates partnering projects with more traditional funding pathways.

Mack outlined some of the policy options available to encourage wetland restoration including: “allowing the use of federal funds alongside carbon finance; environmental credit stacking, eligible types of conservation easements, rules and processes for project aggregation, and crediting period length for wetland restoration. Additionally, establishing funding pools to allow wetland project development to scale up and meet future carbon demands in the compliance market would benefit future wetland restoration projects.”

Money, money, money

In 2010, Entergy sponsored a study that found the cost-benefit ratio for wetland restoration is three to one, meaning for every three dollars invested in wetland restoration a dollar is gained in risk avoidance. Using this study as a baseline, Entergy partnered with Tierra Resources to explore additional benefits, such as hunting, fishing, water filtration, and other ecosystem services that could be gained by restoring wetlands, as well as carbon sequestration benefits.

The total potential benefit of just restoring coastal wetlands in Louisiana was determined to be between $400 and $1 billion. If prevented wetland loss, that is the prevention of wetlands from reverting to, or turning into, open water, is included in the carbon accounting, an additional $140 million to almost $630 million may be earned by Louisiana wetlands.

The case for preventing wetland loss is not just environmental, according to large oil and gas corporations such as ConocoPhillips and Shell currently involved in blue carbon projects. Dorsey highlighted an additional risk associated with wetland loss: “Existing wetland owners, if the wetlands convert to open water, they lose all title to that property including the mineral rights. That is some of the economic push for some of these folks to be involved with blue carbon.”

What motivates companies?

Entergy serves Louisiana, among other southern Gulf Coast states, as an energy generator and transmitter and is vulnerable to adverse weather events that may strike the area as Hurricane Katrina did in 2005, he said.

“Entergy is wed to their service area, we don’t have the luxury of pulling up poles and power plants and moving, we are a real member of our service area,” he said. “Looking at this from a risk-management perspective, a storm could wipe out transmission and distribution facilities and have significant economic impacts to our customers.”

The United States and China made headlines last year with their Climate Pact, but significant collaboration had already occurred at the subnational levels. Both California and several of China’s provinces launched emissions trading systems (ETS) in 2013, and they have been working together ever since. Now, a new report highlights the latest accomplishments and partnerships.

This article was originally posted on The AnthropoZine. Click here to read the original.

March 10, 2015 | When China and the United States announced their Climate Pact to great fanfare last November, the bilateral pledge’s talk of “contributions” shifted the conversation from shared commitments to “common but differentiated responsibilities”: the idea that historical economic differences leads to different responsibilities to tackle climate change today.

Yet, for all its talk of differences, both countries already shared a commitment in the form of subnational emissions trading schemes (ETS).

The California – China Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was the first formal agreement on climate change issues between a US state and China. The MOU was signed back in 2013, when both the state of California and several Chinese provinces launched their ETS.

Since then, there has been a steady stream of officials and experts crossing the pond to share their experiences and form new collaborations. A new report called A Vital Partnership, launched last week by the Asia Society, examines the latest collaborations and partnerships between the two.

The Lure of California

With an economy that outweighs most countries, it’s no surprise that California’s 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) has attracted attention outside its borders. Its subsequent success has only heighted that interest: since its inception in 2013, Californian capped sectors have lowered emissions by 3.8% while the state has maintained economic and job growth that has outpaced the national average.

As China looks to ramp up its seven pilot ETSs into a consolidated national system, the country hopes to replicate California’s economic and environmental prosperity. This has led to a number of agreements and partnerships across a range of actors.

The report tracked fourteen various partnerships currently in effect, with participants drawn across a host of organizations including civil society (research organizations, foundations and NGOs), businesses, government and public utilities.

Four such agreements focus directly on the emissions trading systems, while the rest address such topics as air pollution control, zero emissions vehicles and low carbon technologies.

Though its difficult to make sweeping generalizations about these various partnerships, the report does note that: “What California and its counterparts in China have come to understand is that mutual benefits can flow from such partnerships, not only in the quest for climate change solutions, but also in catalyzing increased trade and investment in clean technology.”

Bridging the Public/Private Divide

Perhaps the most prominent partnership exists between the California Air Resources Board (ARB) and the Chinese equivalent called the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

Before signing the agreement, California Governor Jerry Brown said, “I see the partnership between China, between provinces in China, and the state of California as a catalyst and as a lever to change policies in the United States and ultimately change policies throughout the world.”

Formalized on September 13, 2013, the MOU lays out cooperation between the two agencies on key issues, including: mitigating carbon emissions, strengthening performance standards to control greenhouse gas emissions, designing and implementing carbon emissions trading systems, sharing information on policies and programs to strengthen low-carbon development, and researching clean and efficient energy technologies.

ARB has since hosted five Chinese delegations and four webinars, the latest of which also included officials from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

US-based civil society organizations have also helped China get their pilot ETS programs off the ground.

Within civil society, The Energy Foundation has been engaged since 2011 with several of the pilot ETS jurisdictions to get them off the ground. Though the organization collaborated with NDRC, it primarily worked with equivalent local entities (such as the Guangzhou Energy Research Institute and Tsinghua University) to help these Chinese civil society organizations draft the initial ETS regulations and establish harmonized monitoring, reporting and verification rules across the pilots. Now, the organization is supporting Guangdong, Shenzhen and Beijing to carry out qualitative and quantitative evaluations of their pilot ETSs and impacts on emissions, the environment and economy through March 2015.

As that project wraps up, the Environmental Defense Fund’s (EDF) Mobile Source ETS Integration project will be getting off the ground. The five-year project, launched last year between EDF and the Shenzhen Low Carbon Development Foundation will focus on reducing air pollution from “mobile” transportation sources like cars and buses.

Currently, such sources account for nearly 30% of the city’s total emissions and have been increasing at a rate of 15% each year. The research seeks to reduce air pollution from transport through carbon emissions trading and seek to test the feasibly of expanding emissions trading systems to mobile sources. It will start with public transport, but hopes to expand to include private vehicles, freight, railway and marine transport over the course of the 5-year project.

“This partnership will tackle one of the world’s most vexing greenhouse gas emissions challenges – controlling pollution from transportation, an especially fast growing source in China,” said Dan Dudek, EDF’s Vice President and Head of the China Program. “China is the world’s largest auto market, so solving the global climate challenge not only requires China manage its greenhouse gas emissions, it requires China address pollution from mobile sources. China’s experiences could provide valuable lessons for the U.S. in reducing emissions from its transport sector.”

The partnership stems from US Department of State’s EcoPartnership program, which promotes cooperation between local governments and organizations in the U.S. and China in climate and energy issues relating to the U.S – China Ten Year Framework on Energy and Environment Cooperation or Climate Change Working Group. New 2015 applications are currently accepted through March 20.

Additional resources

The Amazon Working Group, a grassroots network of 600 associations representing smallholder farms, fishermen, rubber-tappers, and indigenous people, on Friday became the latest association of forest people to criticize Brazil’s powerful Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), which it accuses of fomenting division among indigenous people to undermine projects it disagrees with, including Surui REDD.

This article originally appeared on The AnthropoZine. Click here to read the original.

9 March 2015 | The statement sliced through the world of nuance and dimplomatic doublespeak like a Jimi Hendrix solo in the Sistine Chapel.

In surprisingly stark language, the Amazon Working Group – a network of 600 small nonprofits generally known by its Portuguese acronym, “GTA” (for “Grupo de Trabalho Amazonico”) – on Friday accused the powerful Indigenous Missionary Council – known as “CIMI” (for “Conselho Indigenista Missioní¡rio”) – of slandering elected indigenous leaders who disagree with it, often through the mouths of unelected individuals acting on CIMI’s behalf.

“The GTA Network hereby declares its repudiation of the slanders that have been published by CIMI, the Indigenous Missionary Council, through the newspapers Porantim and Nortí£o,” the statement began. “We reject the declarations because they are lies created for the sole purpose of promoting conflict among indigenous peoples.”

It issued the unusually blunt statement after CIMI transported roughly 40* indigenous people to the Brazilian Capitol to speak before the Federal Indigenous Agency (FUNAI) and to present a document purporting to identify problems with the Surui Forest Carbon Project. But CIMI’s coverage of the event contained several inaccuracies, and it also rehashed accusations that had already been debunked by the elected Paiter-Surui leadership (who also acknowledged legitimate critiques and vowed to correct them).

GTA traces its origins to the forest campaigns of Chico Mendes, whose 1988 assassination at the hands of cattle ranchers had the unintended consequence of forging solidarity among the disparate forest movements of the Amazon. Today, the GTA Network represents more than 600 small and regional non-profits serving not just indigenous people, but also smallholder farms, fishermen, and rubber-tappers across the Brazilian Amazon. Several indigenous organizations and individual leaders across the Brazilian states of Rondí´nia and Acre leveled similar criticisms of CIMI’s activities last week, but GTA’s words carry more weight because they reflect the sentiment of a broader range of forest people.

Why the Fuss?

In its statement, GTA said that inaccuracies in the coverage* were part of an orchestrated disinformation campaign built on exploiting “a small group of indigenous people who were manipulated and deceived by promises of financial gain into participating in the theft of wood from the Sete de Setembro Indigenous Territory,” a reference to the Paiter-Surui territory, which is under threat from illegal logging.

The two most prominent of the indigenous people who CIMI brought to Brasilia were Henrique Surui and Antenor Karitiana. The coverage, however, falsely identified Henrique Surui as the overall chief of the Paiter-Surui, which he is not. It also implied that Antenor Karitiana was a member of the Surui, which he is not. Furthermore, they claimed that “all chiefs and leaders of the Suruí­” wanted to end the project, which they do not.

A solid majority of the Paiter-Surui have repeatedly voted to support the project, but Henrique Surui, a village chief along an entry point known as Line 14, has been a strong advocate of illegal logging on the indigenous territory – an activity that the carbon project was created to end.

Much of the criticism that GTA and other organizations have leveled at CIMI revolves around allegations that CIMI undermines indigenous autonomy by selecting those indigenous individuals it chooses to work with and then promoting them in the outside world as duly-elected leaders, while at the same time steamrolling or ignoring organizations created by indigenous people themselves. The document that CIMI delivered, for example, also claimed that the neighboring Cinta Larga wanted to end an alleged forest carbon project on their territory – prompting an angry response from the Patjamaaj Association, which is the association elected to speak on behalf of the Cinta Larga in the outside world.

“The article…dated February 23, 2015, contains several lies, and the planners and perpetrators of these documents do not represent us,” they wrote. “The Patjamaaj-Coordination of Indigenous People’s Organizations Cinta Larga, which is the legal representative of the Cinta Larga People, neither participated in nor was informed about these documents. In addition, representatives of other ethnic groups should not represent the Cinta Larga without the consent of Patjamaaj.”

CIMI’s coverage said the Cinta Larga had already begun a carbon project, but the Patjamaaj statement said the Cinta Larga are simply undertaking a feasibility study to see if REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) finance could work on their territory, and it accused CIMI of trying to prejudice that exploration. It also accused Henrique Surui and Antenor Karitiana of colluding with CIMI to undermine their collective efforts, and of recruiting vulnerable members of the Cinta Larga to circumvent elected officials.

“We also inform you that three indigenous Cinta Larga were manipulated to participate in these accusations, led by Henrique Surui and Karitiana Antenor,” they wrote. “We denounce CIMI for promoting conflict between indigenous people and using Henrique Surui and Karitiana Antenor to make false accusations about indigenous projects.”

The Patjamaaj statement went on to correct several other errors in CIMI’s coverage – including the misspelling of almost every NGO that the Surui contracted to support them in the carbon project (Disclosure: Ecosystem Marketplace publisher Forest Trends is among the NGOs contracted by the Paiter-Surui to support the project, although CIMI referred to it as “Forest Trand”). The statement then took CIMI to task for “criticizing Kanindé, ECAM and IDESAM (other NGOs that supported the Surui project), when CIMI itself – instead of helping us as equal partners, like these NGOs do – is promoting conflicts between indigenous people. We will not allow CIMI to continue its maneuvers and manipulations that promote conflict between our people to prevent us from establishing our autonomy and improving our quality of life.”

Earlier in the week, Chief Tashka Yawanawí¡ also criticized CIMI’s coverage in an open e-mail to indigenous leaders.

“It is sad and unfortunate when ‘pro-indigenous’ organizations seek to gain advantage by dividing indigenous people instead of empowering them to practice their inalienable right of self-determination,” he wrote. “It is unbelievable when these organizations capitalize on existing weaknesses to divide a people and ruin a project that could benefit those people – while at the same time receiving money and resources on behalf of indigenous peoples – only to maintain their own status as NGOs who describe themselves as being in favor of indigenous people. It is sad when indigenous people are used as pawns to serve the interests of others. We must never allow our people and our organizations to be used in such a way.”

Delson Gavií£o, head of the Padereehj Association that represents the Gavií£o and Arara people, issued a similar condemnation in December, after CIMI had also attacked his own exploration of REDD finance.

“These are lies aimed at harming indigenous people and damaging projects that are running correctly and helping to protect indigenous lands from the advance of illegal logging and the destruction of the forest,” he wrote. “We reject the comments of Henrique Surui, which were published by CIMI, because neither he nor they have been on our land to discuss the projects we’re executing, much less done anything to address the problem of illegal logging on indigenous lands.”

Who is CIMI?

CIMI was created in 1972 by the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops to “help build the autonomy of Indians as peoples who are ethnically and culturally different, and to contribute to the strengthening of their organizations and alliances in both Brazil and the continent.” By all accounts, they were incredibly effective – in part because they proved adept at bringing indigenous people out of the forest and into the limelight.

They were instrumental in helping indigenous people secure official demarcation of their territories, and even today, indigenous leaders take great pains to express their gratitude for the work that CIMI did in the past – and in many respects, continues to do. Indeed, many of the letters of condemnation issued in December and January also urged CIMI to preserve its legacy by abandoning its current tactics.

But CIMI remains unabashedly opposed to all aspects of the emerging green economy, and it has dismissed efforts to promote sustainable agriculture as “neocolonialist tools”. While the younger generation of indigenous leaders talks of economic and political autonomy, CIMI often writes of a need to keep indigenous people pure – and to spread that purity among the rest of us.

“We need to regain the memory of humanity on our links with nature, expressed in Sumak Kawsay (Live Well),” they wrote in the December 2014 issue of their flagship publication, Porantim. “The environment, and the cultures living in harmony with it, should be the basis for human development and societies; not an item of the market economy.”

But in January, an organization called Questí£o Indí­gena posted a more cynical take on CIMI’s opposition to the green economy. A generally pro-business site, they see CIMI’s motives as being driven less by ideology than by economics, pure and simple.

“Basically, CIMI is targeting the independence of the Indigenes,” they wrote. “Almir Surui Narayamoga became a subversive when he started negotiating his people’s projects directly with international foundations, without the intermediation of indigenist organizations.”

In Questí£o Indí­gena’s view, the green economy is simply bad for CIMI’s business, because self-sufficient and autonomous Indigenes don’t need the services of an all-powerful benevolent protector.

“Narayamoga threatens a billion dollar business that supports NGOs,” they concluded.

* CORRECTION: We initially reported the number of people brought to Brasilia as “roughly a dozen”, but a CIMI statement put the number closer to 40. We also referred to coverage in Porantim and Nortí£o as “CIMI’s coverage.” Porantim is an official CIMI publication, but Nortí£o is not, although the author of the Nortí£o reporting is listed on CIMI’s site as a board member.

Additional resources