Greenpeace Says Model Forest Protection Project Proves REDD Offsets Don't Work

Today, Greenpeace released a new report, Carbon Scam, on the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project (NKCAP) in the forests of Bolivia.

NKCAP — funded by American Electric Power, BP-Amoco and Pacificorp, and supported by The Nature Conservancy — is often held up as a success story, but that's not what Greenpeace sees.

The report uses the project to instead illustrate the failures of a carbon offset system, particularly one that relies on sub-national offsets to avoid deforestation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

NKCAP is a REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) project. It is similar to the United Nations' UN-REDD program, which is designed to give developing countries financial incentives to preserve their forests, while giving businesses a way to pay rather than reduce their own carbon emissions.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is a big proponent of the process and considers REDD to be a critical component of any international climate change solution. Deforestation accounts for 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and it eliminates a valuable carbon sink — tropical forests store 25 percent of terrestrial carbon.

Greenpeace see serious problems, though, particularly with sub-national projects.

In its new report, it first points to The Nature Conservancy’s own data on the effectiveness of the Bolivian REDD project to reduce atmospheric CO2. From 1997 to 2009, the estimate for NKCAP's potential emissions reductions dropped by more than 90 percent, from about 55 million to 5.8 million metric tons of CO2.

The Nature Conservancy, responding to that criticism, says that the initial 55 million-ton estimate was just that, an estimate.

“We came up with that number before anyone had much familiarity with what was possible with a project of this type,” says Karen Foerstel, explaining that the numbers were amended once they had some experience on the ground. “It was 13 years ago, before the term REDD was even being used.”

Greenpeace also argues that there is no tangible evidence that deforestation practices stopped in one area weren't simply shifted to another. In fact, Greenpeace reports that Bolivian deforestation has increased nationally during the years of the project. The Nature Conservancy doesn't dispute that, but it counters that Bolivian deforestation rates might have been even higher without NKCAP.

Rolf Skar, Greenpeace USA Senior Forest Campaigner, says it was just such problems with REDD offset projects that kept them from being included in European carbon trading systems.

In response to the Greenpeace report, The Nature Conservancy, the Natural Resources Defense Council and a number of other organizations are defending NKCAP, calling it an important learning project to establish the science and methodologies needed to move toward district-wide and, ultimately, national level REDD implementation with funding through both private and public mechanisms (more details on The Nature Conservancy’s position are available here).

"Sub-national REDD efforts — such as those discussed at the recent Climate Summit in California — are a critical part of protecting the world's forests and combating climate change," says Eric Haxthausen, director of U.S. climate policy for The Nature Conservancy.

"The ultimate goal is to have countries implement national-level activities that can protect forests on the scale needed to effectively halt climate change. We need to get there as quickly as we can. Sub-national programs - at state, provincial and other scales — can be essential stepping stones that help countries quickly and effectively build the experience they need to launch national programs."

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