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6
One of us participated in a large conservation conference organized by the
International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Barcelona in 2008.
There were several thousand participants from many different countries. IUCN
encouraged everyone to buy voluntary carbon credits for their travel emissions.
These carbon credits were sold through the conference website. The result was
proudly announced: This was a ‘climate-neutral’ conference.
The second type of carbon trade is one in which an industrialized company or
country can buy carbon credits in a developing country and receive the right to
register these in the climate account as reduction of carbon emissions for their own
country. This is a mechanism that was established under the Clean Development
Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol that was adopted in 1997 and entered
into force in 2005.
Let us have a look at an early use of the carbon market. In 1993, the Dutch
foundation ‘Forest Absorbing Carbon Emissions’ (FACE) started to sell carbon
credits from forest plantations at the slopes of Mount Elgon in Uganda (Cavanagh
and Benjaminsen 2014). According to the plan, the project should result in the
capturing of 3.73 million tons CO 2 from 1994 to 2034, but already in 2003, the
project fell apart. This was due to local resistance and conflicts because of forced
evictions of smallholders in order to clear the area to make space for the planting
of trees to capture carbon. At the same time, the project was presented on the webpage of FACE as a win-win project. This is an example of commodity fetishism
that we introduced in 7 Chap. 2.
In this case, carbon that was stored in the Ugandan forest, was sold to make up
for emissions of greenhouse gases by people in the Netherlands. It was a Dutch
energy company called N.V. Sep that established FACE in 1990. The original aim
was that tree planting in Uganda should secure the company’s rights to carbon
emissions from a new coal power plant in the Netherlands. We can, in other words,
conclude that this was case of climate injustice, where people in Mount Elgon lost
their land and livelihoods because Dutch corporate interests wanted to mask their
increases in CO 2 emissions through carbon trade.
Carbon is a virtual commodity that is detached from the context in which it is
produced (Lohmann 2010). It is also an ‘uncooperative’ commodity in the sense
that carbon is more difficult to measure and quantify than most other commodities
(Bumpus 2011). In addition, forest projects are typically affected by the problems
of ‘leakage’ and ‘permanence’. The former refers to the possibility that deforestation may be moved to neighbouring forests, and the latter to the risk of stored
carbon being released through fire, disease, pests and human encroachment (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen 2014).
CDM certification is not supposed to be approved if there are negative social
impacts of a carbon capture project. There is, however, a question to what extent
certification consultants are able to observe and detect serious problems. One of
the tree plantations of the Norwegian company Green Resources in Uganda is
CDM certified. However, researchers and journalists have criticized the project for
Chapter 6 · Climate Mitigation Choices: Reducing Deforestation ...
6
One of us participated in a large conservation conference organized by the
International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Barcelona in 2008.
There were several thousand participants from many different countries. IUCN
encouraged everyone to buy voluntary carbon credits for their travel emissions.
These carbon credits were sold through the conference website. The result was
proudly announced: This was a ‘climate-neutral’ conference.
The second type of carbon trade is one in which an industrialized company or
country can buy carbon credits in a developing country and receive the right to
register these in the climate account as reduction of carbon emissions for their own
country. This is a mechanism that was established under the Clean Development
Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol that was adopted in 1997 and entered
into force in 2005.
Let us have a look at an early use of the carbon market. In 1993, the Dutch
foundation ‘Forest Absorbing Carbon Emissions’ (FACE) started to sell carbon
credits from forest plantations at the slopes of Mount Elgon in Uganda (Cavanagh
and Benjaminsen 2014). According to the plan, the project should result in the
capturing of 3.73 million tons CO 2 from 1994 to 2034, but already in 2003, the
project fell apart. This was due to local resistance and conflicts because of forced
evictions of smallholders in order to clear the area to make space for the planting
of trees to capture carbon. At the same time, the project was presented on the webpage of FACE as a win-win project. This is an example of commodity fetishism
that we introduced in 7 Chap. 2.
In this case, carbon that was stored in the Ugandan forest, was sold to make up
for emissions of greenhouse gases by people in the Netherlands. It was a Dutch
energy company called N.V. Sep that established FACE in 1990. The original aim
was that tree planting in Uganda should secure the company’s rights to carbon
emissions from a new coal power plant in the Netherlands. We can, in other words,
conclude that this was case of climate injustice, where people in Mount Elgon lost
their land and livelihoods because Dutch corporate interests wanted to mask their
increases in CO 2 emissions through carbon trade.
Carbon is a virtual commodity that is detached from the context in which it is
produced (Lohmann 2010). It is also an ‘uncooperative’ commodity in the sense
that carbon is more difficult to measure and quantify than most other commodities
(Bumpus 2011). In addition, forest projects are typically affected by the problems
of ‘leakage’ and ‘permanence’. The former refers to the possibility that deforestation may be moved to neighbouring forests, and the latter to the risk of stored
carbon being released through fire, disease, pests and human encroachment (Cavanagh and Benjaminsen 2014).
CDM certification is not supposed to be approved if there are negative social
impacts of a carbon capture project. There is, however, a question to what extent
certification consultants are able to observe and detect serious problems. One of
the tree plantations of the Norwegian company Green Resources in Uganda is
CDM certified. However, researchers and journalists have criticized the project for
Chapter 6 · Climate Mitigation Choices: Reducing Deforestation ...