OPINION: Companies: don't let reckless reporting harm communities on the front line of forest conservation

Quantum Commodity Intelligence – Gerald Prolman is chief executive of US-based carbon credit marketing company Everland

Every year about 10 million hectares of forest, an area the size of Portugal, are destroyed. Every year deforestation contributes an estimated 7.5 billion tonnes of carbon emissions. Last year, the world lost 10% more primary forest than in 2021. We are destroying our home. This is insanity.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of leading climate scientists who advise the UN, ending deforestation is essential to solving the climate and biodiversity crises. In response, and at the 11th hour, the private sector showed up with an unprecedented investment of more than $1 billion in 2022 to help communities protect highly threatened forests – with billions more pledged through 2030 and beyond.

Via the system envisioned by the UN, called REDD+, companies can pay for forest conservation results by purchasing carbon credits that represent emissions avoided by community-centered projects. This money means less carbon in the atmosphere, trees stand, wildlife thrive, and some of the world's most disenfranchised communities are on a pathway to meet their basic needs and a better life. All thanks to conserving forests that were previously destined to be felled.

However, an ongoing campaign of reckless 'clickbait' reporting threatens this critical finance, by promoting misleading information and trying to shame corporations who voluntarily took action for climate, nature and communities.

Successful REDD+ projects

Firstly, this campaign ignores what has already been achieved over the past decade by two hundred REDD+ projects, whose successes have been repeatedly and independently verified by internationally recognised environmental and social audit firms. Instead, they promote flawed 'science', which attempts to discredit vital conservation projects by using inaccurate assumptions and bad math. Even their adding up is wrong.

Armchair critics also argue that carbon credits give companies 'a license to pollute'. They got that wrong too. Only legislation permits pollution, and only policymakers and their electors have the power to change that. And while we wait for governments to act, with private investment in REDD+ projects – forests stay standing. Without REDD+ projects, forests disappear, emissions rocket, wildlife perish, and people who already suffer, suffer more.

Campaigners miss the point that deforestation happens for economic reasons, and to stop it communities must have attractive economic alternatives. If a tree brings value as charcoal, timber or cleared land, it will be cut down. But if that tree is the vehicle that finances access to clean water, food security, education, healthcare and improved livelihoods, then that tree has more value to the community standing.

This is how REDD+ projects work, and today such projects protect over 3 million hectares of forest, and generate more than 63 million tonnes of emissions reductions a year. Just the five projects Everland works for, benefit more than 215,000 local people. I have seen what this really means.

Two years of severe drought has struck East Africa, including the region of the Wildlife Works Kasigau Corridor REDD+ project, which lies between Tsavo East and West National Parks in Kenya. As climate change worsens, crops increasingly fail and livestock die. I have listened to children matter-of-factly describe how their families have lost their source of food.

But because of the project, communities in the region have a lifeline. For example, with emergency funding, 23,000 school children were assured a daily meal during the worst of the food shortages.

With proceeds from carbon credit sales, infrastructure like pipelines, catchments and storage tanks has been built across the project area, helping more than 70,000 people to access clean water.

Tens of thousands of trees, including drought-resistant fruit trees, grow in the project's greenhouses each year and are planted by the community, thousands of whom visit the greenhouses to learn how to cultivate crops in the harsh conditions caused by the climate crisis.

Benefits for all

Meanwhile the project funds education and healthcare for many thousands and employs over 400 people who work with communities to conserve more than 2,000 square kilometres of forest, which benefits us all.

These are who the critics' attacks really hurt, the people who are actually doing something meaningful in the fight to preserve life on Earth as we know it. Because community-centred REDD+ projects deliver proven results, and with further investment are the fastest, most effective, lowest-cost thing we can do right now to combat climate change, short of legislation to accelerate the energy transition.

However, instead of lobbying for this legislation, some critics attack the credibility of REDD+ and offer no viable alternative solution. Why? If we listen to them, and do nothing until some yet-to-be discovered solution emerges, the forests and wildlife will be gone and more hardship will be brought to the people who live there.

Standing up for climate

So, to those corporations who stand up for climate, nature and people. Thank you. You are to be commended.

Ignore the noise, the misplaced criticism. It will pass, because the science behind REDD+ is robust and the impacts of projects are undeniable.
Keep investing in forest communities.

Your money is making a real contribution to climate, biodiversity and livelihoods where it's needed most.