ANNOUNCEMENTS
Call for reviewers
Ecosystem Marketplace is seeking a panel of expert reviewers to offer insight for our upcoming State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets 2015 report. The review entails two rounds of feedback: one on the draft figures for the report and one on the draft text. Reviewers must be active in the voluntary carbon market, have responded to our annual survey, agree to maintain confidentiality, and offer comments in a timely manner. Please send expressions of interest to Allie Goldstein ([email protected]) by Friday, April 17.
Do you heart forest carbon?
Ecosystem Marketplace is seeking support for our forest carbon research. Our plans for 2015 include a joint report with REDDX bringing together new research from both initiatives to offer a comprehensive picture of forest carbon finance in 2015, to be released ahead of the United Nations (UN) climate negotiations in Paris. We’re also diving into new research tracking the beyond-carbon impacts of land-use carbon projects – in particular how co-benefits are verified and how they influence demand. Our in-depth journalism will continue to cover major project and policy developments while exploring emerging topics such as indigenous REDD, carbon rights, and the connection between sustainable commodities and avoided deforestation. See our Forest Carbon Sponsorship Prospectus for more information.
NATIONAL STRATEGY & CAPACITY
Two more years!
Indonesia will again extend its ban on forest clearing following a two-year moratorium originally set under a $1 billion climate deal with Norway in 2011. The ban was extended for two years in May 2013, meaning that, without another extension, it would expire next month. But an advisor to Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment indicated the policy would “certainly continue.” On the ground, the battle to save tropical rainforests in the province of Aceh recently meant dismantling 3,000 hectares of palm oil plantations illegally sited in protected areas. Aceh contains the Leuser Ecosystem, the last place on Earth where the Sumatran rhino, elephant, tiger and orangutan coexist in the wild.
A less than taxing proposition
Australia is scheduled to hold its first Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF) auction on Wednesday – the first test of the policy that replaced its carbon tax. Existing projects developed under the Carbon Farming Initiative will be incorporated into the auction, through which the government will submit a benchmark price and then select offset projects that bid in below this threshold. Market participants fear that the AU $2.6 billion ERF will not spur new project development. “The way Australia has implemented the ERF is not using markets so much as just using government money, which can provide support to some projects, but is not fully harnessing the market and directing private capital into markets,” said Jerry Seager, Chief Program Officer for the VCS.
PROJECT DEVELOPMENT
A second Genesis?
In 2008, Hyundai announced that it would offset the emissions from driving its Genesis sedans by investing in a REDD project in the Brazilian Cerrado, a biodiverse grasslands ecosystem covering two million square kilometers. The Ecological Institute proposed the Genesis Forest Project to reforest a barren cattle ranch. But the project failed after auditors raised concerns about low-carbon storage in a landscape regularly burned by wildfires. However, recent research out of the University of Brasília shows the Cerrado may actually store large quantities of carbon in its soil. The Ecological Institute is now taking a different approach to carbon finance, working with 14 ceramics factories in the region to generate carbon offsets by fueling their kilns with rice husks rather than native wood.
North Carolina, c’mon and raise up
The California Air Resources Board (ARB) last week issued 608,000 offsets to seven projects. The majority of offsets – 394,000 tonnes – were issued to the Mattamsuskeet Ventures forestry project in North Carolina. Another 180,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) were issued to three livestock projects and one ozone-depleting substances destruction project operated by Environmental Credit Corp. The remaining issuances went to small-scale livestock projects in Arizona developed under early action protocols recognized by the ARB. California’s compliance offset program now includes 70 early action and 40 compliance projects for a total supply of 18.8 million offsets.
Nonstop to neutrality
JetBlue will purchase 500,000 tCO2e from Carbonfund.org Foundation to offset the emissions from all of the airline’s flights in April. The offsets will be sourced in part from an avoided deforestation project in Brazil as a part of the airline’s “One Thing That’s Green” annual campaign. JetBlue has worked with Carbonfund.org for the past seven years, and its customers have offset 158,000 tCO2e to date. JetBlue’s head of sustainability Sophia Mendelsohn notes that jet fuel is still crucial to the airline’s operations, so emissions cannot be completely eliminated. “Protecting existing forests is a logical way to fund emissions absorption and helps us all adapt to a changing climate,” she said.
SUSTAINABLE COMMODITIES
The best idea since Doritos Locos Tacos
Yum! Brands, which owns KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, recently announced a zero deforestation policy for its palm oil sourcing. Yum! says it will ban plantation development in high carbon stock areas, setting December 2017 as the target date for establishing safeguards for palm oil sourcing. Greenpeace, which campaigned against the company’s pulp and paper sourcing practices in 2012, said the policy was a “good sign” but the company needs to do more to define terms like high carbon stock. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) also noted that the commitment does not cover third-party vendors that provide baked goods and sauces that commonly include palm oil.
Holding out for a forest hero
Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), one of the world’s largest commodity suppliers, plans to release a no deforestation policy at its May 7th annual meeting. The policy will include an assessment of impacts on forests and high conservation value areas, with a particular focus on the Brazilian Amazon and other critical forests in South America. The company plans to work with nonprofit The Forest Trust to map its supply chain. Forest Heroes, a coalition of environmental advocacy groups, commented on the policy: “ADM has shown that they can boost soy production by focusing expansion on degraded land and yield improvement, instead of sacrificing forests.”
FINANCE AND ECONOMICS
Head in the clouds
The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and Norway have signed a NOK 35 million agreement (about US $4.5 million) to improve the capacity of developing countries to monitor and report on changes in forest area. The project will facilitate access to satellite imagery, as well as a platform for analyzing the data, using cloud-based software that avoids the need for outdated computers to download data in areas with poor Internet connections. FAO’s Open Foris Initiative developed the software, which can be used without expensive licenses. The technology will be implemented in 13 countries developing activities under the UN REDD program.
Beefing up deforestation
Agricultural subsidies worth at least $486 billion annually dwarf the $8.7 billion total that developed countries have pledged to halt deforestation in tropical regions, according to new research by the Overseas Development Initiative. The working paper delved into subsidies in Brazil and Indonesia, which have been pledged 40% of the REDD funding committed to date but also have dozens of subsidies in place for commodities associated with deforestation: beef, soy, palm oil, and timber. The authors of the study suggest that REDD could be used as an opportunity for phasing out agricultural subsidies that incentivize deforestation.
That’ll cost you
Former Brazilian President Luís Iní¡cio Lula da Silva spent more than $2 billion on combating deforestation in the Amazon during his 2007 to 2010 term, while current President Dilma Rousseff spent $570 million on the cause from 2011 to 2014, according to a new report by InfoAmazonia. The lower spending was accompanied by a weakening of the Forest Code, the construction of hydroelectric dams, and a slowing in the demarcation of indigenous territories. Deforestation “only garners attention when it is facing a crisis,” said Mauro Oliveira Pires, former director of the Department of Deforestation at the Ministry of Environment, so as deforestation rates in Brazil dropped in the early 2000s, the issue “started to lose political importance.”
HUMAN DIMENSION
Anatomy of a commitment
The story of how Wilmar came to make a no deforestation commitment is not one of NGOs campaigning against companies, but rather a story of individuals. A recent piece in Grist anatomizes the 48 hours preceding Wilmar’s historic commitment in December 2013. It began, in some ways, with a letter from Kuok Khoon Hong, Wilmar’s CEO, to Glenn Hurowitz, founder of Forest Heroes, following an interview Hurowitz gave on Bloomberg. “I saw potential in that letter,” Hurowitz said. “I could see there was a seriousness and an openness to him. You know, Wilmar did what they set out to do well. The environment just hadn’t been their top concern. But they didn’t ideologically embrace deforestation.”
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Droning out deforestation
Oxford-based BioCarbon Engineering plans to plant one billion trees per year using drones. The technology will use unmanned aerial vehicles to map terrain, design appropriate planting patterns, and then plant up to 36,000 seeds per day. (In comparison, two human planters could do about 3,000 seeds per day.) BioCarbon Engineering is collaborating with the Brazilian NGO Imozen, with plans to kickstart the planting in either Brazil or South Africa within the next year. The organization won a $1 million United Arab Emirates Drones for Good competition. “We believe that industrial-scale deforestation can only be countered with industrial-scale reforestation,” said Susan Graham, an engineer for BioCarbon Engineering.
The naked North
Boreal forests in Russia and Canada lost significant tree cover in 2013, according to new data from Global Forest Watch. Russia lost 4.3 million hectares and Canada lost 2.5 million hectares, in part due to fires increasing in frequency and intensity as the climate warms. Because boreal forests maintain vast carbon stocks in their soils, their loss could facilitate an influx of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The data revealed other top deforesters by area as Brazil (2.2 million hectares), the United States (1.7 million hectares), and Indonesia (1.6 million hectares), though Indonesia’s loss was the lowest in nearly a decade.
PUBLICATIONS
The biggest zeros
The UCS has released its 2015 Palm Oil Scorecard that rates major companies on their commitments (or lack thereof) to source palm oil sustainably. Nestlé, Danone, Kellogg’s, Unilever, ConAgraFoods, PepsiCo, Colgate-Palmolive, Henkel, P&G, and L’Oreal all earned scores of 80 or higher, with many brands making significant gains from their 2014 ranking. However, a dozen companies – including The Clorox Company, CVS, Walgreens, Target, and others – earned a ‘0’ score for no commitment to end tropical deforestation. “The scorecard looks behind savvy marketing campaigns and feel-good branding to uncover the environmental impacts these companies condone when they fail to ensure their inputs aren’t harming the environment,” said Lael Goodman of UCS.
In the public disinterest
Monoculture plantations continue to drive illegal deforestation in Peru, according to a new report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). The investigation finds that Grupo Romero is currently the largest palm oil actor in Peru and its planned plantations would result in 25,055 hectares of illegal deforestation. Meanwhile, the Melka Group has requested at least 96,192 additional hectares of public land from the government after having already established 7,000 hectares of illegal plantations. “Procedural loopholes and violations of national law are facilitating palm expansion in the Peruvian Amazon,” the report finds. Peru has announced a potential for at least 1.5 million hectares of palm oil development, but the report finds that this potential is based on an “illogical definition” of suitable land.
JOBS
Senior Communications Associate – Forest Trends
Based in Washington, D.C., the Senior Communications Associate will support the Communications Manager in strengthening Forest Trends’ overall communications, with a special emphasis on media and social media outreach. S/he will be responsible for promoting Forest Trends’ work to the media and also generally strengthen the organization’s outreach by cultivating and organizing media contacts and lists, assisting with mailings (primarily electronic) and other forms of outreach, coordinating event logistics, supporting the publication and communications production process, and performing other duties as assigned. Successful candidates will have a bachelor’s degree and three to five years of relevant experience.
– Read more about the position here
Supply Change Research Assistant – Ecosystem Marketplace
Based in Washington, D.C., the Research Assistant will support Supply Change, a project that provides real-time information on the extent and value of commitment-driven commodity production and demand. The position involves researching public commitments to reduce supply chain impacts on ecosystem degradation, compiling data in Excel, identifying news for the Supply Change web platform, and conducting stakeholder outreach. The successful candidate will have excellent research, organizational and writing skills; an interest in agricultural commodity-related deforestation; and experience with Excel. The position runs for an initial three-month period at a negotiable hourly rate.
– Read more about the position here
Project Development Coordinator, Uganda – co2balance
Based in Uganda, the Project Development Coordinator will work with co2balance partner Carbon Zero Kenya to deliver carbon reduction projects under the Gold Standard, VCS, and the Clean Development Mechanism. The coordinator must serve as the focal point for coordination with the United Kingdom-based project development team. The position requires proven team management experience, a minimum of three years of work experience in an environment-related sector, and good organization and negotiation skills.
– Read more about the position here
Senior Program Officer – United Nations Environment Programme, World Conservation Monitoring Centre
Based in Cambridge, United Kingdom, the Senior Program Officer will support decision-making at the intersection of climate change and biodiversity conservation policies, including REDD, biofuels, and ecosystem-based adaptation. The ideal candidate will have experience working at the interface of science and policy as well as leading project implementation. The role involves extensive international networking and collaboration.
–Read more about the position here
Global Forests Watch Website Assistant – World Resources Institute
Based in Washington, D.C., the Global Forests Watch (GFW) Website Assistant will work closely with the technology and communications teams to maintain the GFW platform and reach target audiences. This will include updating website text, launching campaigns targeted at priority users, and assisting with usability testing. The position requires a bachelor’s degree in environmental science or a related field, a minimum of one year experience, and strong communication skills. Basic programming skills, experience with GitBHub, and knowledge of CartoDB or other mapping technologies are a plus.
– Read more about the position here |
