Forest offsets – overhyped, unverified and over there...

Can you balance coal power with forests? Not based on the research we've done, you can't.

Carbon offsetting seems deceptively simple. We know that we in the West need to cut our carbon emissions - the committee on climate change has said 80% by 2050 in the UK. That's going to be expensive and difficult say the naysayers - so here's an idea. Instead of getting rid of, say, coal-fired power stations, why don't we get the people who want to build them - the big energy companies - to pay for the carbon they're going to emit to be saved somewhere else?

The original form of carbon offsetting suggested investing in forest protection - paying to lock carbon away in trees and forests instead of cutting them down. The idea goes that by preventing trees from being cut down, you can count the carbon they store in their timber as ‘balancing' the carbon being emitted by polluters - usually in the rich west.

As I said, it's a simple and pretty alluring idea. Chuck some money at forest protection, and keep on building the coal plants. But a new report from our crack forests research team shows that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Of course, given that the forestry sector accounts for 1/5 of human-made emissions, protecting forests is a vital part of any climate stability package. That's why the Greenpeace line is that we need to halt deforestation globally by 2020, and we need agreement on funding to make that happen at Copenhagen.

But is wrapping specific bits of forest in the mechanisms of carbon offsetting the best way to get to zero deforestation?

The latest piece of work we've produced examines one particular forest offsets project - the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project, or NKCAP as it's known, which has been hailed as a successful model for so-called ‘sub-national' projects - basically, forest protection of areas which are administered on a basis smaller than an entire country.

NKCAP is a joint venture between American Electric Power, BP and Pacificorp. They paid the Bolivian government in return for the carbon credits from an area of rainforest that was agreed to be protected from logging for 30 years.

Our research concludes that that NKCAP has "yet to produce real, measurable, reportable, and verifiable emissions reductions." In other words, despite all of the policy wonks, economists and carbon offset companies who have created a market in forest offsets, we have no idea whether the project cited as a best-practice example has actually saved any carbon at all –
especially given that Bolivian deforestation rates have not declined over the
course of the project. And coal power plants are being built on the assumption that it has.

Let's not forget the wider framing. We're being told by scientists that in order to stave off maybe 4 degrees of global warming within our lifetimes we have to peak our emissions within the next five years or so, and then reduce them dramatically. We in the west can maybe use carbon trading to slow the rate of emissions reductions we need to make a bit, but we reckon at least 3/4 of emissions cuts need to be made domestically.

Carbon trading in general and forest offsetting in particular shouldn't be used as an excuse to keep on building high-carbon infrastructure which will lock us into high carbon emissions for the next thirty or forty years. We need to stop cutting down forests as a bare minimum step to protect us against the worst possibilities of climate change, not as a get out of jail free card for coal power. Unfortunately, that's exactly what's happening. Witness the reaction from one big energy company executive in the states to our report:

"When Greenpeace says the only reason American Electric Power wants to do this is because it doesn't want to shut down its coal plants, my answer is, 'You bet, because our coal plants serve our customers very cost-effectively,' " he said.

Which kind of says it all, really.

So what's the answer? We reckon that instead of messing around with complicated and dubious project-level schemes, we should do forest protection on a national scale. Read more about what we advocate.

Or... Download the new report here.