Verra
In 2005, Climate Wedge and Cheyne Capital drafted v1 of the Voluntary Carbon Standard. In March 2006, they transferred the Voluntary Carbon Standard version 1.0 to the Climate Group, International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) and World Economic Forum.
Verra has since become the largest vendor in the voluntary carbon market.
Greenwashing
Many factors would suggest that Verra credits have little credibility as legitimate carbon offset, and are most often a vehicle for greenwashing.
Pollution Collusion
Verra is a member of the International Emissions Trading Association, whose membership includes top petroleum corporations such as British Petroleum, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Enbridge, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, and Shell Oil. These companies are currently engaged in extensive greenwashing campaigns which include the use of Verra's offsets.[1]
Most if not all of them have known about global warming and other signs of climate collapse for decades, all the while casting doubt on or outright denying the reality. See also: Fossil Fuel Industry Disinformation.
IETA members further include:[2]
- top fossil fuel financiers (e.g. Bank of America & Goldman Sachs)
- industrial agriculture firms (e.g. Bayer-Monsanto & Cargill) that manufacture the munitions required to "secure" a genetically engineered monoculture in the War on Insects + War on Weeds.
Monoculture Plantations
Eucalyptus Forestry
The project title on the Verra protect database is “‘Guanaré’ forest plantations on degraded grasslands under extensive grazing”. The project consists of more than 21,000 hectares of eucalyptus monocultures. The project was set up by Guanaré AS, a Uruguayan forestry investment firm founded by Peter Lyford Pyke. The industrial forestry operations on the ground are carried out by Agroempresa Forestal, a Uruguayan company. The timber is harvested and shipped to India and China.[3]
EcoPlanet Bamboo
<https://redd-monitor.org/2018/04/27/has-ecoplanet-bamboo-really-found-a-buyer-for-its-bamboo-in-nicaragua/> <https://theecologist.org/2011/aug/30/bamboo-can-it-live-green-gold-hype>
Rainforest Protection
Systemic Analysis
A nine-month investigation published January 2023 by The Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial found that an estimated 94% of the rainforest carbon offsets provided by Verra are worthless. These account for about 40% of all credits it has approved. They also found that the credit scheme may worsen global burning, and the deforestation baseline for Verra projects was overstated by 400% on average relative to 'non-protected' forest. At one of Verra's project sites in Peru, residents complained about being forcefully evicted from their homes, which were then demolished. The investigation was based on two peer-reviewed studies, one by a group of University of Cambridge scientists and the other from a team of international researchers [4] [5], as well as a third study still in peer-review.[6]
Verra denied the claims and criticized the methodology of the studies; the IETA pontificated on "the importance of representing all voices when it comes to the climate"[7]
Mai Ndombe
One source for the $NCT of Toucan Protocol and Regen Network.
The Savory Method
(See: accreditation of & partnership with Ruuts)
Colonialism
In "Aviation and false solutions: The farce of the 'Florestal Santa Maria' REDD project in Mato Grosso, Brazil," the World Rainforest Movement documented how this Verra-certified project is highly questionable in terms of its purported ecological benefits (and being used to issue carbon credits greenwashing Delta Airlines).[8]
The report also emphasizes that the "chain of custody" of the project land in question shows that:
The area is in the hands of the powerful family-owned business group that – according to the project’s own text – claim to be the "original landowners" who acquired the land from the federal and state government in 1975, along with the right to “colonize” Colniza.
This was during the the Brazilian Military dictatorship of 1964-1985, when vast swathes of Amazonian forestland (including the project area) were stolen from Indigenous Nations through a devastating genocide which killed hundreds of thousands of people.[9]
The report continues:
It's striking that the VCS as well as FSC auditors, reproduce the story about supposed legality of the land title and the process of occupation of Colniza as told by FSM-REDD project owner without any further comment. The reality, however, is that there are very different stories about the history of Colniza and the project area. There is much documentation available of the history of land grabbing, environmental destruction and violence that has marked the Amazon colonization process, yet the auditors do not seem to have investigated these other stories of colonization in the specific case of Colniza for the FSC and VCS certification except for brief comments on the presence of indigenous peoples in the region, mentioned in the reports of the FSC auditors.[10]
Sources
- ↑ https://redd-monitor.org/2022/07/13/how-to-burn-the-planet-shell-invests-us38-million-in-carbonext-brazils-biggest-redd-offset-firm/
- ↑ https://www.ieta.org/Our-Members
- ↑ https://redd-monitor.org/2022/07/18/german-supermarket-aldi-buys-carbon-offsets-from-monoculture-eucalyptus-plantations-in-uruguay-in-order-to-claim-that-its-milk-is-carbon-neutral/
- ↑ https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2004334117
- ↑ https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cobi.13970
- ↑ https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.03354
- ↑ https://www.ieta.org/resources/News/Press_Releases/IETA%20Guardian%20reponse%20January%202023.pdf
- ↑ https://www.wrm.org.uy/publications/aviation-and-false-solutions-the-farce-of-the-florestal-santa-maria-redd-project-in-mato-grosso-brazil
- ↑ https://branchoutnow.org/the-brazilian-holocaust-anti-indigenous-fascists-are-on-the-brink-of-destroying-the-amazon-rainforest-join-the-boycott-to-stop-them/
- ↑ https://www.wrm.org.uy/publications/aviation-and-false-solutions-the-farce-of-the-florestal-santa-maria-redd-project-in-mato-grosso-brazil