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Alto Mayo Forest Reserve in Peru
Photo: Mark Bowler / Nature Picture Library / IMAGO
In times of the global climate crisis, many companies and corporations face the challenge of saving CO₂.
However, companies that manufacture industrial products and sell them worldwide can only reduce climate-damaging carbon dioxide to a limited extent.
That is why large corporations are buying so-called CO₂ certificates under pressure from customers and investors.
The idea behind this form of compensation resembles a kind of indulgence sale and has become big business: the companies give advertising money for forest protection or other projects such as climate-friendly energy technologies - and are allowed to continue releasing CO₂ emissions.
As a research by »Zeit«, the British daily newspaper »Guardian« and the British reporter pool SourceMaterial has now revealed, questionable methods are said to have been used when evaluating these CO₂ certificates for forest protection projects.
Apparently, millions of climate protection certificates were sold that should not have existed because the CO₂ compensation of the projects is greatly overrated.
Companies like SAP, Bayer, Boeing, Disney, Shell and Gucci are affected.
At the center of the criticism is a company that evaluates certificates and is the world market leader in this area.
As studies of the methodology of the industry-related service provider are supposed to show, many forecasts for the development of certified forest areas were drawn too positively.
Research teams studied 29 of the company's 87 tropical forest conservation projects.
The result: Over 90 percent of the certificates from these projects are worthless.
89 million tons of CO₂ that were calculated are actually not saved at all.
Flexible climate protection factors
The company rejects these numbers.
Although the investigations had provided useful data, the conclusions were "wrong", reports the "Zeit".
The methodology would not take local factors into account - that explains the difference in the calculations.
Forests are considered to be important carbon reservoirs worldwide.
But when trees are felled or fall victim to storms, the carbon enters the atmosphere.
A general problem when trading certificates from forest protection projects is that the assessments of climate protection are based on forecasts that are included in the calculations.
For example, you have to price in how much forest would have disappeared in a certain area without the conservation projects – a factor that can easily be overstated.
The greenwashing criticism of trading in CO₂ certificates is nothing new.
Experts have been calling for stricter rules on the climate protection market for some time.
The former environment minister of Panama recently spoke to SPIEGEL of "fraud against climate protection and consumers".
joe
