In April 2024, the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) came under criticism after SBTi’s Board of Trustees put out a statement that opened the door to allowing companies to use carbon offsets to address scope 3 emissions.

The statement came without any consultation with staff working at SBTi or with the SBTi Technical Council.

Doreen Stabinksy, Professor of Global Environmental Politics at College of the Atlantic, is a member of the SBTi Technical Council. “This isn’t a science-based decision,” she told Reuters.

My favourite response to the statement came from Frederic Hache of the Green Finance Observatory:

In a shocking turn of events, a corporate and financial institutions’ climate action organisation decided to favour corporate and financial institutions’ economic interests.

Here are the organisations that partner with the SBTi — none of these organisations is critical of carbon trading:

In July 2024, SBTi published a synthesis of evidence submitted to SBTi on the effectiveness of carbon offsets. The synthesis report was “SBTi’s bombshell rebuke to offsets,” Joe Romm at the University of Pennsylvania commented.

In February 2025, 29 scientists wrote to the SBTi urging SBTi not to allow corporations to use carbon offsets.

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“Ongoing emissions responsibility”

This week, SBTi published version 2 of its Corporate Net Zero Standard.

And surprise, surprise! Carbon credits are in there.

SBTi has come up with something it calls an “ongoing emissions responsibility” recognition programme.

“Companies will continue to emit GHGs on the path to net-zero,” SBTi writes in its new standard. Ongoing emissions responsibility is aimed at recognising companies that buy carbon credits and make other climate contributions.

SBTi describes ongoing emissions responsibility as “a balanced approach to the use of high-integrity carbon credits and other climate contributions as a complement and not a substitute to companies reducing their carbon footprint, through a voluntary recognition program”.

SBTi does not define which “high-integrity carbon credits” will be allowed. The new standard sets “minimum criteria” for companies in the ongoing emissions responsibility framework. And it states that,

The SBTi will develop criteria and processes to recognize relevant third-party frameworks, standards, and programs where applicable.

Other climate contributions refers to using a contribution budget. Companies should set a price per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent ongoing emissions. This sets a “contribution budget” which is to be used to fund “verified mitigation outcomes and other eligible climate actions”.

There are three levels of ongoing emissions responsibility:

• Engaged: companies that cover at least 1% of their emissions by buying carbon credits or using a contribution budget;

• Advanced: companies that cover 10% of their emissions by buying carbon credits, or set a carbon price of US$20 per tCO₂e for the contribution budget; and

• Leadership: large companies that cover 100% of their emissions by buying carbon credits, and set a carbon price of US$80 per tCO₂e. Small companies have to cover 10% of their emissions and set a carbon price of US$80 per tCO₂e.

From 2035, large companies have to buy carbon dioxide removal credits, starting at 1% of ongoing emissions and increasing to 100% by the net zero target year.

“Best efforts”

SBTi’s new standard allows a loophole for companies that fail to achieve their net zero targets. “The updated Standard is built on a best-efforts framework,” the new standard explains.

Under the new rules, a company that fails to meet its target can argue that it made “best efforts”.

“The one property that gave the system its meaning,” Robert Nasi, CIFOR’s director general, comments, “is that a target was something you could fail.”

“Whether the new architecture constitutes pragmatic realism about scope 3 or a managed retreat dressed in the language of implementation will be decided entirely by documents the SBTi has not yet written, and that is itself the finding: the standard's credibility is now a forward contract on its own future guidance.”

SBTi will not publicly disclose companies that fail to meet their targets.

Big Tech lobbying

The Financial Times reports that Big Tech companies lobbied the SBTi to allow companies to buy certificates linked to lower-carbon products — even though the companies did not buy or use these lower-carbon products.

Under pressure from the industry, SBTi dropped proposed rules that would have made it difficult for Big Tech to claim that their massively polluting gas-fuelled data centres were running on renewable energy.

Kenza Bryan writes that four people familiar with the decision told the Financial Times about SBTi’s decision to drop the proposed rules. Bryan writes that,

Companies argued that the proposal was too onerous and could backfire by discouraging clean energy investments, the people said, despite research showing that such a policy could slash emissions.

A group of 26 NGOs wrote to the SBTi’s CEO David Kennedy describing the weakening of the standard as “unacceptable”. The NGOs urge SBTi to follow the science rather than corporate pressure. They write that,

If it stays on this current disappointing path, it will be a self-admission that the SBTi has become an unscientific target setting body without real credibility in the climate and clean energy space. It will be an irreparable self-inflicted wound to its integrity, utility and relevance going forward.

In February 2026, the UN’s Article 6.4 Supervisory Body approved the first carbon credits under the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism. The project generating the credits is a so-called “clean-cooking” project in Myanmar. The project distributes efficient cookstoves that are intended to reduce smoke inside homes and use less wood, therefore reducing pressure on forests.

In a statement, Simon Stiell, the UN climate change executive secretary said,

“The first credits to be issued through the UN carbon market under the Paris Agreement come from a clean‑cooking project, and they show how this mechanism can support solutions that make a big difference in people’s daily lives, as well as channeling finance to where it delivers real-life benefits on the ground. The opportunities presented by this UN carbon market across all regions are vast, particularly now that strong environmental safeguards, robust standards, and a clear system for redress are in place to ensure integrity, inclusiveness and efficiency.”

But a new report about the project notes that the project is “being implemented in regions ravaged by conflict, displacement, and state-sponsored violence”. The approval of the project’s carbon credits under the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism “signals a profound disconnect between the lofty rhetoric of ‘high integrity’ carbon markets and the complex, often devastating realities on the ground”.

The report is published by the Global Forest Coalition, Myanmar Policy Institute, Plan 1.5, Biofuelwatch, and Gibson Climate Justice Lab, and is titled, “Carbon Credits Under Fire: Myanmar, Crimes Against Humanity, and the Crisis of Credibility Facing the UN’s “High-Integrity” Carbon Markets.”

Civil war and human rights violations

On 1 February 2021, a civil war started in Myanmar following an attempted military coup. The military violently cracked down on mass anti-coup demonstrations. Nearly 100,000 people have been killed in the civil war and 3.8 million people have been displaced.

The cookstove project started generating carbon credits one month before the military coup. The project is run by a South Korean NGO called Climate Change Center (CCC). Apart from that first month, all the carbon credits generated from the project were issued during the civil war.

The UN Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM) has reported allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Myanmar carried out by the military regime. Since the coup IIMM has received many reports of massive rights violations including torture, sexual assault against people in custody, aerial bombings, attack, and killing of prisoners of war.

In November 2024, the International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan issued an arrest warrant against Min Aung Hlaing, the head of the Myanmar military regime, for crimes against humanity committed against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority.

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Working with the military junta

The new report points out that the cookstove project is operating in some of Myanmar’s most conflict-affected regions. The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation (MONREC) is under the control of the military junta and is under EU sanctions for contributing “to the funding of the military regime”.

MONREC is responsible for the exploitation and trade of gemstones, pearls and other mineral resources, and timber from Myanmar. Much of this trade is illegal. MONREC is the implementation partner for the cookstove project. CCC continued working with MONREC after the military coup, as if nothing had happened.

The report quotes Yadanar Maung, spokesperson for Justice for Myanmar, saying that,

“Partnering with MONREC in a project tied to international carbon market mechanisms lends false legitimacy to the military junta and whitewashes its international crimes.”

Companies including Korea Electric Power Corporation, SK Group, and Industrial Bank of Korea, are buying carbon credits from a military regime that is committing horrific human rights abuses.

The report raises concerns about whether the carbon credits represent genuine emissions reductions. Analysis carried out by Plan 1.5, Carbon Market Watch, and the Carbon Trading Project at the University of California Berkeley concluded that the cookstove project may have been over-credited by seven times despite the supposedly more rigorous emissions calculations under Article 6.4.

In a press release, Global Forest Coalition’s Oli Munnion says,

“The UN has presented Article 6.4 as a new generation of high-integrity carbon markets. If the very first project approved under the mechanism raises this many questions about human rights, governance, monitoring and emissions accounting, then the credibility of the entire system is at stake.”

The report makes a series of recommendations to the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body about the cookstove project (PoA 10471):

• Immediately suspend any further issuance, transfer, or use of credits associated with PoA 10471.

• Conduct an independent review of the project’s compliance with all applicable methodological, environmental, and social requirements.

• Revoke all credits issued under PoA 10471 and disqualify it from future issuances under PACM if the review determines that the project has failed to meet PACM requirements and safeguards, or that issued credits do not represent genuine and verifiable emissions reductions.

Danny Cullenward, a Senior Fellow with the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, has resigned from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s Independent Standards Board.

“The Protocol is openly violating its own rules,” Cullenward writes on BlueSky, “and has effectively delegated forest carbon accounting standards to a secret, industry-led working group.”

Cullenward posted his resignation letter on BlueSky — it is also available in full below.

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol was launched in the late 1990s. It is run by the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council on Sustainable Development. It is the leading standard for corporate carbon accounting with more than 22,000 companies using its methodologies to report their emissions.

The land sector standard

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol has been working on a land sector standard for several years. In January 2024, The Washington Post reported that the draft guidelines, published in autumn 2023 were criticised by dozens of environmental groups and academics. The proposed rules would allow companies to claim destructive products such as timber, paper, beef, and milk are “carbon neutral” by making small changes that don’t actually reduce emissions.

William Moomaw, an environmental policy professor at Tufts University, told the Washington Post that,

“The process was incrementally eroded until it became fully captured by the companies who want to get credit for addressing climate change without changing what they are doing.”

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“Kafkaesque”

Kate Dooley, a lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, is a member of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s technical working group on forest carbon accounting. In April 2026, she spoke to Emily Pontecorvo, a journalist with Heatmap, about a discussion over how companies should account for carbon emissions from harvesting forests, land management and buying wood products.

There were two proposals, one from forest industry and landowner organisations and one from independent scientists. The technical working group held a series of meetings over a six month period, but could not reach consensus.

In spring 2025, the technical working group gave both proposals to the Independent Standards Board. But the board also could not reach consensus. In January 2026, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol published the land sector standard without any guidance for forest carbon accounting. Companies could use whatever method they wanted, Heatmap reports, as long as they disclose how they calculated the emissions.

Dooley and other scientists in the technical working group referred to scientific papers that supported their position. Another member of the group, Nathan Truitt, executive vice president of climate funding at the American Forest Foundation, argued that the same papers made the opposite point. It was “Kafkaesque,” Dooley told Heatmap.

In January 2026, Dooley received a copy of a formal complaint made by Truitt in April 2025 challenging the scientists’ expertise and impartiality. She also found out that the Independent Standards Board had asked outside scientists for their opinions on the two proposals. Dooley told Heatmap that she was shocked that she hadn’t known about this at the time.

Cullenward and Keith’s formal complaint

In April 2026, Cullenward wrote a report about the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s governance structure published by the Kleinman Center. He wrote that,

Limited representation from scientists and environmental NGOs, along with an opaque grievance process, risks undermining the enforcement and integrity of the Protocol’s own governance rules.

He recommended mandatory representation from independent scientists and environmental NGOs in the Protocol’s decision-making bodies and that additional transparency measures should be put in place.

Cullenward and another board member, Heather Keith, an Australian forest ecologist, filed a formal complaint with the leadership of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Cullenward wrote in the Kleinman Center paper that the complaint alleges “multiple violations of the Protocol’s governance rules”.

A spokesperson from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol told Heatmap that an independent review found “some process shortcomings” but “no material breach” of the organisation’s rules.

“They buried it,” Cullenward writes.

Cullenward’s resignation letter:

08 June 2026

Geraldine Matchett
Chair, Steering Committee
Greenhouse Gas Protocol

Craig Hanson
Managing Director
World Resources Institute

Dominic Waughray
Executive Vice President
World Business Council on Sustainable Development

Dear Ms. Matchett, Mr. Hanson, and Mr. Waughray,

I write to resign my position on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s Independent Standards Board, effective immediately. I no longer have any confidence in the Protocol’s governance structure and strenuously object to your organisations’ treatment of scientific information — and scientists themselves — in the deliberations over forest carbon accounting.

Last year the Board received two competing proposals from the experts appointed to a technical working group. One proposal was authored by the group’s independent scientists and the other was produced by landowner and forest industry organisations.

Remarkably, the forest industry proposal would assign carbon removals to forest harvests. This is the opposite of what physically happens when a forest is cut down: forest harvests and wood consumption cause emissions, not removals. But under the industry rule, recycled paper would be counted as a climate harm while cutting down an old-growth forest to produce virgin paper would be counted as a climate benefit.

The independent scientists in the technical working group gave you consistent feedback that the industry proposal would create severe environmental impacts. They stressed that it is scientifically invalid and far exceeds already-incorrect claims that wood use is “carbon neutral” — a position that has been widely rejected by forest and climate scientists, including in comments to the Protocol from the European Academy of Sciences.

These concerns should have been addressed by the Board in a careful deliberation that centers scientific integrity, as is required by the Protocol’s decision-making hierarchy. But before transmitting the competing proposals to the Board, the secretariat staff and Board Chair acted on a confidential industry complaint that falsely alleged the technical working group scientists were biased and unaware of relevant academic literature.

In response, the Board chair and secretariat unilaterally determined that the Board needed to hear from outside experts, who were presented as neutral arbiters of a contested scientific debate. What the Board was not told is that these outside experts were named in the industry complaint as individuals who would support the industry position.

Before filing a formal complaint in February 2026 about these and several other concerning matters, I worked with Mr. Hanson for months in an attempt to reach a resolution. Mr. Hanson stated his belief that my concerns would harm the reputation of the Protocol if they were made public, and I agreed to work with him constructively to resolve matters internally. I hoped that Mr. Hanson and the World Resources Institute cared sufficiently about scientific integrity to prevent this process from devolving further, but my efforts to pursue internal accountability were met with retaliation. I then had no choice but to file a formal complaint along with my Board colleague, Dr. Heather Keith — the only other Board member with scientific expertise in climate change and forest carbon accounting.

As Chair of the Steering Committee, Ms. Matchett had a choice about how to handle the complaint Dr. Keith and I filed, along with its 200-page appendix of primary sources. She chose to cover it up. She appointed an outside mediator who:

• Was not allowed to speak with the scientists on the technical working group;

• Had not read the full complaint when he met with me to discuss it;

• Refused to meet with me after reading the full complaint;

• Stated that he was only authorized for 30 hours of work, and that he did not have time to watch recordings of key Board meetings as a result; and

• Provided Dr. Keith and myself with a brief, 5-page response that we were told we cannot even share with other Board members without violating on our non-disclosure agreements.

Ms. Matchett then declared that the Protocol’s complaints and concerns procedure does not require any public documentation of “internal” Board member complaints (or their official responses) and closed the matter without any public accountability — despite disclosure being required for “external” complaints.

Meanwhile, it has been five months since the Land Sector and Removals Standard was published without any guidance on forest carbon accounting and more than a year since the technical working group shared its proposals with the Board.

Although the Board approved a set of questions for public comment earlier this month, Board members were advised that the Steering Committee may now be considering a public comment period that could last up to seven months. In nearly two decades of work in public and private regulatory processes around the world, I have never encountered a comment period of this length.

Rather than serve a legitimate purpose, I believe this delay will further delegate control to industry interests. And to be clear, these concerns are not speculative. At a Board meeting earlier this month, a World Business Council on Sustainable Development (WBCSD) representative confirmed that forest carbon accounting is within the mandate of a joint working group operating between the Protocol and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). As documented in a recent report I wrote for the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, these new joint working groups operate with confidential membership that is heavily tilted in favor of industry interests. Specifically, the WBCSD representative said that the joint working group may draw on existing ISO standards that appear to allow the industry proposal to assign carbon removals to forest harvests and wood consumption.

After manipulating the Board’s decision-making process on forest carbon accounting and withholding the technical working group documents from the public for more than a year, the Protocol is now planning an extended public comment period on issues that have already been delegated to a secret, industry-dominated drafting process.

I again reiterate my request that the Protocol publish all documents from the forest carbon accounting technical working group, all related complaints and official responses, all pilot testing results evaluating the industry proposal, and any written agreement(s) documenting the Protocol’s working relationship with the ISO that may exist.

I regret that we have reached this impasse, but I will not be intimidated or silenced about what is happening. Nor will I take any further part in it.

Danny Cullenward, JD, PhD
Shleifer Senior Fellow
Kleinman Center for Energy Policy
University of Pennsylvania

The Livelihoods’ Mangrove Restoration project aims to restore degraded mangroves on an area of more than 10,000 hectares in the Sine Saloum and Casamance deltas in Senegal. The project has so far sold almost 500,000 carbon credits.

Most of the companies that have bought carbon credits from this project have done so anonymously. One of the few that has acknowledged buying credits is an investment firm called Robeco Institutional Asset Management.

Amaury Sport Organisation bought 5,500 carbon credits to offset the emissions of the 2014 Paris Marathon. Carbon credits from the project also offset emissions from the 2014 Michelin Bibendum Challenge in China and the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games.

The project is run by the Paris-based Livelihoods Funds, which was created by food-products corporation Danone. 20 firms invest in the Livelihoods Funds, including Hermès, Michelin, La Poste, Schneider Electric, KfW, Crédit Agrocole, and Mars.

Colonial conservation

This project has appeared twice on REDD-Monitor. In 2024, journalist Jack Thompson wrote an article for Hakai Magazine following his research into the project and interviews with villagers who planted mangroves under the project. Thompson wrote that,

International companies and NGOs pay local workers substandard wages, obscure their own finances, and rarely involve communities in project designs. Local communities also receive no share of the revenue generated by the projects they contribute to, aside from meager wages for planting mangroves.

Only 5.2% of the project budget went to communities. “It’s an injustice that echoes the colonial model of many 20th-century conservation projects in Africa,” Thompson wrote.

Green grabbing

Earlier this year, the project featured in one of the “Crooked Carbon Business” briefings written by Simon Counsell and Jutta Kill. In the briefing, they refer to the work of Marie Christine Cormier-Salem and Jacques Panfili, both of the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development.

In a 2016 paper, Cormier-Salem and Panfili wrote that,

[T]he extensive planting of a single mangrove species, Rhizophora mangle, is a means of green grabbing. The buying of carbon offsets by industrial conglomerates has disempowered local communities . . .

Counsell and Kill note that carbon credit ratings agency BeZero gave the project a “BBB” rating, meaning “a moderate likelihood of avoiding or removing 1 tonne of CO₂e”. BeZero highlighted the risk of non-permanence and “notable over-crediting risk due to potential over-estimation of soil carbon”.

Counsell and Kill also note that a 2017 verification reports for the project states that,

not all project areas are completely covered with trees as rd. 25% of the sample plots measured in the course of the 2nd verification period showed an almost 100% loss of tree cover. Subsequently the accuracy of the calculation of the emission reductions are negatively impacted.

The auditing firm TÜV SÜD South Asia recommended planting with another species of mangrove, Avicennia. The next verification report, carried out by TÜV NORD CERT in 2021 noted that no such replanting had taken place.

To make matters worse, in the third monitoring report the project proponent used a significantly higher value for carbon stored in the soils of the replanted areas. Counsell and Kill report that this resulted in nearly 40% more carbon credits than anticipated in the initial project document.

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“Ghost carbon”

Julien Andrieu is a professor of geography at Côte d’Azur University. In 2020, he was lead author of a paper published in Forest Ecology and Management looking into natural regeneration of mangroves in the Saloum Delta based on remote sensing and botanical field data.

The authors found that 96% of mangrove regeneration is “spontaneous and linked to the rainfall recovery”. They conclude that,

[T]he mangrove ecosystem has shown resilience to rainfall and salinity variation, which advance our understanding of potential future climate change impacts to mangroves and their ability to recover from drought-induced mortality. We estimate that the diverse process of replantation contribution is diminutive to the spontaneous regeneration of mangroves in the Saloum Delta, and that the merit of replantation programs should be reevaluated. Narratives regarding the degradation of the Senegalese mangrove, the contributing pressures of human activity, and environmental politics should also be revised to reflect the findings of scholarly research.

Andrieu’s aim in his research is “to see if there were any lessons that could be learned to improve future restoration efforts”.

In a recent article in The Conversation, Andrieu writes that,

We recently discovered that more than a third of the restoration plots were a complete failure. There were no surviving mangroves at all in this area. On the rest of the land, the results ranged from less than 5% to a real success (100%).

The failure rate of the trees was not properly taken into consideration when calculating how much carbon dioxide they could capture. This meant the climate benefits were overstated.

Andrieu argues that the carbon project was “based on a poor understanding of ecology”. Part of the 10,000-hectare project area was not fit for mangroves. The project instructed villagers to plant mangrove seedlings in salty mudflats. These are not suitable for mangroves unless they are regularly flooded by the tides. The project planted areas covering up to 55 hectares that were too far away from tidal channels.

Some plots were up to 9 kilometres away from existing mangrove areas. The sites had different ecological conditions from natural mangrove habitats. “Replanting should have started closest to existing mangroves,” Andrieu writes.

As a result, 36% of the mangrove plots failed completely. The remaining 64% had at least some surviving mangroves, but survival within these plots was low. Overall, only 18.3% to 20.5% of the planted mangroves survived across the project area.

The consulting firm Agresta carried out the monitoring reports for the project. Agresta measured a sample of mangrove trees to calculate how much carbon the trees stored. They assumed that all the trees across the 10,000-hectare project area had survived and grown.

“Because so many trees died or never grew,” Andrieu writes, “the total amount of carbon stored in the trees was overestimated.”

Andrieu’s research team estimates that about 168,000 carbon credits were “ghost carbon” and “this has no benefit to people or the environment”.

I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to talk about an article published in The Times last week.

Really? I didn’t have you down as a Times reader.

Generally speaking, I’m not. Let’s just say I’m not a fan of Rupert Murdoch and his climate denialism. Or of billionaire-owned newspapers in general. Which is not to say that everything in The Times is rubbish, of course.

Why do you want to talk about this particular The Times article?

Well, Jeremy Freund, Chief Climate Officer at Wildlife Works, referred to it in a post on LinkedIn. He writes that the article “refreshingly captures a dichotomy that has been building for years and I’m thrilled to see it finally get some exposure”.

Let’s start with what The Times article says. We can come back to Freund later on.

The Times article starts with this sentence: “Milton Friedman called it ‘the suicidal impulse of the business community’.”

We’re diving straight into the neoliberal deep end then.

Oh yes. That shouldn’t be a surprise, given that the author of The Times article is Ryan Bourne, an economist at the Cato Institute.

Remind me. What is the Cato Institute?

It’s a neoliberal think tank based in Washington DC. It was founded in 1974 by Charles Koch, Murray Rothbard, and Edward Crane.

The Cato Institute’s position on the climate crisis, is that “Global warming is indeed real, and human activity has been a contributor since 1975.”

1975?

The Cato Institute doesn’t give any source for this date. Obviously, human activity, largely through burning fossil fuels, has influenced the climate since long before 1975. A 2016 paper in Nature found that greenhouse gases began warming the world’s oceans in the 1830s.

The Cato Institute is only out by 145 years.

Cato Institute’s “Global Warming” statement hasn’t changed since at least January 2013 — the first time it was saved on the Internet Archive.

I don’t hold out any hope at all that they’ll correct it now just because of some peer reviewed scientific paper in Nature from 10 years ago.

Anything else about the Cato Institute’s position on “Global Warming”?

I’m afraid so. According to the Cato Institute, “global warming” is a “very complicated and difficult issue”.

The Cato Institute is reading straight from the tobacco disinformation playbook, then.

Yes. In the 1950s, the tobacco industry launched a public relations campaign to cast doubt on the science that provided mounting evidence of the health dangers of smoking.

In 1969, an internal memo from tobacco firm Brown & Williamson stated that,

Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy . . . if we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, there is an opportunity to put across the real facts about smoking and health.

The fossil fuel industry has used the same strategy — even employing the same PR agents that the tobacco industry used.

It gets worse, believe it or not. Despite the urgent need for immediate action to address the climate crisis, the Cato Institute argues that “there is ample time” to develop the technologies needed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

The reality, of course, is that we need to stop extracting and burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible.

I don’t suppose there’s any mention of fossil fuels in the Cato Institute’s “Global Warming” statement, is there?

No, of course not. And here’s why: Between 1986 and 2015, the Cato Institute received more than US$17 million from various Koch Foundations.

The Cato Institute was originally incorporated under the name “The Charles Koch Foundation, Inc.” and was funded by billionaires Charles and David Koch (who died in 2019). Koch Industries, the Koch family business, is a huge conglomerate that generates its profits largely from fossil fuels, but is also involved in chemicals, cattle, pulp and paper, and synthetics.

Koch Industries is one of the biggest climate villains on the planet — not only because of its greenhouse gas emissions but because of the millions that the Koch brothers have poured into organisations promoting climate denial. The Cato Institute is just one of these organisations.

The Koch brothers also assembled a network of more than 600 libertarian wealthy donors, which US historian Nancy MacLean described in 2025 as “the largest private political network in the world”.

This network has become a powerful delivery vehicle for its libertarian and increasingly authoritarian agenda. We’ve seen its fingerprints in the Brexit campaign, in billionaire support for fascist parties in Europe, in the growing collaboration of far-right parties and neoliberal think tanks, and in the ascent of the Trump administration itself.

Nice guys, the Koch brothers.

I suppose so, if you’re keen on fascism and the destruction of the planet’s living ecosystem.

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Let’s go back to Ryan Bourne, the Cato Institute economist, and writer of The Times piece. Any more on him?

Before he moved to the Cato Institute, he was head of public policy at the Institute of Economic Affairs in the UK.

The IEA was formed by Anthony Fisher, a former banker, World War II pilot, and chicken farmer. He read the 20-page edited version of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” that was published in Readers’ Digest magazine in April 1945.

Fisher didn’t like the post-war Labour government’s economic policies. Apparently, he took a particular dislike to the Egg Marketing Board.

Fisher visited Hayek at the London School of Economics. He told Hayek he believed his arguments and asked him what he should do. Hayek advised him not to go into politics, but to set up a think tank.

First Fisher needed money. He brought factory chicken farming from the US to Britain and expanded his operations to more than 1 million birds. He made enough money to set up his think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs.

The IEA has been extraordinarily influential. Its 2025 accounts reveal that it appeared on British media more than 4,000 times, or an average of almost 11 times a day, in the previous 12 months. (That’s down from 14 times a day in 2023.)

In 2019, LBC radio presenter James O’Brien described IEA as a “hard-right lobby group for vested interests of big business, fossil fuels, tobacco, junk food”. When the IEA complained to the UK media regulator Ofcom about O’Brien’s comments, Ofcom cleared LBC of any wrongdoing,

Anything else we need to know about Fisher, before we get back to The Times article?

In 1981, Fisher founded the Atlas Network. It promotes limited government, free enterprise, personal liberty, and personal responsibility. It promotes neoliberalism, in other words.

Nearly 500 think tanks worldwide are Atlas Network partners.

In 2024, writing in The Guardian, George Monbiot outlined the Atlas Network’s links to right wing politicians including Rishi Sunak, Javier Milei, and Donald Trump. Project 2025 was written by the Heritage Foundation, a member of the Atlas Network.

Also in 2024, Anne-Sophie Simpère investigated the Atlas Network’s links with — and funding from — ExxonMobil, and its role in playing down the climate crisis.

Needless to say, the Cato Institute is also a member of the Atlas Network.

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So, we know who wrote the article. What did Bourne actually write?

Bourne, as you’ll remember, opens his Times article by referring to Milton Friedman.

In 1989, Friedman won the National Association for Business Economics’ Adam Smith Award. He gave a lecture titled, “The Suicidal Impulse of the Business Community”.

Friedman argues that “corporations, and especially large corporations, seeking to pursue through political means what they regard as their own interests, do not do a good job of evaluating their interest. The policies they pursue and promote are very often adverse to their own interests.”

In his lecture, Friedman argues against tariffs and protectionism, against banking regulation, for the privatisation of education, and against regulation of Big Tech.

“When it comes to politics and philanthropy, businessmen often fund causes that work not just against their company’s interests,” Bourne writes, “but against free enterprise itself.”

Bourne apparently doesn’t consider the fact that he’s working for a think tank funded by massively polluting businesses. Neither does he consider what Friedman might have thought about corporations funding right wing free market think tanks, like the Cato Institute.

In his Times article, Bourne gives the example of Big Tech and the current resistance against AI data centres. According to Bourne, for two decades Big Tech has “helped bankroll a climate activist ecosystem persuading Westerners that fossil-fuel energy, industrial expansion and economic growth were pushing the planet towards catastrophe”.

Wait, are you seriously trying to tell me that resistance to AI data centres is a result of Big Tech’s funding for climate organisations?

That’s Bourne’s argument, not mine. Incidentally, Bourne doesn’t mention that the Cato Institute has received funding from Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.

Brian Merchant, who writes the excellent Blood in the Machine Substack met some of the protesters against data centres when he attended at a recent city council meeting in Monterey Park, California.

He describes them as “a remarkably diverse group” of people concerned about higher electricity costs, noise, and air pollution. In return they see temporary jobs and a technology that would profit others, quite probably at their direct expense. Some of them raise concerns about AI involvement in surveillance and the US war-machine. At least one raises concerns about “techno-fascism”.

“In that context,” Merchant writes, “it seems condescending to imply that affluent environmentalists are running this movement.”

Does Bourne provide any evidence to back up his argument about Big Tech’s funding driving the opposition to AI data centres?

No. But he mentions a “recent Wall Street Journal column by Barton Swaim” about former Google CEO Eric Schmidt being booed after comments about AI that he made during a graduation speech at the University of Arizona.

Swaim’s article is titled, “The Panic Industry’s New Target.” It’s almost certainly where Bourne got the idea from for his Times article.

Swaim claims that many of the people opposing construction of data centres are attached to “501(c)(3) organizations” (charities and foundations) who “got their talking points from national nonprofits supported by some of the same moneyed outfits the Schmidt and Gates foundations spent the last two decades bankrolling.”

This claim is not held up by reporting by Blood in the Machine, or Inside Climate News, or More Perfect Union, or Wired to name just a few of the publications writing about the impacts of AI.

Do we need to know who Swaim is?

He’s a conservative opinion writer at the Wall Street Journal. Which, incidentally is owned by Dow Jones, a division of Murdoch’s News Corp. He writes of “climate alarmism” and “climate-change ideology”. He argues that it “should have been obvious” that climate science is “in no way settled”.

Hmmm. Another climate denier at a Murdoch newspaper. So what does he have to say about Schmidt being booed?

Swaim writes that, after being booed,

Schmidt then continued with his prepared remarks: “There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics is fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.” He went on to urge graduates not to let fear rob them of personal agency — a fine, saccharine message.

Except that Schmidt was probably being booed because many of the graduates have not been able to find jobs. Many are blaming AI.

Instead of considering the impact of AI on graduate jobs, Swaim asks “Where does Mr. Schmidt thing young people got the idea that ‘the climate is breaking’?”

A sensible answer to this question would be from climate scientists, NASA, the IPCC, or even from reading newspapers not owned by Murdoch.

Swaim’s answer is that the fear comes in part from the “scores of climate-panic groups” that the Schmidt Family Foundation’s 11th Hour Project has funded over the past two decades.

“One detail particularly amuses,” Swaim writes, “When 11th Hour first appeared, in 2006, it funded screenings of Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ a documentary designed to terrorize viewers with 90 minutes of bleak prophecies, now happily exploded.”

That’s not true. Gore got most things right, and exaggerated a few.

And to state the obvious, the climate crisis has not gone away.

Both Bourne and Swaim end their articles by trying to tell us that AI is good for us. We need data centres, they say, to watch Netflix and football, make online payments, and buy airline tickets.

A recent report by the International Energy Agency looks at energy and AI. It finds that energy consumption for AI queries (such as simple text queries) has “declined massively” in recent years with improved software and hardware. However, new energy-intensive AI applications such as video generation, reasoning, and agentic tasks are increasingly being used. The International Energy Agency reports that, “These kinds of tasks can consume hundred or thousands of times more energy per query than simple text generation.”

Do Swaim or Bourne mention any of the problems with AI data centres?

Swaim mentions the vast increase in the numbers of data centres to meet AI’s demands. And the increase in energy needed.

Bourne mentions the water needed for cooling, but writes that “water use is localised, and cooling can often use recycled water”.

Localised water use is clearly a problem if you happen to live next to a data centre that is sucking away your drinking water. The water for cooling systems has to be clean, to prevent bacteria growth or corrosion in the cooling system. That means using mostly drinking water. And most AI data centres use evaporative cooling. Closed loop systems cost more and use more energy.

AI data centres consume water for both cooling and electricity generation.

In October 2025, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water, Pedro Arrojo Agudo, called for a moratorium on new data centres:

States and international institutions should promote a moratorium on the development of data centres and provide clear information on their water and energy consumption and the risks that they pose to climate change, the sustainability of aquatic ecosystems, the human rights of impoverished populations and the survival of vulnerable productive sectors.

And in December 2025, more than 230 organisations in the US demanded a moratorium on data centres in the US.

Bourne tells us that the effect of data centres on electricity bills depends on “whether governments allow enough reliable generation and grid capacity to be built”.

So governments should massively expand electricity production and grid capacity to meet the surging demand of AI data centres? Whether that involves coal, oil, gas, nuclear, or biofuels?

According to Bourne, yes. Of course, the Cato Institute’s position on “global warming” is that “there is ample time” to develop the technology that will miraculously stop the climate crisis. In the meantime, then, it’s drill baby drill.

Many of the new AI data centres currently being built are powered by fossil gas. Many are following the model developed at Elon Musk’s Colossus AI data centre in Memphis. Musk installed 35 “mobile” gas turbines to power the plant. As a result communities living near the plant are increasingly suffering from asthma, cancer, and respiratory diseases.

In Texas, for example, about 300 data centres are currently operational. 100 more are under construction and 100 more are planned. Texas has 80 GW of fossil gas power plants under construction. About half of these plants will provide power exclusively to data centres without connecting to the Texas electrical grid.

One of the new AI data centres, GW Ranch, will generate almost 8 GW of fossil gas electricity. That’s enough to provide electricity for more than half the homes in Texas. All of that electricity will be off the grid — entirely for that one data centre.

This may relieve pressure on the electricity grid and avoid increases in electricity bills, but it will also result in additional very large greenhouse gas emissions.

These fossil gas operations also generate fine particulate matter which are detrimental to human health. One study of the healthcare related costs for people living near to a similar data centre in Virginia could be between US$53 million and US$99 million per year.

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So, why on earth is Wildlife Works’ Jeremy Freund so “thrilled” about this piece of pro-AI, pro-pollution, climate denialism in The Times?

Read Freund’s LinkedIn comment yourself — here it is in full:

Wow. That’s quite a ride. Capitalism for good, eh?

One of the problems that carbon market proponents have always had is that they need a very large, very polluting, expanding industry to buy carbon credits. That’s why carbon traders have always been close to the fossil fuel industry. And the aviation industry. The AI boom has everything the carbon traders have ever dreamed of — a huge increase in fossil fuels to power data centres, vast amounts of money, commitments to “net zero”, and a complete disregard of the impacts on either people or the environment.

Which explains why we have a carbon trader publicly admitting that he couldn’t care less about the climate crisis, or about extractivism, logging, mining, industrial agriculture, fossil fuels, water supplies, human health, or the impacts of AI — as long as the extractivists buy carbon credits.

Joe Sanberg, the co-founder of fintech bank and carbon trading company Aspiration Partners, has been sentenced to 14 years in prison for defrauding investors and lenders. In October 2025, Sanberg pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud resulting in losses of US$248 million.

In a statement, first assistant US attorney Bill Essayli, said,

“This serial fraudster used his Cinderella-like background, impressive educational credentials, and virtue signaling skills to swindle investors and lenders out of hundreds of millions of dollars. This criminal case serves as a warning: Anyone can get duped by a con man.”

REDD-Monitor first wrote about Aspiration in 2022, after the company partnered with the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank’s private sector lending arm.

The deal was part of IFC’s Carbon Opportunities Fund, which IFC described as, “a global investment platform that will raise private capital for an innovative model to source, tokenize and sell high-quality, verified carbon credits”.

It appears that the IFC’s due diligence did not pick up on Sanberg’s fraud.

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Sanberg’s fraud

Sanberg’s scheme ran from 2020 and continued into 2025. He used his large share of Aspiration stock to defraud lenders and investors.

In 2020 and 2021, Sanberg and Ibrahim AlHusseini, who were both on Aspiration’s board of directors, fraudulently obtained US$45 million in loans from two lenders, by pledging shares of Sanberg’s Aspiration stock.

Sanberg and AlHusseini falsified AlHusseini’s bank and brokerage statements, fraudulently inflating his assets by more than US$200 million at one point.

Starting in 2021, Sanberg concealed from investors that he was the source of millions of dollars paid to Aspiration. Sanberg recruited companies and individuals to enter agreements with Aspiration. The companies and individuals committed to pay tens of thousands of dollars per month to Aspiration for tree planting services. The money for these payments came from Sanberg.

Reporting by Bloomberg reveals that these companies included:

• Young Israel, an orthodox synagogue in Beverley Hills that agreed to pay US$25,000 per month to Aspiration for tree planting.

• A non-profit called the Hidden Light Institute, that produces documentaries about Israeli figures and events, agreed to pay US$300,000 per month to Aspiration for tree planting. That’s almost ten times Hidden Light’s revenue for the whole of 2021.

• A company called 539 N. Alta Vista LLC, apparently named after a house in Los Angeles, agreed to pay US$50,000 per month.

• ETZ Partners LLC was formed within days of its deal with Aspiration by another LLC that was registered anonymously in Delaware. ETZ agreed a multimillion-dollar tree planting deal with Aspiration.

Sanberg made other deals were with an actor, several retired footballers, and a model, all from Colombia.

As a result of these sham deals, Aspiration’s financial statements fraudulently showed much higher revenue than the company actually received. Sanberg continued to try get investments in Aspiration into 2025.

Aspiration under investigation

In 2023, Meta signed a deal to buy 6.75 million carbon credits from Aspiration. In a July 2023 blog post about the deal, Aspiration wrote that,

Meta selected Aspiration for this partnership in large part due to the company’s rigorous standard for evaluating nature-based carbon removal initiatives — ensuring that the projects it supports are high quality with verifiable carbon removal and well-managed risks to the durability of carbon storage.

The following year, the Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission started an investigation into whether Aspiration had misled customers about the quality of the carbon offsets it was selling.

At the time, Aspiration listed three projects from which it was buying carbon offsets:

• Renewable Wind Power Project by Adani, Gujarat, India

• Northern Kenya Improved Grasslands, Samburu County, Kenya

• Mai Ndombe REDD+ Project, Mai Ndombe Province, Democratic Republic of Congo

All of these projects are extremely problematic.

Climate Home pointed out in 2024 that,

Experts have long written off the vast majority of credits produced from renewable energy as junk because they often already provide the cheapest sources of power in most of the world and selling offsets to fund them does not have any additional impact on emissions.

The carbon credits ratings agency Calyx Global gave the Adani wind project an E rating — its lowest possible score. “Calyx Global has Low Confidence that the carbon credit reliably represents a unique and permanent metric tonne of emission reduction or removal.”

The Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon project in Kenya has been suspended twice by Verra, the Washington DC-based carbon certification company. The project covers an area of almost 2 million hectares and is carried out by the Northern Rangelands Trust.

More than 100,000 people live inside the project area, including Indigenous Peoples who are pastoralists whose livelihoods depends on cattle, camels, sheep, and goats. The project imposes “planned rotational grazing” which is a concept dreamed up by a Zimbabwean rancher called Allan Savory but which has little or no scientific backing.

The Mai Ndombe REDD project in the Democratic Republic of Congo is run by Wildlife Works. The project was set up without a meaningful process of free, prior and informed consent of the people living there.

The number of carbon credits generated by the project was exaggerated by selecting a reference area 600 kilometres away that has been almost completely deforested.

Local communities have received few, if any, benefits from the project.

Calyx Global gave the Mai Ndombe project its lowest rating: E.

Two REDD projects in Brazil

We got another glimpse into Aspiration’s carbon deals with a court case between Zero Carbon Holdings and Aspiration. In 2021, Aspiration was trying to win a deal to offset emissions from the 2022 World Cup, held in Qatar. Aspiration was hoping to buy carbon credits for the World Cup deal from a company called Zero Carbon Holdings.

The carbon credits were supposed to be generated from two REDD projects in Brazil: the Zero Carbon Aripuanã Valley REDD project 1; and the 413 REDD project. But by December 2021, only feasibility studies had been carried out on the projects. Nevertheless, Zero Carbon Holdings convinced Aspiration to make an advance payment of US$29.5 million for 6.5 million carbon credits.

As security, if Zero Carbon Holdings did not deliver the carbon credits, Aspiration would take over the REDD projects in Brazil.

The REDD projects did not deliver the carbon credits. They have still not generated any carbon credits. Aspiration did not win the World Cup deal. The whole thing ended up in court.

The Clippers deal

And then there’s Steve Ballmer, ex-CEO of Microsoft and owner of the Los Angeles Clippers.

In September 2021, the Clippers announced a US$300 million partnership with Aspiration. The Clippers’ new arena, the Intuit Dome was going to operate “100 per cent carbon free”. The Clippers and Aspiration planned to launch a fund that would give fans the opportunity to “offset their own carbon impact” when they bought tickets to a game.

In September 2025, sports journalist Pablo Torre obtained 3,487 pages of internal corporate documents from Aspiration. It turned out that Aspiration had given a US$28 million endorsement deal to Clippers’ player Kawhi Leonard. Under the deal, Leonard did not have to do anything.

There is a salary cap under National Basketball Association rules, which prevents rich owners from persuading the best players to move to their team by offering bonuses, gifts, or donations.

Pablo Torre spoke to a former Aspiration employee who said that he was told that the deal with Leonard was “to circumvent the salary cap. LOL.”

The NBA is carrying out an investigation into the salary cap allegations.

Ballmer and the Clippers deny any wrongdoing. Leonard also denies wrongdoing. “I understand the full contract and services that I had to do,” he said in reply to questions from reporters about the Aspiration deal. “Like I said, I don’t deal with conspiracies or the click-bait analysts or journalism that’s going on.”

In April 2026, Ballmer’s lawyers sent a letter to the judge ahead of Sanberg’s sentencing. The letter states that “Sanberg flagrantly defrauded Mr. Ballmer, and his actions have significantly damaged Mr. Ballmer’s reputation.” Ballmer invested US$60 million in Aspiration.

The Clippers also lost US$20 million that was held in escrow to buy carbon offsets. Aspiration neither delivered the carbon offsets nor returned the money.

Ballmer’s lawyers wrote that,

Sanberg’s representations turned out to be lies, and what he promised by way of an environmental mission turned out to be nothing more than a lure to bilk Mr. Ballmer and others. As a result, Mr. Ballmer lost his entire investment in Aspiration — an investment that was intended to promote sustainability and benefit charitable causes.

ESPN reports that the judge, Stephen V. Wilson, said in the Los Angeles federal courtroom that Sanberg’s actions were “among the worst I’ve ever seen” in his 41 years as a federal judge.

“This case has touched almost every badge of fraud,” Wilson said.

The Indonesian government is currently carrying out the world’s largest deforestation programme. It’s taking place in West Papua, which has been subjected to Indonesian military occupation for more than 60 years. Currently there are 56,000 Indonesian troops in West Papua.

In 2025, the Papuan Church Council reported that there were 103,000 internally displaced persons in West Papua.

Indonesian government has deployed thousands of troops to Papua to force through the destruction of 2.5 million hectares of forest for industrial food and biofuel plantations. 1.3 million hectares will become rice fields. 560,000 hectares will produce sugar and bioethanol. 400,000 hectares will become palm oil plantations to produce biodiesel. A further 380,000 hectares will be used for cattle ranching.

A new film, “Pesta Babi: Kolonialisme di zaman kita” (Pig Feast: Colonialism in our time) documents the destruction of the forests and the resistance by Indigenous communities.

The film is directed by Dandhy Laksono and Cypri Dale. Dandhy previously directed “Sexy Killers,” a film about the coal mining industry in Indonesia, and “Dirty Vote,” about the 2024 presidential election. Cypri is an anthropologist. He is a research fellow at CSEAS Kyoto University in Japan and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US.

Several organisation collaborated in the production of the film, including Watchdoc, Ekspedisi Indonesia Baru, Yayasan Bentala Pusaka, JubiTV, Greenpeace Indonesia, and Legal Aid Institute of Papua Merauke.

The film is deeply shocking. The scale of the destruction is vast. Indigenous communities have lost their land, forests, hunting grounds, and livelihoods. Fertiliser and herbicides sprayed onto the industrial crops run off into rivers polluting the water that villagers previously used.

On 22 May 2026, the film was posted on YouTube where it has been watched more than 9.7 million times.

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The film starts with the Awyu community in South Papua. They are building an enormous wooden cross in the forest. The red-painted cross is one of more than 1,800 that communities have built over the past 10 years as a form of resistance against the Indonesian government’s destruction.

One of the villagers explains:

“We believe that if we are unable to resolve a problem, in this case preventing a company from entering our land, we ask for help from our ancestors and God. On the crosses we inscribed or drew the attributes of war that are meant to show that we strictly prohibit anyone from entering or disturbing our territory. If anyone breaches these signs, or threatens or ancestral land rights we are prepared to fight a war.”

The first that Indigenous communities knew about the government’s plans for their forests was when ships docked in their villages carrying hundreds of excavators along with the Indonesian military.

The film-makers uploaded the film to YouTube after the Indonesian military targeted several screenings of the film in Indonesia. Screenings were disrupted or cancelled in several cities.

On 7 May 2026, a screening at the University of Mataram was stopped after deputy rector Sujita said the film was not suitable for students. “This film is not fit for screening,” Tempo reported Sujita as saying. “It is better to watch football together.”

The following day, a screening in Ternate, North Maluku, was dispersed by soldiers.

According to Rettet den Regenwald, which will show the film in Germany and Switzerland in September 2026, 30 screenings were banned around the country.

In a statement, Amnesty International Indonesia’s executive director, Usman Hamid, said,

“The series of bans and forced dispersals of screenings of the film ‘Pesta Babi’ in several regions of Indonesia not only shows the government’s anti-criticism stance, but also reveals the state’s efforts to suppress any alternative information that exposes systematic human rights and environmental violations in Papua. This is clearly an attempt to silence and suppress critical voices about Papua, as expressed through the film ‘Pesta Babi’.”

While global deforestation fell in 2025, it remains disturbingly high, particularly in the tropics. In 2025, a total of 4.3 million hectares of tropical primary forest were lost. That’s almost twice as much as in 2024. And tropical primary forest loss is 46% higher than it was a decade ago.

A new report by the Financial Transparency Coalition investigates the illicit financial flows from illegal deforestation from Brazil and Cameroon. The report finds that illicit financial flows amount to US$1.28 billion for Brazil and US$289 million for Cameroon in timber exports every year.

“Financial secrecy prevents uncovering the real owners of the land, forestry concessions and companies who are responsible,” the Financial Transparency Coalition states.

The Financial Transparency Coalition is a global network of organisations working on illicit financial flows. The report is titled, “Financial Secrets of Forests: How Financial Secrecy Fuels Deforestation in Brazil and Cameroon”.

In a statement, the lead author of the report, investigative journalist Alfonso Daniels, comments,

“The world faces an environmental and climate crisis, with record levels of tropical forest destruction, primarily to make way for crops. The EU Deforestation Regulation, which will come into force in December 2026, along with other initiatives, seeks to address this crisis; however, persistent secrecy regarding who owns and benefits from recently deforested lands means these measures will fail or have limited impact unless there is public access to asset ownership records and the beneficial owners.”

In 2025, Brazil lost 1.6 million hectares of tropical primary forest — the highest area in the world. “A significant share of this was commodity-driven and sold to large corporations,” the report states.

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Here are the key findings from the report:

• Brazil’s cumulative illicit financial flows (IFFs) from timber amounted to US$2.56 billion between 2013 and 2024, averaging US$233 million per year, based on the trade mispricing method. Most of these losses occurred between 2018 and 2022, during Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency. Furthermore, according to SIMEX, a Brazilian NGO initiative, between 35% and 42% of all deforestation in the Amazon biome across multiple states was unlicensed. Since total timber exports from Brazil amounted to US$3.6 billion in 2024, we estimate conservatively that US$1.28 billion of timber exports that year originated from illicitly logged land.

• Land without deforestation permits in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso alone accounted for a significant proportion of total soy and beef production, equivalent to billions of dollars lost in illicit funds each year. Specifically, land without these permits in this state — which is responsible for a fifth of Brazil’s forest loss in 2025 — represented 48% of all farmland used for soy production (worth US$10 billion) and 15% of all farmland used for intensive grazing for beef production in 2022 (worth US$4 billion).

• In Cameroon, illicit financial flows (IFFs) resulting from trade mispricing in the timber sector caused average annual losses of US$289 million between 2013 and 2023. This figure is five times higher than the official estimated financial losses for the sector, which stand at US$59 million per year. Furthermore, the Cameroonian government has continued to grant timber licences to companies previously sanctioned for illicit trade. Despite these sanctions, these companies have still managed to export timber to countries that explicitly prohibit the import of illegally logged timber. In some cases, this has been verified through customs invoices or shipment records from Cameroon to Europe, Vietnam, and China.

• Illicitly deforested land contributes significantly to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In the state of Mato Grosso alone, cumulative carbon dioxide emissions from 2001 to 2023 associated with illicitly deforested land used for pasture in beef production amounted to 21.84 MtCO₂. This is equivalent to the CO₂ emissions from approximately 28.43 million flights between New York and Los Angeles. In the case of illicit deforestation linked to soy cultivation, emissions averaged 10.90 MtCO₂ per year over the same period. This is comparable to the annual emissions from driving 2.3 million typical petrol-powered cars, which is roughly the number of registered vehicles in Greater London, where there were 2.6 million registered vehicles in 2023.

• Financial and land ownership secrecy prevents the identification of individuals responsible for, and ultimately benefiting from, deforestation. In Mato Grosso, for instance, publicly available satellite data only allowed us to map soya cultivation and intensive pasture on recently illicitly deforested land (post-2010) at the plot level. Using publicly available data, we were able to identify the IDs of the plots where these activities occurred, as well as their legal owners. However, information on the beneficial owners of the plots was not accessible. In Cameroon, publicly available satellite data enables the mapping of all main types of timber concessions and the legal owners of the two principal types, namely Forest Management Units (FMUs) and Sales of Standing Volume (SSV, or “ventes de coupe” in French), but not their beneficial owners.

European companies have bought at least 2.6 million carbon credits from oil and gas projects in China that failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

A new investigation by Bloomberg reveals that the oil and gas project sites are supposed to capture greenhouse gases and prevent them entering the atmosphere. But the operations do not have the equipment needed to capture the gases.

Bloomberg journalists Petra Sorge and Natasha White explain how the process is supposed to work:

It’s a highly bureaucratic, but potentially lucrative, process. A project developer — either the facility owner, or someone else — files a proposal to a carbon-crediting program explaining how emissions will be cut and what equipment will be used. A third-party auditor verifies the site and the plan. Finally, the project can be registered, approved by authorities and implemented, then the developer can begin selling credits.

A verification report and EU data reveals that in 2023, almost 120,000 carbon offsets were registered with Austrian and Polish authorities generated from projects in China’s Changqing oilfield.

In November 2025, Bloomberg journalists visited some of the project sites listed in the documents. BloombergNEF also analysed drone footage and satellite images. “The projects did not appear to exist,” Sorge and White write. “One site was still under development and there was no sign of the equipment needed to trap emissions.”

The developer of the Changqing carbon offset project is Shaanxi LY Oil and Gas Service Co. In 2024, German TV station ZDF visited the company’s alleged address. It was an apartment. The woman living there knew nothing about the company. She had lived in that apartment for the previous 10 years.

Shaanxi LY did not respond to either ZDF’s or Bloomberg’s requests for comment.

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Germany’s carbon offset scandal

In 2024, ZDF exposed a scandal about Chinese offset projects that sold fake carbon offsets into Europe’s government-run upstream emissions reduction (UER) scheme.

The CDU/CSU, Germany’s centre-right political party, stated that the fraud may have cost as much as €4.5 billion.

The German authorities found 45 carbon offset projects to be “suspicious”, to have exaggerated the number of carbon offsets generated, or to be non-existent. The authorities have withdrawn the carbon offsets from two-thirds of these projects.

The 30 withdrawn projects had generated 2.1 million carbon offsets.

None of the companies and individuals behind the projects are likely to face any legal consequences, Bloomberg reports. In January 2026, a fraud investigation into 17 employees at the European auditing firms was closed, due to lack of evidence. Sorge and White write that the auditing firms cannot be criminally prosecuted under German law:

A spokesperson for the German Environment Agency said its investigations had clearly found that some projects relied on incorrect documentation, failed to deliver the promised emissions reductions or were not properly validated and verified as required. They added that while the projects were unlawful under administrative law, this does not automatically imply criminal liability.

One of the Chinese projects, visited by ZDF journalist Miriam Steimer, turned out to be a disused chicken shed.

None of the corporations that bought the Chinese offsets face any penalty if the carbon offsets are determined to be fake. A spokesperson for Germany’s General Customs Directorate told Bloomberg that’s because the offsets were bought in good faith.

The Big Polluters that bought these carbon offsets include BP, Électricité de France, ExxonMobil, MB Energy, MOL Group, OMV AG, the German-controlled subsidiary of Rosneft, Shell, TotalEnergies, and Vitol.

Not just Germany

Bloomberg’s investigation reveals that Germany is just one of at least nine European countries where carbon offsets were bought from similarly problematic projects. The countries include Austria, Poland, Luxembourg, UK, Cyprus, Hungary, Estonia, and Italy. The projects sold almost 500,000 carbon offsets to these countries, in addition to those sold to Germany.

“But the total claimed by flawed projects may well be much higher,” Bloomberg notes.

The EU introduced the upstream emission reductions market in 2015. Under the scheme, companies could buy UER offsets from projects that reduce emissions from fossil-fuel extraction. Most of the 180 registered projects were in China. In 2022, 15 EU member states bought 5.9 million UER offsets.

Three German auditing firms audited many of the projects: TÜV Rheinland, Müller-BBM Cert, and Verico SCE. In 2024, German police raided the offices of all three firms as part of the fraud investigation.

Bloomberg reports that all three firms denied any wrong-doing.

“Warning signs”

Bloomberg found five projects that sold carbon offsets to EU countries and the UK that “exhibited warning signs” such as the absence of relevant equipment or audits carried out by a verifier who “rubber-stamped more than 20 projects that German authorities have since disqualified”.

Between 2020 and 2022, one project in Shandong Province, in eastern China, sold carbon credits to companies in Austria, Poland, and the UK. Müller-BBM Cert’s 2022 verification report states that,

The project activity generates GHG emission reductions by recovery and associated gas from remote and scattered oil wells in Shengli Oilfield which would otherwise be flared, and to process the recovered gas into hydrocarbon products.

When Bloomberg’s journalists visited the project site, they found “no evidence of gas capture equipment. Instead: belt pumping units extracting oil, cylinders for recovering liquids and a flare tower to burn — not capture — the gas, according to BNEF’s visual analysis.”

Shengli Doro Energy Corp., the project owner, did not respond to Bloomberg’s requests for comment.

The auditor-developer revolving door

Bloomberg reports that during 2020, Jing Wang, also known as Robin Wang, was employed as both an auditor and developer of carbon offset projects. He was employed by both Verico and Beijing Karbon, a Chinese consulting firm that developed UER projects.

He was one of the 17 people under investigation in Germany. Wang no longer works for Verico.

Sorge and White write that, “Between 2020 and 2024, Wang audited more than 20 projects developed by Beijing Karbon, that sold credits into Germany, official documents show.” He also audited at least two projects that sold carbon credits into Austria, Cyprus, Estonia, and Hungary.

Beijing Karbon, or one of its shell companies, developed at least 30 projects that the German authorities found to be “suspicious”, Bloomberg reports.

Beijing Karbon registered at least five UER projects on Chinese property that it did not own. The actual owner only found out when contacted by a whistleblower.

One project was registered at a location that TÜV Rheinland and Verico claim to have visited in 2021 and 2022. But the project coordinates are an area of empty sandy desert. A whistleblower alerted German authorities to the situation in 2023. When investigators started asking questions, Verico pointed them to a new location. The second location did not meet German regulatory requirements for carbon offset generation, Bloomberg reports.

Carbon credits in the EU’s emissions trading system

The EU recently decided to allow international carbon credits in its emissions trading system. Federico Terreni, climate policy manager at Transport & Environment, told Bloomberg that this could create a bigger market for dubious carbon credits.

“Without rigorous safeguarding, it risks creating a paper tiger of Europe’s climate efforts. There is ample evidence that most offsetting and carbon credit schemes used today are a scam.”

If the EU could implement “rigorous safeguarding” that would be a first in the world of carbon trading. A 2024 analysis of 2,346 carbon projects found that 84% of the carbon credits did not constitute real emission reductions. That’s 812 million junk carbon credits.

But even if the carbon credits were all miraculously genuine, allowing carbon credits into the EU’s carbon trading scheme would allow for massively increased greenhouse gas emissions. The NewClimate Institute calculates that allowing Article 6 carbon credits into the EU’s emissions trading system would allow the EU to emit 50% more greenhouse gases in 2040.

Tomorrow, 26 May 2026, will see the latest meeting in the development of the Tropical Forests Forever Facility. The meeting will take place in Rotterdam and is titled, “Inside the TFFF: An Exclusive Investor Convening.” It is billed as “An exclusive convening for investors and policymakers offering a deep dive into the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF).”

The meeting is hosted by the Netherlands government, Finance for Biodiversity Foundation, Robeco, and WWF Netherlands. Robeco is an asset management firm. Finance for Biodiversity Foundation was launched by 26 financial institutions in 2020 with the Finance for Biodiversity Pledge. More than 200 institutions have now signed on.

In April 2026, the TFFF held a meeting as part of the IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings. Brazil and Norway agreed to co-chair both the Tropical Forest Investment Fund Transition Committee and the TFFF Interim Board.

In May 2026, the TFFF held a dialogue during the UN Forum on Forests in New York. In a press release about the meeting, TFFF states that, “Since COP30, the Facility has made fast progress toward implementation.”

“Fast progress” is something of an exaggeration, to put it mildly.

TFFF aims to raise US$25 billion from countries and philanthropic organisations. So far, Brazil and Indonesia have committed US$1 billion each. France has pledged US$578 million, Norway US$3 billion, and Germany US$1.17 billion.

“Risky and unnecessarily complex”

Neither Germany nor Norway appear particularly convinced about their pledges.

A recent parliamentary question from Germany’s Green Party reveals that the government cannot say where the money will come from, or over what period the money will be paid out. The German Development Minister Alabali Radovan previously stated that the German money would be provided in the form of equity. But this no longer appears certain, according to reporting by RiffReporter.

In Norway, Development Today reports that one of the conditions attached when prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre pledged US$3 billion to the TFFF in Belém in November 2025, was that the pledge needs parliamentary approval.

Nikolai Astrup is a member of parliament with Norway’s Conservative Party and was previously Development Minister. Commenting on Norway’s TFFF pledge, he told Development Today that,

“This appears to be a risky and unnecessarily complex transaction, which in the worst case will cause Norway great losses without any funding for the conservation of the rainforest.”

Norway’s climate minister, Andreas Bjelland Eriksen declined Development Today’s request for an interview.

Støre is now asking Parliament to authorise the loan which would be paid over the next ten years, only if the remaining conditions are met. These conditions require that the TFFF raises US$10 billion by the end of this year; that Norway’s contribution is less than 20%; and that the funding model is sustainable and maintains “an acceptable level of risk”.

None of these conditions has, so far, been met, as Development Today points out.

Development Today also reports that the Norwegian Climate Ministry has hired Knut N. Kjær and Dag Løtveit to “assist with reviewing and improving the TFFF concept”.

In 1998, Kjær was hired as the first manager of the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global, which is now the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. It is commonly called the Oil Fund — because that’s where the money originally came from. Kjær then hired Løtveit to lead the Oil Fund’s investment in bonds.

When Development Today asked the Climate Ministry for Kjær and Løtveit’s terms of reference, a spokesperson replied that, “This is on-going work related to the Norwegian conditions for the loan contribution. It is too early to share anything beyond that.”

And Kjær told Development Today “It is not possible for me to comment on this matter now.”

Can the TFIF outperform the Oil Fund?

Several economists have argued that the TFFF is extremely risky and market volatility, or a collapse, would leave no money left for tropical forest countries.

Bjørn H. Amland of Development Today argues that to succeed, TFFF would have to raise almost four-times the bond earnings of the Oil Fund over the past decade.

The TFIF will borrow most of the US$125 billion that it plans to invest in bonds issued by governments or corporations, mainly in emerging markets. TFIF relies on earning between 2.47% and 3.25% more than the interest the US Treasury pay to buyers of US bonds.

The TFFF has to cover a series of expenses before it can start payments to tropical rainforest countries for protecting their forests. Development Today summarises these payments as follows:

• pay interest on almost all the money it raises;

• cover its administrative costs;

• allocate funds for reserves for risk reduction;

• build up equity capital; and

• repay the US$25 billion it hopes to raise from governments.

Tropical rainforest countries receive whatever is left over. If the returns on the TFIF are too low, the amount paid per hectare of forest will be reduced.

The Oil Fund has low management costs. It does not borrow the money that it invests, so there are no interest payments. Only 5% of the Oil Fund’s money can be invested in emerging economies. The TFFF will invest in both emerging and OECD countries. But, according to the most recent TFFF concept note, it hopes to “Act as a significant new investor in debt issued by Emerging Markets and Developing Economies.”

Investing in emerging economy bonds can give higher returns but it is considerably riskier.

Development Today has compared the TFIF’s hoped for earnings with the performance of the Oil Fund in the bond market. Amland writes that, “According to latest public version of the TFFF concept note, the fund will need an annual gross yield on its bond portfolio in the range of 7.0 to 8.25 per cent.”

Since the Oil Fund was established in 1998, the average annual return on bond investments has been 3.85%. Over the past decade, the Oil Fund had a return of 2.04% per annum.

That is significantly less than the TFFF’s hoped for returns.

The TFFF’s Missing Billions

In the week before the TFFF’s meeting in Rotterdam, German economist Max Alexander Matthey has written a series of articles pointing out ongoing problems with the TFFF.

Matthey notes that the legal incorporation of the TFIF is not yet in place. There is no published rating analysis, or a public risk analysis. And the Concept Note has not been updated to incorporate various design revisions that have been announced since October 2025: Concept Note 3.1. (This version is still only available in English.)

Matthey lists the following missing documentation:

❌ The Funding Path: A clear, written trajectory from the roughly $5.7 billion currently pledged to Norway’s $10 billion launch threshold.

❌ The Market Rationale: A transparent financial theory explaining how a multilateral fund can reliably earn hundreds of basis points after cost on a carry trade that commercial markets have left unexploited for decades.

❌ The Rating Analysis: The published rating-agency assessment that the TFFF’s own Financial Q&A confirms has already been performed privately.

❌ The Term Sheet: A precise description, in writing, of how the senior tranche is actually structured and protected.

According to Concept Note 3.1 the return of 2.47% to 3.25% over US Treasuries will fund a US$2 billion annual pay out to tropical forest countries.

Matthey points out that the previous Concept Note (3.0 dated August 2025) gave an example based on a 3% gross spread on investments in BB+ emerging market bonds. This, according to Concept Note 3.0, would give a return of US$3.4 billion for payments to tropical forest countries.

“The near-term forest payout fell 41% between drafts,” Matthey writes. “This retreat was never acknowledged.”

Matthey notes that even US$2 billion is optimistic. He writes that, “the honest case for annual forest payments on a $125 billion fund lies between $213 million and $738 million”. That gives a midpoint of US$475 million, about one-quarter of the US$2 billion in Concept Note 3.1.

The TFFF was designed to give US$4 per hectare of protected forest to tropical forest countries. “The honest case is $0.50 / hectare,” Matthey writes.

And that is the favourable estimate: it assumes the post-GFC [global financial crisis] EM [emerging markets] credit rally extends another forty years, the senior tranche secures its AAA rating, operating costs come in at the Concept Note’s promised floor rather than the comparator-implied ceiling, and the full $25 billion sponsor base is raised — against confirmed pledges of under $7 billion as of May 2026. Strip any one and there is no forest payment to make.

João Paulo de Resende, under-secretary for economic and fiscal affairs at Brazil’s Ministry of Finance argues that the TFFF’s financial structure has been subjected to extensive testing and modelling. In October 2025, he told the Financial Times that,

“We’ve run this through four different financial advisers, the World Bank Treasury, credit rating agencies . . . and they’ve all confirmed that at least one version of this can work.”

Matthey asks, “Which version is being marketed in Rotterdam?” It’s a good question.

For anyone outside the inner workings of the TFFF and TFIF, there is currently no way of knowing.

Tomorrow’s meeting is for investors and policymakers only and it remains to be seen how much information will be released about the discussions after the meeting.

Petrobras is a massive Brazilian oil and gas corporation. It is responsible for a large contribution to the climate crisis. And it’s getting worse. In 2025, the company increased its oil and gas production by 11%.

In September 2021, Petrobras was one of 12 oil and gas companies in the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative that announced a net zero strategy. The Oil and Gas Climate Initiative is a Big Polluters’ greenwashing exercise. Its members include BP, Chevron, CNPC, Eni, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Occidental, Petrobras, Repsol, Saudi Aramco, Shell, and TotalEnergies.

Obviously, these companies are not planning to stop extracting and profiting from the sale of fossil fuels in order to achieve their net zero target. Instead, they will ignore the emissions from burning fossil fuels (scope 3 emissions) and concentrate on reducing emissions in their own operations (scope 1 and 2 emissions).

And, of course, they buy carbon credits. In its recently published, “Climate change and energy transition supplement 2025,” Petrobras explains that,

We believe emission offsets through carbon credits can complement our decarbonization journey. These credits may be nature-based, leveraging forests, soils, oceans, and seaweed, or derived from technological solutions. While offsets are expected to be used, they are intended as supplementary contributions and do not replace the need for lower-carbon energy supply.

The last sentence sounds nice, but Petrobras is increasing the amount of oil and gas it is extracting. The reality is that Petrobras is another Big Polluter using carbon credits to greenwash its destructive operations.

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“Carbon neutral” petrol

Petrobras sells its Gasolina Podium as “carbon neutral”. REDD-Monitor wrote about this absolute farce in 2023:

In 2025, Petrobras bought 1.2 million carbon credits. Here’s what Petrobras writes in its recently published report:

[S]ince 2023, we have invested in the voluntary market to offset emissions from Petrobras Podium Carbon Neutral gasoline. In 2025, we acquired 1.2 million credits from the Brazilian Amazon APD Grouped project, of which 455,000 were retired to offset Podium emissions. The credits, from the 2022 vintage, are certified under the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) by Verra . . .

The Brazilian Amazon APD Grouped project was developed by a Brazilian company called BRCarbon. The project covers a total area of more than 30,000 hectares made up of 15 properties in different the states of Mato Grosso, Acre, Amazonas, and Pará.

On its website, the project developer, BRCarbon, has this map of the project area:

The project has sold a total of 3,220,904 carbon credits. Among the buyers, in addition to Petrobras, are Air New Zealand, trip.com, Rhodia Brasil (now owned by the Belgian-French firm Solvay), PwC International, and Air Canada.

Under Brazil’s 2012 Forest Code all properties in forested areas must maintain a minimum area of 80% with native vegetation cover as a Legal Reserve. In cerrado areas, the figure is 35%. The remaining land can legally be cleared. BRCarbon’s project document explains that,

The landowners who decide to join the initiative, by giving up their right to legally clear their forest areas will be able to access financial resources from the carbon voluntary market, becoming BRCarbon partners.

Additional? Permanent?

Whether or not the project is additional is debatable — as it is with all REDD projects. BRCarbon states that, “Any legally constituted private properties within Amazon biome, with more than 80% of forest cover (or 35% for Cerrado) is eligible for this grouped project.”

Whether the forest will remain protected for as long as the emissions from burning fossil fuels will remain in the atmosphere, and against which the project’s carbon credits are being traded, is impossible to know.

The project document acknowledges that,

The proposed project activity is economically less attractive than any agriculture project because no financial benefits other than VCS related income are expected for the project proponent due to the project implementation.

At any point in the future, a landowner could decide to make more money by clearing the forest, selling the timber, and converting the land to cattle ranching or soy plantations.

Even if the forest remained standing as a result of the REDD project for the next thousand years, the climate benefits would be cancelled out by the polluting operations of the companies buying the carbon credits.

“We see carbon markets as a crucial instrument in combating climate change and are engaged in discussions on implementing a regulated carbon market in Brazil,” Petrobras writes.

The company is even looking at the possibility of generating its own carbon credits by “optimizing transport infrastructure as a decarbonization lever via public-private partnerships”.

The oil and gas industry urgently needs to be regulated. Instead, the Brazilian government is inviting one of the country’s worst polluters to help implement the loophole of carbon trading in order to allow the destruction to continue.

As the climate crisis gets worse, the Amazon is getting ever closer to a dangerous tipping point. We simply cannot afford to trade the carbon stored in forests against continued emissions from fossil fuels. Yet that is precisely what Petrobras and other Big Polluters are doing.

A new documentary by Abby Martin and Mike Prysner focuses on the environmental impacts of the US military, by far the world’s largest and most destructive war machine. The documentary is titled “Earth’s Greatest Enemy”.

Martin is an antiwar activist, artist and journalist. She hosted a show called “Breaking the Set” on Russia Today. In February 2015, she left RT. The previous year she criticised Russia’s military occupation of Crimea. She and Prysner launched The Empire Files in September 2015.

Prysner is a US Army veteran who served in Iraq and Syria. “It was my firsthand experiences in Iraq that radicalized me,” he told journalist Dahr Jamail in February 2013. He is now an antiwar activist. Prysner and Martin are married.

The US is a global military empire. The biggest empire ever. The US has 800 bases around the world. The film documents the destruction caused by this empire. Contaminated drinking water poisoning military families. Toxic air in Iraq. Toxic waste dumps. Cites demolished by bombing. Millions of people killed in US wars. Corals destroyed to make way for a military base. Waste and sonar pollution in the oceans.

The film is currently being screened in Canada, Sweden, Australia, and the UK. It is also available on Vimeo (where it can be rented) and YouTube (for members only). It’s an excellent film and well worth watching.

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US military and the climate crisis

The documentary brings together Martin and Prysner’s opposition to the US war machine and their “profound climate anxiety”.

They read Dahr Jamail’s book, “The End of Ice,” a book that featured on REDD-Monitor when it was published in 2019:

They travel with Jamail to Alaska to look at the disappearing glaciers. “It’s scary and its saddening, and it’s also, it makes me really angry,” Jamail says. “I can’t imagine a bigger injustice.”

The US military is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet. The US air force is bigger than the next five biggest combined. Yet military emissions are not included in the UN climate negotiations.

The documentary includes footage of Bill Clinton talking about the Kyoto Protocol, agreed at COP3 in 1997. “This is a very good agreement,” Clinton says. “It’s going to be possible for us to do this and grow our economy. We got what we wanted, which is a market oriented approach.”

In Kyoto, the US reduced the target from 15% by 2010 down to 5.2% by 2012. The US lead negotiator, Al Gore, insisted on the inclusion of carbon trading in the Kyoto Protocol.

In 2004, Gore launched Generation Investment Management to profit from carbon trading.

As Martin points out, the “US lobbied for its military to get blanket exemption from its national total, on the ground of national security.” All other countries also did so. Ever since, the world’s militaries have been excluded from all UN climate meetings.

“That makes the agreements, in other words, a farce,” Martin says.

“A corporate trade show”

The documentary team travelled to Glasgow to COP26, which took place in 2021. If the fossil fuel industry were a country, it would have had the largest delegation at the conference. “What becomes really obvious is how much corporations are really driving the narrative,” Martin says. “It’s just a corporate trade show.”

Martin asks a session moderated by Nancy Pelosi, then-Speaker of the House of Representatives. The Pentagon budget had recently increased. “How can we seriously talk about net zero, if military is exempt from climate talks?” Martin asks.

Frank Pallone, a Democratic party politician, replied. Instead of addressing the question, he talked about rising sea levels. He said he’d had many talks with the Navy about how they have to respond to what’s going on. “I don’t see what we’re doing in any way, increasing the defence budget, as being something that is inconsistent with climate action,” he said.

“National security advisers all tell us that the climate crisis is a national security matter,” Pelosi added.

Martin asked a series of US government officials whether they agreed that the military should be exempt from climate talks. None replied either yes or no, except Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said that, “To omit conversations about military investment is to omit measuring our CO₂ emissions,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

The documentary links capitalism and militarism. The first overseas bases were to access coal for the military. “You can’t green a global military empire,” Martin says.

“For US capitalism to grow, it had to grow its military to conquer new markets and raw materials. The military, powered by fossil fuels, had to increase how much it could store and how many places it could store it. To do that, it needed a bigger military, which in turn required more fossil fuels. Oil would soon become the dominant national security priority.”

Nick Buxton of the Transnational Institute has worked on the military and the climate crisis for many years. He says that,

“There’s a reason why the US has 800 military bases around the world. Why has it gotten in every corner of the globe? You see where those bases are, they’re in the Middle East. It’s about securing access to the key resources. They’re near the shipping routes which really keeps the whole flow of capital flowing. And that involves huge consumption of oil and gas. So they have a very direct involvement in causing the climate crisis.

“But they have an indirect role as well. I think that’s a role that’s less talked about but is probably more important. And that’s because it wants an infrastructure to support the free flow of corporations and supply chains that supply the US economy. It wants to have access to the key areas of strategic resources. And that’s why it gets deployed internationally.

“And so what you see is a whole empire that is really geared entirely around keeping the flow of the fossil fuel economy flowing.”

The Lumphat Wildlife Sanctuary REDD project aims to generate carbon credits from almost 135,000 hectares of dry forest inside the Lumphat Wildlife Sanctuary in northeast Cambodia. The project is run by Cambodia’s Environment Ministry, BirdLife International, and NatureLife Cambodia.

According to BirdLife International a process of free, prior and informed consent took place before the launch of the Lumphat Wildlife Sanctuary REDD project. But recent reporting by Leila Goldstein and Eung Sea in The Diplomat reveals a very different story.

The status of the project is currently listed on Verra’s registry as “Registration requested”. In a letter to Verra, BirdLife states that “the FPIC process began in 2013, but the auditor required a complete consent process before we could define a project start date”.

The Khmer Times reports that from January to April 2023, NatureLife Cambodia carried out “consultations, disseminated information and obtained consent from local people in 16 targeted villages”.

NatureLife Cambodia is an NGO that was set up by BirdLife International in 2017. Bou Vorsak was Cambodia country director of BirdLife International for 15 years before becoming the CEO of NatureLife. The consultation was supported by BirdLife International and USAID Morodok Baitang (a five-year project funded by USAID aimed at biodiversity conservation in Cambodia).

“Before asking for the consent of the residents of the area, we made sure they understood the importance of the carbon credit scheme,” Vorsak told the Phnom Penh Post in May 2023.

“After learning about the project, they gave their consent with no coercion,” the Phnom Penh Post reported NatureLife Cambodia as saying.

To illustrate the article, the Phnom Penh Post used a photograph (above) of the Lumphat village chief and his relatives with their hands in the air.

“How will we know where the money will be spent?” Lai Khammay, who lives in Lumphat village, asked The Diplomat. “If they got money [for the project], people in the village don’t know because everyone involved are relatives of the village chief.”

Free, prior and informed consent?

The Diplomat interviewed people from more than 30 households in villages near the project area. More than 20 households were in REDD project partner villages. The Diplomat reports that more than half of these 20 households said “they did not consent to the project and were not well informed about it”.

BirdLife International told The Diplomat that 53% of households in partner villages consented to the project. In a statement, BirdLife International explained that,

Participation and consent cleared the thresholds set by international standards and by the communities themselves. Two separate audits have confirmed that. Even so, unanimity across 16 villages is never going to happen, and we would not pretend it did. It is entirely possible some of those people [who spoke to The Diplomat] did not give consent or did not feel as well-informed as they should have.

The Diplomat visited four partner villages. In all four, villagers said they were not well informed about the project. They were not asked for their consent. And they were not even invited to take part in meetings about the project.

“Why wasn’t I invited?” Sara Sreymon from Rovak village asked The Diplomat. “The NGO wanted the village chief to invite all of the households, but he didn’t.”

She said that most villagers could not attend meetings because they had to farm. Others were not invited.

Hing Ping, a rice and cattle farmer in Thmei village, did attend a few project meetings. He was not asked to give his consent and he did not understand what the project was for, or even what it had to do with his village, he told The Diplomat.

“It’s difficult for people to understand what the project is about because they are illiterate; they just go to the meeting but do not really understand why they were invited or what the project is about.”

In a statement, BirdLife International said that the consultation process was “designed to be inclusive and iterative”. The Diplomat reports BirdLife International as saying that the consultation involved village assembly meetings in all 16 partner villages, focus group discussion and participatory mapping. NatureLife Cambodia made household visits to meet people who could not take part in meetings.

The project has set up feedback and grievance mechanisms, BirdLife International explained. The project installed mailboxes in villages so that people could provide feedback.

In Thmei village, The Diplomat found that several of the mailboxes were “completely unmarked”. One blue unmarked box was attached to a fence in front of a home. “I have no idea what it’s for or who put it there,” the home owner told The Diplomat.

REDD-funded reforestation?

In May 2025, NatureLife Cambodia announced plans to reforest more than 1,700 hectares of land in Mondulkiri Province. The land had been illegally cleared according to NatureLife Cambodia.

Although it is outside the REDD project area, the tree planting is to be funded by the REDD project. “Our reforestation efforts aim to prevent further forest loss due to opportunistic encroachment, reduce heat, mitigate erosion and address climate change,” Vorsak told the Phnom Penh Post.

The Diplomat reports that the area to be replanted overlaps the Roya Leu Indigenous community’s land. The community is applying for an Indigenous Communal Land Title on 10,000 hectares of sacred land, burial grounds, and residential areas.

Indigenous Bunong people in Memom village told The Diplomat that they were not properly informed about the reforestation project and they were not asked to give their consent. Two people said that people had been blocked from attending REDD meetings.

Teuk Kin, Roya Leu’s community leader, told The Diplomat that,

“I know very little about the REDD+ project. Environment ministry rangers installed REDD+ signs at the end of the village. They did not clarify how many hectares of forest were for the REDD+ project or how many hectares of the forest were for the community. They acted on their own on where to install the signs. There was no consultation with people.”

Tham Yan, an Indigenous villager told The Diplomat that in 2024 Environment Ministry and REDD officials had discouraged him and other villagers from applying for the Indigenous Communal Land Title. The officials said it would not benefit the community.

In 2024, Yan attended a REDD project meeting in Rovak village. He told The Diplomat that during the meeting “officials warned that opposing the REDD+ project would bear consequences”. Villagers were told that if they cleared forest on their farmland they would be arrested and put in jail or fined.

“Roya Leu (Memom village) sits outside the REDD+ project area. It hasn’t been covered by the FPIC process, and it isn’t covered by REDD+ project activities,” BirdLife International told The Diplomat.

BirdLife International pointed out that the Lumphat Wildlife Sanctuary was established by royal decree in 1993. “Therefore, any related claims should be directed to the government.” The Roya Leu territory became part of the protected area in 2023 when the government increased the area of the wildlife sanctuary by more than 106,000 hectares. Communities were not consulted about the expansion.

Cambodia’s Environment Ministry did not answer The Diplomat’s specific questions, but said in a statement that it is “aggressively implementing law enforcement to protect forests.”

Roya Leu community members have been charged with cutting down trees and clearing state land.

Stopping deforestation?

While villagers face repercussions for cutting trees on their own land, the government has handed out agricultural and mining concessions inside the wildlife sanctuary.

Coby Hobbs and Eung Sea reported on the damage to the forests in the Lumphat Wildlife Sanctuary for Mongabay in February 2026.

Roads have been cut through the REDD project area to reach the mining operations, The Diplomat reports. A proposed hydropower dam would flood 70,000 hectares including a core zone of the wildlife sanctuary. It would result in the eviction of more than 4,200 families from their homes.

Sarah Milne is an associate professor at the Australian National University in Canberra. She has worked on conservation, Indigenous rights, and REDD in Cambodia for many years. She told The Diplomat that,

“One ministry will approve the dam, another ministry will approve the mine, and another ministry is in charge of the protected area. One of the biggest problems with REDD+ is that it assumes that the state is a coherent entity that is interested in the rule of law.”

Mokua Manyara is a Kenyan lawyer, with the firm MNW Law. He recently wrote an article about carbon credits and conservation in Kenya. He starts with the book “The Big Conservation Lie: The Untold Story of Wildlife Conservation in Kenya” by John Mbaria and Mordecai Ogada.

The book raises serious questions about the way conservation has been carried out in Kenya and in the rest of Africa. I wrote a review of the book in 2017, not long after it was published.

From there, Manyara moves on to carbon trading and the Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon project, run by the Northern Rangelands Trust. Verra has suspended this project twice and it is currently listed as “On hold” on Verra’s registry.

Manyara draws parallels between fortress conservation and carbon trading. “Reading Mbaria and Ogada in 2026 is to read prophecy,” he writes.

Where they spoke of fortress conservation, philanthrocapitalism and the captured Kenyan elite, we now confront the same architecture rewired for a new commodity: carbon. The instrument has changed. The grammar is identical.

Manyara concludes his article with six conditions for implementing carbon projects so that they are not in breach of community rights.

Unfortunately, Manyara does not consider the fact that carbon trading exacerbates the climate crisis, by legitimising the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

Manyara’s article is posted here in full, with his permission.

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Carbon Credits, Conservancies and the Lie We Were Sold

By Mokua Manyara, MNW Weekly, 5 May 2026

There is a peculiar elegance in the way the carbon economy has dressed itself for African audiences. It arrives in the language of climate justice, indigenous empowerment and community development. It speaks of partnership, stewardship and shared prosperity. And then, when the cameras turn away and the project documents are filed in distant boardrooms, it does what every extractive economy before it has done. It takes the land. It takes the labour. It takes the story.

Almost a decade ago, John Mbaria and Mordecai Ogada published a slim, searing volume titled The Big Conservation Lie: The Untold Story of Wildlife Conservation in Kenya. Their central thesis was uncomfortable, and remains so. The conservation industry in Kenya, they wrote, is “thoroughly intertwined with colonialism, virulent racism, deliberate exclusion of the natives, veiled bribery, unsurpassed deceit, a conservation cult subscribed to by huge numbers of people in the West, and severe exploitation of the same wilderness conservationists have constantly claimed they are out to preserve.” The book did not invent that critique. It crystallised it.

Reading Mbaria and Ogada in 2026 is to read prophecy. Where they spoke of fortress conservation, philanthrocapitalism and the captured Kenyan elite, we now confront the same architecture rewired for a new commodity: carbon. The instrument has changed. The grammar is identical.

Consider the largest soil carbon project in the world. The Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project, run by the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT), spans more than 1.9 million hectares of pastoralist land in Samburu, Isiolo, Laikipia and Marsabit. It promises to remove some 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide over thirty years. Its credits have been bought by Meta, Netflix, British Airways, NatWest and other corporations seeking to neutralise their emissions on paper while continuing to emit them in fact. The story sold to the global market is one of community: indigenous herders, ancestral grasslands, voluntary participation and equitable benefit. The story lived on the ground is colder.

In March 2023 the indigenous rights organisation Survival International published Blood Carbon, a forensic report concluding that the project had been validated on flawed methodology, that long-standing pastoralist grazing systems had been disrupted in the name of carbon sequestration and that the free, prior and informed consent required of any such intervention had not been obtained from the affected communities. Verra, the world’s leading voluntary carbon standard, suspended issuance of credits while it reviewed the project. Eight months later, Verra reinstated it. The fundamental concerns remained. The cash continued to flow.

Then came the courts.

In Osman & 164 Others v Northern Rangelands Trust & 8 Others, Petition E006 of 2021, [2025] KEELC 99 (KLR), delivered on 24 January 2025, a three-judge bench of the Environment and Land Court at Isiolo, comprising Angote, Yano and Nzili JJ, held that the establishment of Cherab and Bulesa Biliqo Community Conservancies was undertaken without due public participation and was consequently unconstitutional. The court declared the two conservancies to be “operating illegally”. It issued a permanent injunction restraining NRT, its rangers, its agents and its partners from any conservancy operations within the affected wards. It ordered the County Government of Isiolo and the Ministry of Lands to register the community land as required under the Community Land Act, 2016. It declared the deployment of armed NRT rangers unconstitutional and unlawful for want of vetting under the National Police Service Act.

Bulesa Biliqo, it must be remembered, generates about twenty percent of all carbon credits in the entire NRT project. Half of the participating conservancies sit in materially identical legal positions. In May 2025 Verra suspended the project for the second time, this time in response to the judgment. Mbaria and Ogada had warned, years earlier, that the conservation industry in Kenya was operating without regard to the rule of law. The court has now said the same thing in formal terms.

Three lessons emerge.

First, the carbon market in Kenya was, until very recently, a legal lacuna. Soil carbon was not contemplated by the Wildlife Conservation and Management Act, 2013. It was not contemplated by the Community Land Act, 2016. The earliest tranches of NRT credits were sold to multinational corporations on a methodological architecture that no Kenyan statute had endorsed and no Kenyan community had meaningfully consented to. The Climate Change (Amendment) Act, 2023, assented to by the President on 15 September 2023, has begun to fill that void. It now requires every land-based carbon project to be implemented through a Community Development Agreement, recorded in the National Carbon Registry, providing an annual community contribution of not less than 40 percent of the aggregate earnings of the previous year. That is a significant statutory floor. It is also an admission, however quiet, that the floor was previously zero.

Second, “community” is a contested word. NRT and its defenders have always invoked the idea of community: community conservancies, community boards and community ranger units. But in Osman, the court was clear that the relevant community had not been consulted. In Mbaria and Ogada’s terms, what had been built was a parallel governance structure, sustained by donor money and rifle-bearing rangers, that performed the rituals of community participation while extracting the substance of land control. The true test of community is not the brochure. It is whether the community can say no.

Third and most painful, the carbon credits economy as currently constituted in much of Africa is the latest costume of an old script. Where the colonial state took land for crown reserves and game parks, the contemporary carbon project takes land for offset volumes. Where the missionary brought salvation in exchange for sovereignty, the climate broker brings climate virtue in exchange for grazing rights. The currency is new. The exchange is not. Mbaria and Ogada saw this clearly in 2016 when the carbon discourse had not yet fully seized the imagination of the conservation industry. They wrote of conservation as a tool for economic and political control. A decade on, that is precisely what carbon has become in many of the rangelands they wrote about.

None of this means carbon markets are inherently incompatible with community welfare. They can be allies of justice. But the conditions are exacting. They include:

1. Registered community land under the Community Land Act, 2016, with title vested in the community itself and not held in indefinite trust on its behalf.

2. Free, prior and informed consent evidenced not by the signature of a paid intermediary but by the demonstrable engagement of the community in its own deliberative spaces.

3. A Community Development Agreement that is negotiated rather than presented; whose financial flows are auditable in real time; and whose terms can be revisited without penalty.

4. Independent verification that does not rely on the project proponent for data, methodology or access to affected communities.

5. A genuine right of exit, including the right of a community to withdraw from a carbon project without forfeiting its land or its livelihood.

6. Domestic legal accountability, with project disputes adjudicated in Kenyan courts and enforced under Kenyan law.

Anything less is what Mbaria and Ogada called it: a lie, dressed for a new market.

The pastoralists of Isiolo did not need a carbon ecologist to tell them what was happening on their grasslands. They needed lawyers. They got them. And on 24 January 2025, the Environment and Land Court told them, in the dry register of the constitutional text, what they had been saying in the open register of village meetings for almost fifteen years. They were right. The project was unlawful. The conservancies were unconstitutional. The rangers had no business being there.

That is the moment, perhaps, to retire the slogans and read the book again. The Big Conservation Lie is not anti-conservation. It is anti-deception. The distinction matters. And in the carbon economy now sweeping the rangelands of East Africa, that distinction may be the difference between climate justice and climate dispossession.

Liberia is currently developing a Carbon Development Policy that will allow the country to trade carbon credits on international carbon markets. In October 2025, Liberia’s President, Joseph Nyuma Boakai, issued an executive order to establish the Carbon Markets Authority. The executive order also established a National Carbon Registry to track the issuing of carbon credits.

On 1 May 2026 Kenza Bryan reported in the Financial Times that the African Development Bank was putting pressure on the government to pass the Carbon Development Policy:

Liberian government departments have been told that a portion of the country’s funding from the African Development Bank (AfDB) — which has previously provided budget support and loans to the country’s private banks — depends on its approving a carbon sales framework, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The AfDB told the Financial Times that was involved in discussions with the Liberian government about “potential areas of support, including strengthening fiscal stability, promoting key sectors and enhancing climate governance frameworks”.

The Liberian government did not respond to the Financial Times’ requests for comment.

Made in the USA

1: The Coalition for Rainforest Nations

In September 2024, the government of Liberia signed a Letter of Engagement with the Coalition for Rainforest Nations. According to the Liberia Environmental Protection Agency’s website, the agreement, “signifies Liberia’s commitment to participating actively in the global carbon market”.

Under the agreement, which runs for two years, the Coalition for Rainforest Nations would provide “technical support to enhance its capacity for monitoring, reporting, and verifying (MRV) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, aligning with the Paris Agreement standards”.

The CfRN would also strengthen “Liberia’s institutional framework to prepare for results-based payments through platforms such as REDD+ and ITMOs”. ITMOs are internationally transferred mitigation outcomes traded bilaterally under Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement.

In December 2022, a company called ITMO Ltd was incorporated in the UK. The company’s sole director was Kevin Conrad, the founder of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations. The company was dissolved via compulsory strike-off in August 2025.

In May 2023, a company called ITMO Ltd LLC was incorporated in the tax haven of Delaware. On its website, the company states that,

ITMO Limited is a private company registered in Abu Dhabi, UAE. ITMO Limited LLC is registered in the USA. ITMO LTD. is registered in the UK.
ITMO Limited is an affiliate of THE COALITION FOR RAINFOREST NATIONS.

A search on OpenCorporates gives no information about a company called ITMO Limited registered in Abu Dhabi.

On LinkedIn, ITMO Ltd explains that,

ITMO Ltd is building the new global trillion-dollar Compliance Carbon Market (CCM) under the UNFCCC Paris Agreement, and sources, structures, and sells globally Compliant Carbon Credits (ITMOs) under Article 6, which you can buy now!

The photograph on the left is Kevin Conrad and Emmanuel Urey Yarkpawolo, executive director of the Environmental Protection Agency, at the signing of the Letter of Engagement in September 2024. The photograph on the right is Federica Bietta and Conrad, the co-founders of CfRN, with Yarkpawolo and James Marape, Papua New Guinea’s prime minister, one year later at the UN General Assembly in New York.

2: Gordian Knot Strategies

In January 2026, Liberia hired a company called Gordian Knot Strategies, a company incorporated in Oregon in June 2018, to provide technical and financial guidance. Gordian Knot Strategies is a climate financial consulting firm — in other words, it’s a carbon trading company.

Gordian Knot Strategies’ CEO, Sean Penrith, is a true believer in carbon markets, capitalism, and neoliberalism:

At Gordian Knot Strategies, I help clients untangle the world of climate finance. For over two decades, I’ve worked at the intersection of carbon markets, impact investment, and strategy, designing solutions that move billions in capital toward climate action.

According to a company statement, Gordian Knot Strategies will work with Liberia’s Carbon Markets Authority to support “capital mobilisation and market readiness” and “the development and operationalisation of Liberia’s national carbon market framework”.

Gordian Knot Strategies will also support “the design of robust governance, market infrastructure, and operational systems”. This will include providing “technical advisory support to assist the CMA in developing governance frameworks, institutional arrangements, registry, and MRV [monitoring, reporting, and verification] systems, and other core elements required for market readiness and integrity”.

Among Gordian Knot Strategies’ client list are Environmental Defense Fund, the Integrity Council for Voluntary Carbon Markets, Delta Airlines, South Pole, and the Savory Institute.

There are few mentions of fossil fuels on the company’s website. Gordian Knot Strategies recycles the myth that carbon markets can “facilitate the transition away from fossil fuels”.

The reality is that decades of carbon trading has not made the slightest impact on the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. And companies that buy carbon credits do not decarbonise faster than those that don’t.

NGO reaction to the draft policy

The Financial Times reports that, “Liberian NGOs responded with alarm to a draft framework last month.”

The draft framework is marked “final”. It claims to ensure a “fair and equitable” distribution of the benefits from carbon trading. However, the policy would give between 50 and 90% of the benefits to the government and project developers.

This is despite the fact that under the 2009 Community Rights Law and the 2018 Land Rights Act, 70% of Liberia’s forests are legally owned by communities. The draft Carbon Development Policy appears to be stealing communities’ rights to the carbon in their forests.

Members of the NGO Coalition of Liberia, a network of more than 25 civil society organisations working in the forest sector, told the Financial Times that they had not been properly consulted on the policy. They are also concerned that the policy could endanger the right of communities to say no to projects on their land.

Alexandra Benjamin, of the Brussels-based NGO Fern, highlights the following problems with the draft Carbon Development Policy:

• The policy could undermine Liberia's Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC). To avoid double counting, forests used for carbon credits can't count toward Liberia's climate commitments. The policy doesn't address this.

• Investment treaty risks are real. Countries like Singapore are revising bilateral investment treaties so that even an MoU around carbon (one a government later decides not to pursue) can trigger punitive financial consequences. Liberia could be locking itself into agreements it can't safely exit.

• The policy misinterprets Liberia's Revenue Sharing Law, applying it to community and private lands where it was never meant to apply. On community land, government is only entitled to tax revenue, not concession-style benefit sharing.

• Communities have not been consulted by the government. When civil society conducted its own consultations last August, the message was overwhelming: respect our land rights.

• There is no credible FPIC process described. No grievance mechanism. No safeguards framework with teeth. History tells us what happens next, companies claim verbal consent, development begins, and communities are left with nothing.

On 30 April 2026, the NGO Coalition of Liberia wrote to President Boakai to “urgently appeal” that he “defer the endorsement and signing of Liberia’s Draft Carbon Market Policy until a genuine, inclusive, and credible national validation process has been conducted”.

The letter is posted here in full:

His Excellency Joseph Nyuma Boakai, Sr.
President of the Republic of Liberia
Executive Mansion
Capitol Hill, Monrovia

April 30, 2026

Your Excellency:

On behalf of the NGO Coalition of Liberia, a network of over 25 Civil Society Organizations (CSO) working in the Forest Sector, extend sincere compliments and appreciation for Your Excellency’s leadership and continued commitment to advancing Liberia’s sustainable development agenda, particularly in the areas of climate action and natural resource governance.

We write, with utmost respect, to urgently appeal that Your Excellency defer the endorsement and signing of Liberia’s Draft Carbon Market Policy until a genuine, inclusive, and credible national validation process has been conducted.

While recognizing the efforts made by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Carbon Market Authority, and the Forestry Development Authority in advancing this policy, we express growing concern that the process leading to its “final validation” has been significantly truncated especially with respect to the meaningful participation of key stakeholders. In particular, we note that the validation process at both the technical and national levels did not involve the full and meaningful participation of key stakeholders. Forest-dependent communities, civil society organizations, and other critical actors — whose engagement is essential to the legitimacy, implementation, and long-term success of this policy — have not been adequately consulted in a manner that meets the standards of inclusivity, transparency, and informed consent. But most importantly, there remain fundamental disagreements on a number of critical issues that require further discussion.

Your Excellency, Liberia’s carbon market policy is not a routine administrative instrument. It is a foundational framework that will determine how Liberia’s forests, lands, and carbon assets are governed, monetized, and potentially committed under long-term agreements. Importantly, this policy framework will also serve as the basis for developing future legislation on carbon marketing and a broader national climate law. As such, any gaps, weaknesses, or exclusions at this stage risk being carried forward and institutionalized within binding legal frameworks that will shape the sector for generations.

The implications for national sovereignty. community land rights. benefit-sharing, and intergenerational equity are therefore profound.

We respectfully note that endorsing such a policy without a robust national validation risks:

• Undermining the legitimacy and public trust in national policy, as well as damaging the international reputation of Liberia, given that the policy potentially undermines Liberia’s ability to maintain its bilateral investment treaties and fulfil its Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement;

• Exposing communities to arrangements that they neither fully understand nor have consented to;

• Creating conditions for inequitable or unfavourable carbon agreements that may be difficult to renegotiate;

• Embedding structural gaps into future legislation on carbon markets and climate governance.

It is therefore both prudent and in the national interest to ensure that this policy is grounded in a process that reflects true national consensus - not one shaped by compressed timelines or external pressures.

In this regard, we respectfully urge that:

1. The endorsement and signing of the Draft Carbon Market Policy be deferred;

2. A comprehensive national validation process be convened, ensuring the full and effective participation of’communities, civil society. and other stakeholders across affected regions;

3. Adequate time and space be provided for technical review, public dialogue, and incorporation of stakeholder inputs before final approval.

We remain confident in Your Excellency’s commitment to protecting the interests of the Liberian people and ensuring that the country’s natural resources are governed in a manner that is just, transparent, and beneficial to all.

Please accept, Your Excellency, the assurances of our highest consideration.

The Amazon rainforest faces unprecedented pressure from climate heating and from deforestation. A new study published in Nature finds that these pressures could lead to “system-wide changes across major parts of Amazonian ecosystems”. If deforestation continues in the Amazon basin, a tipping point could be reached at global heating of 1.5 to 1.9°C resulting in two-thirds of the Amazon rainforest shifting to degraded forest or a savanna ecosystem.

The authors conclude that,

Overall, our results reinforce the need to keep global warming levels below 1.5 °C and halt deforestation, as well as ecologically restore degraded forests to avoid high transition risks across the Amazon forest system.

We are currently at 1.4°C of global heating and about 17 or 18% of the Amazon rainforest has been deforested. A tipping point could be reached with global heating of 1.5 to 1.9°C and deforestation of 22 to 28%.

Nico Wunderling, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and lead author of the study explains that,

“One implication is that we would lose the most biodiverse area on the planet, also economic impacts from agricultural yields would decrease, but also a third point is that the global carbon sink of the Amazon rainforest would completely disappear once it would transition over to a savanna-type vegetation.”

The study is titled, “Deforestation-induced drying lowers Amazon climate threshold,” and is written by Nico Wunderling, Boris Sakschewski, Johan Rockström (all of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany), Bernado M. Flores (Instituto Juruá, Brazil), Marina Hirota (Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil), and Arie Staal (Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, The Netherlands).

The study notes that the Amazon rainforest is “transitioning from one of the largest terrestrial carbon sinks to a carbon source”.

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Rainfall feedbacks

In a statement, Arie Staal, a co-author of the study, says that,

“Global warming and deforestation affect rainfall feedbacks across the Amazon system. When deforestation interrupts moisture transport in one area of the Amazon, entire regions hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away can also lose resilience through cascading drought effects.”

The Amazon rainforest generates part of its own rainfall with up to half of the rainfall in the Amazon coming from water recycled by the rainforest. Trees in the Amazon release water vapour into the atmosphere producing rainfall across the basin. When the forest is destroyed, this water recycling is reduced leading to increased drought stress. Other forest regions therefore become more vulnerable to degradation.

“If you lose forests, then you lose rainfall,” one of the co-authors of the study, Bernardo M. Flores, tells the New York Times. “This interaction between rain and forests is at the heart of the Amazon’s resilience.”

Johan Rockström is the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a co-author of the study. In a statement, he emphasises the importance of the Amazon rainforest:

“Until now, the Amazon rainforest has played a vital role in stabilising the Earth system as a carbon sink, regulator of moisture recycling and host of Earth's richest biodiversity on land. Continued deforestation is undermining this stability, pushing the forest closer to a tipping point. This would not only be devastating for the region, but could have far-reaching consequences for the entire planet.”

“However,” Rockström adds, “these changes are not inevitable. Stopping deforestation, together with ecologically restoring degraded forests and rapid emission cuts can still reduce the risks.”

Stopping deforestation

Unfortunately, the record so far on stopping deforestation is not great.

In 2025, the loss of tropical rainforests globally fell by 36%. But this was from a record high in 2024. Brazil’s deforestation fell by 41% from the previous year. Even so, 1.94 million hectares of forest in the Amazon basin was lost.

Elizabeth Goldman, the co-director of Global Forest Watch describes the drop in deforestation in 2025 as “encouraging”. But she points out that,

“[P]art of the decline reflects a lull after an extreme fire year. Fires and climate change are feeding off each other, and with El Niño on the horizon for 2026, investments in prevention and response will be critical as extreme fire conditions become the norm.”

In 2021, at COP26 in Glasgow, Brazil was one of more than 100 countries that signed the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forest and Land Use with a commitment to “working collectively to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030”.

We are now half way to that target date. World Resources Institute calculates that current levels of deforestation are about 70% too high to meet the target of stopping deforestation by 2030:

“Generally speaking, a good year is a good year,” Matthew Hansen, a professor at the University of Maryland told the New York Times. “But you need good years forever if you’re going to conserve the tropical rainforest.”

If deforestation in the Amazon increases again, the Amazon could cross a tipping point as soon as 2031.

Stop carbon trading!

In 2025, Rockström was one of the scientists that signed a statement published during COP30 in Belém on the urgency of both phasing out fossil fuels and stopping deforestation.

The statement made clear that trading the carbon stored in rainforests against continued emissions from burning fossil fuels is simply not an option:

The only reason we can have an orderly phase out of fossil fuels is because we assume forests will continue to be a major carbon sink. Unfortunately we have increasing evidence that forests are turning from carbon sinks to carbon sources. This happens because forests are vulnerable to climate change causing more frequent and intense droughts, fires, heatwaves and land use conversion. The main cause of climate change is burning fossil fuels, thus without a fossil phase out, forests might not have the ability to survive and thrive. This is why it’s equally urgent to have a roadmap to concurrently phase out fossil fuels and end deforestation.

Most intact tropical forests are in developing countries. The Roadmap on ending deforestation must include financial support, capacity building and robust monitoring. Forest protection cannot be used as offsets. Standing forests cannot be an excuse to keep burning fossil fuels.

The new study in Nature reinforces the urgency to stop burning fossil fuels, stop deforestation, and stop carbon trading.

On 25 April 2021, a full-page advertisement appeared in the New York Times. The headline read, “Agriculture can be part of the climate solution.”

The first sentence read as follows:

“To feed a growing global population, we must produce food that is both good for people and the planet. Climate change is a threat to the world’s food security, and the way we produce food must be part of the climate solution.”

The advertisement was taken out not by an environmental organisation, or by a company that had shifted to plant-based production, but by a Brazilian company called JBS — the world’s largest meat company.

JBS took out the advertisement to announce its “goal of net zero by 2040”. But there was no credible plan for achieving this goal.

In February 2024, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, sued JBS USA for making misleading statements about its net zero target. In a statement, James said that JBS had “used greenwashing and misleading statements to capitalize on consumers’ increasing desire to make environmentally friendly choices.”

The case ended with a settlement in November 2025. JBS USA agreed to pay US$1.1 million to support climate-smart agriculture programmes.

JBS is an extraordinarily destructive company. In 2017, it paid one of the biggest corporate fines ever, after bribing officials so that it could expand its operations internationally. JBS has been accused of abuses of workers’ rights, has been implicated in child labour, and has sold diseased meat. And JBS has been linked to large-scale deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.

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JBS is not an outlier

A recent study found that 98% of the environmental claims by 33 of the largest meat and dairy companies are greenwashing. And the 2% of claims that were not greenwash were “generally neutral and verifiable, such as ‘in the United States alone, 30-40% of food produced is never consumed’” the researchers write.

The study is published in PLOS Climate and is titled, “Environmental claims, climate promises, and ‘greenwashing’ by meat and dairy companies.” It is written by Maya Bach, Loredana Loy, Katharine J. Mach, Jennifer Jacquet (all from the University of Miami), and Sonali Shukla McDermid (New York University).

The study looked into 1,233 environmental claims made by meat and dairy companies between 2021 and 2024. The researchers used a greenwashing assessment framework developed in 2022.

Pete Smith at the University of Aberdeen was one of the developers of the greenwashing framework. He told New Scientist that the findings “don’t come as a surprise to me”.

Of the 1,233 claims, 68% were climate related. That’s important because animal agriculture accounts for at least 16.5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. But the researchers found that “many climate-related claims were vague or related to non-material areas of production”.

Net zero?

17 of the 33 companies have made net zero commitments. The researchers write that,

Yet many companies that have made net-zero commitments provided little evidence on how they plan to achieve it. A study that looked into the net-zero pledges of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell found no plans to reduce or phase out the production and sales of hydrocarbons and instead found that these companies were planning to rely on offsets to achieve net-zero emissions. Likewise, meat and dairy companies appear to have no scalable ways to end their emissions, and their net-zero plans, when discussed, similarly rely on carbon offsets to achieve the stated goals. They also do little to nothing to address the other forms of pollution from meat and dairy production.

Maya Bach, the lead author of the study, told Time magazine that, “What we see here is that they are scratching at the surface, sharing pilot projects or initiatives that yes, reduce emissions, but not at the scale or the scope that we need in order to make a meaningful impact.”

The study gives the example of Arla Foods, the world’s fourth largest dairy company. In 2022, Arla launched a “regenerative agriculture pilot” on 24 farms. That represents just 0.0019% of the company’s global operations. It also reported “installing solar panels on the roof of a cheese packaging site in Oswestry, UK, which can cover 12% of the site’s annual electricity needs”.

The researchers point out that,

As one of the world’s largest dairy companies operating in over 32 countries, such a narrow, site-specific practice is small relative to the scale of its overall environmental footprint.

This kind of misleading greenwash affects how people perceive corporations. “It affects the way consumers see their products,” Jennifer Jacquet, another of the authors, told Time magazine. “It affects what politicians think they need to do to regulate — if they think the companies are solving the problem already, they may be less keen to regulate the industries.”

The meat and dairy industry has said, “We don’t need to worry about the present. We’re going to solve this by 2040. This will all be cleaned up,” Jacquet told Sentient. But the reality is that “they’re not making actual progress”.

There is a simple way to avoid the misleading greenwash from the meat and dairy industry: Go vegan.

“Consumers make the decision about what to eat three times a day at a minimum,” Jacquet says. I’ve been vegan for 10 years — and I’m still surprised at how many climate activists eat meat.

The Longido and Monduli Rangelands Carbon project aims to control more than 970,000 hectares of Maasai territory in northern Tanzania for 40 years. The project proposes a dramatic change to the Maasai’s nomadic herding practices. Centuries-old grazing traditions would be replaced by rigid 14-day rotational grazing schedules.

The project developer is the Tanzanian subsidiary of a US-based organisation called Soils for the Future. Volkswagen ClimatePartner has also invested in the project. Maasai Indigenous people have called on Volkswagen to withdraw from the project.

Mark Ritchie, the founder of Soils for the Future, was one of the lead designers of the disastrous Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon Project. Soils for the Future is developing the Kajiado Rangelands Carbon Project on the other side of the border in Kenya. Between them, the two projects will cover almost 2.5 million hectares.

Ritchie is also the founder of US-based carbon project developer CarbonSolve, which is also involved in both projects. Both Soils for the Future and CarbonSolve are incorporated in the tax haven of Delaware.

Soils for the Future wrote Verra’s methodology (VM0032) for the generation of carbon credits from “sustainable grasslands”.

The Longido and Monduli Rangelands Carbon Project is currently listed as “Under validation” on Verra’s registry. The project was open for public comment for one month to 8 April 2025. A note on Verra’s registry states that, “Any comments received have been uploaded in the ‘Other Documents’ section below.” However, almost four weeks since the comment period closed, Verra has not uploaded any comments.

Survival International and the Maasai International Solidarity Alliance submitted a detailed comment, urging Verra not to certify the project.

Survival International and the Maasai International Solidarity Alliance summarise the fundamental problems as follows:

This project proposes to generate large volumes of carbon credits from a complex and highly variable pastoral system using indirect measurement, contested assumptions, and a governance model that raises serious social concerns. The key risks — non-additionality, leakage, monitoring uncertainty, and lack of permanence — are not incidental. They are structural features of the project design.

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“Holistic management”?

The Project Description Document states that,

The principal project activity is a widespread implementation of rapid rotational grazing (RRG) of livestock in the participating communities. Under coordinated grazing plans, livestock will be grouped and moved subject to local day-to-day movement decisions by herders within constraints that follow this set of concepts from rest-rotation grazing and holistic management . . .

“Holistic management” is a concept dreamed up by a Zimbabwean rancher called Allan Savory. He argues that increasing the numbers of livestock on drylands and rotating the grazing can restore the land and address the climate crisis. His 2013 TED Talk has been watched 15 million times.

The Project Description Document refers to Savory’s 2010 book, written with his wife Jody Butterfield, about “The Holistic Management Framework”.

Savory’s ideas have been challenged several times, but the Project Description Document makes no mention of this scientific debate. Instead the PDD refers only to reports in favour of Savory’s ideas — including those written by Mark Ritchie.

Here is some of the scientific research that challenges the ideas of “Holistic Management” and “rapid rotational grazing”:

• A 2014 review published in Agricultural Systems, of the evidence supporting holistic management and intensive rotational grazing (IRG) found that, “The vast majority of experimental evidence does not support claims of enhanced ecological benefits in IRG compared to other grazing strategies, including the capacity to increase storage of soil organic carbon.”

• Also in 2014, a review published in the International Journal of Biodiversity, is titled, “Holistic Management: Misinformation on the Science of Grazed Ecosystems.” It reported that, “This review could find no peer-reviewed studies that show that this management approach is superior to conventional grazing systems in outcomes.” The review concluded that, “Ecologically, the application of Holistic Management principles of trampling and intensive foraging are as detrimental to plants, soils, water storage, and plant productivity as are conventional grazing systems.”

• A 2016 report, published by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, found that “no review study has concluded that holistic grazing is superior to conventional or continuous grazing” and that, “The claimed benefits of holistic grazing thus appear to be exaggerated and/or lack broad scientific support”. The report concludes that “holistic grazing cannot reverse climate change”.

• In 2017, Oxford University’s Food and Climate Research Network published a report titled “Grazed and Confused”. The report found that the evidence backing the claims that rotational grazing can sequester carbon to be “thin on the ground and contradictory”. The report found that “grazing livestock – even in a best-case scenario – are net contributors to the climate problem, as are all livestock. Good grazing management cannot offset its own emissions, let alone those arising from other systems of animal production.”

• Also in 2017, a meta-analysis of the scientific evidence for Savory’s “holistic planned grazing” found that rotational grazing does not result in statistically significant improvements in plant cover, biomass, or animal productivity, compared to existing grazing patterns.

Allan Savory in debate

In July 2023, the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery hosted a debate between Savory and George Monbiot, the Guardian journalist and author. Monbiot has long been critical of Savory’s ideas — mainly because of the lack of scientific evidence backing them up.

The debate was frustrating and extremely odd, mainly because Savory refused to discuss the title of the debate, “Is livestock grazing essential to mitigating climate change?”

Following the non-debate, Monbiot posted a list of references, on his website, with key quotations, in answer to his two main questions:

1. Does the Savory method or any other kind of ranching cause net soil carbon storage?

2. Is significant carbon storage in agricultural soils a viable proposition?

The answer to both questions based on the scientific literature is a resounding “No”.

None of which, of course, is an argument against the importance of livestock and pastoralism to the Maasai’s livelihoods and culture. But it is an argument against using Allan Savory’s ideas, which are not backed by science, to generate carbon credits to allow polluting corporations to continue polluting — and to facilitate a massive land grab of the Maasai’s land.

One of the most important individual actions we can take to address the climate crisis is to stop flying. Aviation is one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gases. And the industry has no plans of slowing down. Instead it is relying on an insane carbon trading scheme to continue business as usual.

We cannot address the climate crisis without addressing ever increasing emissions from the aviation industry.

More than 95 organisations from 25 countries have signed a manifesto demanding that 10 measures to limit aviation. The organisations include Extinction Rebellion, Friends of the Earth, and Scientist Rebellion.

The manifesto, “A Red Line for Airports,” is coordinated by the Stay Grounded network and highlights aviation’s impacts from climate heating to militarisation.

The Stay Grounded network has put out a short video about the manifesto:

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In a press release, Inês Teles, spokesperson from the Stay Grounded Network, says,

“The jet fuel crisis shows what the ‘new normal’ looks like. In a world shaped by war, rising extremism and accelerating climate breakdown, dependence on fossil fuels means permanent instability. Aviation makes this clear: it is one of the fastest-growing sources of emissions, and one of the most vulnerable sectors to global shocks. The solution is simple: reduce flights and invest in grounded alternatives.”

Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist who doesn’t fly. He has also signed the manifesto. In the press release, he says,

“The alarm has been sounding for decades, but we are still locked into a system addicted to fossil fuels. The consequences are clear: war, famine, inequality, instability and worsening climate disasters year after year. Aviation is one of the most unnecessary and unequal sectors: 80% of the world population has never flown, while 1% is responsible for 50% of emissions. It’s past time we cut it - we can do so by design, or be forced to by disaster.”

The Stay Grounded Network is inviting organisations and individuals to sign the manifesto:

Here is the manifesto in full:

A Red Line for Airports Manifesto

Stop the destruction – Make space for a fair and liveable future for all

The world is on fire. We are facing increasingly dramatic climate extremes, while emissions from burning fossil fuels keep rising; the far right growing in power and spreading climate denialism and violence towards the most vulnerable; imperialist attacks shattering international law; genocide broadcast live. In our own skins we feel the cost of living going up; essential needs like housing and health getting harder to meet; we struggle to breathe in the smoke of wildfires and suffocating heat.

We dream of a fair and liveable future for all. A future where everyone’s basic needs are met, a home to live in, clean air and a safe climate. A future where we don’t have a few ultra-rich individuals profiting out of our poverty and the destruction of the physical conditions for life on Earth. A future where we use the wealth of the world to provide a good life for all, closer to each other and to nature, free from oppression and exploitation.

Aviation is a core part of the deadly fossil-fuelled capitalist system we live in and is a direct obstacle to our dream. Millions experience its impact on a daily basis: increasing emissions,health hazards (noise and pollution), destruction of land and biodiversity loss. Existing airports already represent an intolerable impact on health and the climate. Despite this, the sector plans to more than double in size in the next decades, with dozens of new airport projects and expansions1 currently planned in Europe.

How does this fit with safeguarding the climate? It doesn’t. They justify their growth plans and the millions propping-up airport expansion by hiding behind bogus technological fixes and misleading economic arguments. They say jet fuel substitutes will cut emissions but don’t want emissions limits on their airports. That’s because they know the only way to cut aviation emissions is to reduce air traffic – their technological solutions are nothing more than a smoke screen.

Aviation is the most unequal and destructive mode of transport. It directly pollutes and heats the planet; it is the driving force of touristification, with its dire impacts on access to housing and on the lives of local people; it ravages communities, stealing land and resources, destroying biodiversity and fueling militarisation; it profits from deportation flights that disproportionately expel poor, racialised and marginalised people, enforcing a system where borders are weaponised against the vulnerable – while the rich have a free pass to fly anywhere on their private jets. 80% of the global population have never set foot on a plane, and only 1% are responsible for 50% of all aviation emissions.

That is why it’s way past time we cut air traffic to a bare minimum. The massive emissions cuts needed to avert the worst climate disasters don’t leave room for the aviation sector as we know it. Due to the historic responsibility of Global North countries for climate breakdown, as well as their active role in plundering and exploiting the rest of the world, we know where these cuts need to start. This needs to happen at the same time as new airport projects are brought to a halt, globally.

With our voices and our bodies we draw a red line: stop all airport expansion, reduce air traffic. We are people and organisations experiencing first-hand the harms of the aviation sector. We call on everybody to join our efforts to stop airport expansion, end the most destructive and pointless flights and make way for a fair and liveable future for all.

Our aim is to reduce aviation Greenhouse Gas emissions by at least 80% in Europe by 2030 (including flights leaving Europe) and 86% by 2035, compared to 2025.2

To achieve this, we will campaign for these ten measures to immediately keep aviation to a bare minimum:

Stop aviation expansion:

1. No airport expansion: We cannot allow any further airport expansion! The number of flights should be reduced, not increased.

2. No false solutions of offsets and distraction by so-called “sustainable” aviation fuels (SAF): we oppose all forms of greenwashing in achieving aviation emissions reductions. We aim at real cuts in air traffic.

3. Ban Frequent Flyer Programmes and aviation advertising: These practices promote growth and are contrary to fairness.

Rapidly reduce air traffic:

4. Shift short-haul to rail or boat: Short-haul flights with a rail or boat alternative of 10 hour duration or less must be banned. Regional and night trains must be improved and rail fares made affordable if not free.

5. Steep cuts in long and medium-haul flights: These flights – for business, tourism or freight – should be drastically reduced in favour of more regional travel and supply of goods.

6. Ban night flights at airports: takeoffs and landings between 10pm and 7am must be stopped immediately, because they represent a completely unacceptable health hazard for residents. Night flights also have a disproportionate climate impact, since the warming effect of contrails is stronger at night.

7. Ban private jets: Ban the most unjust and climate-wrecking form of transport.

8. Shut down regional airports: Small regional airports, swallowing enormous amounts of taxpayer’s money for a small number of flights, should be shut down immediately. In remote areas, where no other transport alternative is available, air traffic should be drastically reduced and progressively replaced by other clean forms of transport.

A transformation grounded on justice and planetary boundaries:

9. Ensure a just transition and public ownership: Airports and airlines should guarantee a rapid and just transition and pay reparations for their role in climate breakdown. Remaining parts of the aviation sector should not serve private interests and profit but should instead be transferred to public ownership.

10. Set binding carbon limits and distribute flights fairly: Establish a strict carbon cap on airports, fully included in national emission budgets (i.e. the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC’s)). Each airport would then be allocated a fair share of the overall, steadily declining, aviation emission budget. Within this limit, the remaining flights must be distributed through democratic processes based on need, to decide what counts as an essential flight and a justifiable flight – e.g. flights for emergencies, life-saving research or for securing refuge.

This struggle is part of a broader movement for climate justice and collective liberation. Every new runway we stop, every flight we ground, chips away at the system driving inequality and the destruction of life – and builds our power to move towards a future rooted in care and the needs of people, not profit. The red line is here. Stand with us and stay grounded.

The Khasi Hills Community REDD+ project was India’s first REDD project. It covers an area of 23,507 hectares in the East Khasi Hills district of Meghalaya northeast of India.

In November 2011, REDD-Monitor featured the project in a post based on an article by Soumitra Ghosh in Mausam. At the time, the REDD project was just beginning. Plan Vivo approved a Project Idea Note for the project in July 2011 and the project started selling carbon credits in 2012.

Ghosh spoke to Tambor Lyngdoh, the Secretary of the Mawphlang Indigenous government (hima), and subsequently Project Director of the REDD project.

Lyngdoh told Ghosh that,

“The project is just starting and people don’t know anything about REDD etc yet. All they know is that we need to conserve our forests, and we have been doing that for so many years.”

Ghosh questioned the restrictions that would be place on villagers under the REDD project. He questioned whether the project was additional, whether the project was legal, and whether the community had given their consent to the REDD project.

Mark Poffenberger, the Executive Director of Community Forestry International, wrote a response to REDD-Monitor’s post. He explained that CFI became involved in 2005 at the invitation of the Mawphlang Indigenous government. He wrote that,

Over the next four years, the forests in the project area regenerated rapidly as the community controlled ground fires, adopted fuel efficient stoves, and shifted over to higher value stall fed livestock. The success in the early pilot activities generated requests from neighboring indigenous governments (hima) to extend the project to their areas.

The decision to set up a REDD project, according to Poffenberger came from the hima involved in the project. Yet the Project Design Document states that the project was “Initiated by Community Forestry International (CFI) in 2010”.

Ghosh replied in detail in a comment following Poffenberger’s response. “How much [do] the subsistence-level forest users know about the extremely complex and severely challenged mechanism that results in carbon credits?” Ghosh asked. “Do they know or are aware of what’s been happening in other REDD areas across the world?”

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“The slow enclosure of the commons”

Recently, Angshuman Sarma, Policy Officer at Focus on the Global South, wrote about the Khasi Hills Community REDD+ project. Sarma writes that,

In the hills and valleys of Northeast India, where Indigenous worlds are sustained through forests, shifting cultivation, and collectively held commons, these market mechanisms arrive not as allies but as disruptions. They reframe living landscapes into measurable carbon stocks, translating relationships of care into units of trade. What is rendered invisible in this conversion is the deep, historical stewardship of Indigenous Peoples—their knowledge systems, their cyclical practices, and a moral economy rooted in reciprocity.

Sarma argues that instead of supporting Indigenous livelihoods and culture carbon trading mechanisms risk unsettling them. “Ancestral lands, once held in collective ownership and practice, are drawn into circuits of valuation and control,” he writes.

Decision making moves away from the community and toward distant actors such as developers, certifiers, and brokers. “In this quiet reordering, dispossession does not always announce itself loudly,” Sarma writes, “it advances through contracts, metrics, and the slow enclosure of the commons.”

The project aims to reduce fuelwood collecting and has established fast-growing plantations close to villages. The project provides training on the manufacture and installation of efficient cookstoves, and encourages the use of government-subsidised solar cookers.

Villagers are encouraged to stop cattle and goat grazing. The project offers financial support for hybrid chickens called Kuroilers. It also supports stall-fed piggeries and aquaculture ponds. “Where communities once relied on collective fishing practices in rivers and streams, aquaculture represents a more enclosed and individualised mode of production,” Sarma writes.

Where does the money go?

The Project Design Document states that the project has agreements with several international organisations to sell carbon offsets, including ZeroMission (Sweden), COTAP (USA), C-Level (UK), Climate Seed (France), Lund Fund, Ceramica Sant’Agostino (Italy), Anima Impressa, and WeForest (Belgium).

By the end of 2024, the project had generated a total of 532,459 carbon credits, of which 61,145 have not been sold.

Only Carbon Offsets to Alleviate Poverty (COTAP) provides any information about the price of carbon credits from the project. COTAP sells carbon credits from the project for US$22.50 each, of which US$20.25 goes to the project.

But in reality, little of the money reaches communities. COTAP states that by 2024, “the Khasi project has paid US$1,039,487 to approximately 8,005 families and has invested US$414,951 in forest conservation and management”. These figures come from the 2024 project annual report submitted to Plan Vivo.

That may sound like a lot, but it averages only US$86,624 per year, which amounts to less than US$11 per family each year.

Additionality?

In November 2022, Tim Whitley, CEO of COTAP visited the Khasi Hills Community REDD+ project. He spoke to Tambor Lyngdoh, the Project Director of the REDD project. Here’s how part of the conversation went:

Lyngdoh: I am the kind of a man who has been involved running so many things through my community service. Most thing that I love is forestry and tourism. These are two things that I really put myself in. It might be forestry for heritage site, forestry for wildlife conservation, forestry for engaging with Sacred Groves. I have been reviving two Sacred Groves already now.

Whitley: And are these potential additional like separate REDD projects?

Lyngdoh: Yeah, these are separate, yeah.

Whitley: Could they be a carbon project?

Lyngdoh: Yes, it might be in future, why not? Because now when it is depleting means it’s barren so we are starting to grow trees there.

This short exchange reveals a lot. Lyngdoh has set up two initiatives to revive Sacred Groves, outside the REDD project area. He has done so without financing from the sale of carbon credits. Yet Whitley’s only question is whether these could become carbon projects. Both men’s grasp of the concept of additionality appears flimsy, at best.

This was one of the issues that Ghosh raised back in 2011. Given the fact that the project area is community-governed, Ghosh described the additionality of the REDD project as “dubious, if not outright nonsense”.

Sarma concludes his article about the project as follows:

As environmental scientist P. S. Ramakrishnan, who has done extensive research in Northeast India, notes, “traditional societies tend to be much more holistic in their approach towards ecosystem and landscape management, though often at the cost of short-term gains”.1 The Indigenous communities of Northeast India have sustained biodiversity-rich landscapes through such Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), which operates across multiple scales — from species-level interactions to the management of entire landscapes. These systems have enabled long-term ecological stability without reducing forests to extractive assets. Yet, it is precisely these ecologically intact landscapes that are now being drawn into carbon markets, where Global North-based emitters and corporations seek to derive value — appropriating the outcomes of long-standing community stewardship into circuits of carbon finance.