room full of biologists biting their tongues (or, why "Carbon Credits" suck)
I was recently at a marine science conference, which was of course the good kind of exhausting. 3 days solid, consecutive, of lectures and workshops — coupled with the free coffee & alcohol & baffling lack of water — might've shaved down my lifespan a bit. oh well, I'm Disabled anyways.
the conference was, unsurprisingly, attended predominantly by scientists. Some engineers, some physicists, computer scientists, chemists ... but mostly biologists.
and one economist, who went up to give a talk on exciting progress on applying the concept of "Carbon Credits" to the marine environment. The room was dead silent. Nobody asked questions after, the first & only time that happened.
for the unfamiliar. "Carbon Credits" are basically borne out of the idea that some environments/landscapes/whatever are carbon sinks, taking CO2 out of the atmosphere. For example, forests, since trees use CO2 in photosynthesis. "Carbon Credits" are basically a money value on avoiding/sinking one metric tonne of CO2 or equivalents. so, forests can be protected as nature reserves, in turn having a carbon credit value attached, which can then be purchased by CO2-emitters to "offset" their emissions. purchasing of credits can be required, or maybe a company is only allotted a certain amount for free & then they have to buy more. So — that toxic-gas-spewing factory or that fertilizer-'roided corn farm is now giving money to a nature reserve. That's good, right?
Nope, LOL...
there are a few problems here. The idea relies heavily on a set of assumptions:
1 ) We can accurately estimate the amount of CO2 sunk/offset/etc by a given feature.
2 ) Based on [X] CO2 offset, we can then give an appropriate financial value to that feature.
3 ) Saving a forest/jungle/etc makes it fine to destroy a different forest/jungle/etc ... that these two landscapes can be mutually substituted for one another.
4 ) We know how to preserve/protect nature without causing problems.
&, of course, all of these assumptions fall apart. They have fallen apart already, Carbon Credits being used in the world & not doing what they're supposed to.
...
1 ) CO2 sink estimation. So we have some pretty solid information on CO2 use by certain plants or whatever. But there's a lot more complexity here. Where does it go after, does it fall into a bog where it is buried (nice! long-term storage), does it turn into wood, does it get re-emitted when a forest fire turns the trees to ash? Most of California's credits went up in flames, after all1. & that's assuming we know the landscape well enough to understand its CO2 use, how its ecosystem community changes this, how seasons and natural disturbance change it... & writing this as an ecologist, I can tell you 100% that humans may know a lot of things but we certainly don't know enough.
The Windy Fire burns amid sequoias in Sequoia National Forest near California Hot Springs, California © Reuters, from the Financial Times1
2 ) Giving a monetary value to a carbon sink. Yeah... no. There are a lot of problems here. Firstly, financial value doesn't equate to actual value, look at how much money people are willing to pay for clothing with a Gucci logo versus clothing without it, even if the clothes are the same quality. We also don't have great strategies for figuring out the value of natural features. For example, one way of estimating the value of a natural space is to figure out how much money people spend to visit it (fuel, accommodation, tickets, so on), which completely excludes people who would like to visit but don't have the money to do so. Another way is to estimate the amount of money we'd lose if the landscape was gone, such as valuing a mangrove forest based on the financial damage caused by the flooding it prevents. Or, maybe, the amount of money we can make off of sustainable use of that land, like harvesting wild plants, sustainable forestry, or tourism. But that's another thing we don't know enough about. And how much money is all the nature on Earth even worth, since without it we'd all die? ...& what if it's valued lower than the annual revenue of the wealthiest companies...?
...The estimated value of all of the EU's nature, based on ecosystem services, is 234 billion € in 20192,3, less than the annual revenue of the global fossil fuel sector2,4. That "what if" wasn't rhetorical, but a cry of fear on my part.
3 ) Saving one forest = saving a different forest. This is just a silly assumption. Every place in the world is unique, one-of-a-kind. Billions of creatures crawl over every landscape, many invisible. Some only exist in tiny, forgotten spaces, the pool of a bromeliad, the thick skin of moss built up over hundreds of years, beneath the bark of a tree, in the crevice of a cliff face. There is no equivalent, even if the CO2-offset is spot-on. CO2 isn't the only problem we're dealing with, after all. Biodiversity is the basis of life's resilience, its breadth unknown, species lost before we knew they existed.
but even the idea of "saving a different forest" is unfortunately too much to ask.
4 ) Problem-free conservation? Even if all the other points were moot, "we" (the West...) have a very bad track record of "conservation" of wild places. To "protect" a forest, NGOs such as the WWF violently evict indigenous people living inside it, forbid foraging and hunting, and rape, torture, and kill people2. Destroying entire ways of life, cultures and foodways that had danced in balance with the landscape for millennia.
They put up fences and trails to establish a perimeter. Animals that cannot get past the fence can no longer freely enter or leave, deteriorating the "protected" area. The trails create "edges", reducing the available "center" habitat within a landscape, with many resulting "edge effects"5.
& this "protected" land is often stolen. Taken without permission. Established by some detached international body without consultation with the local community. Sometimes, it is purchased by speculators hoping to sell it at a profit, causing the price of land to skyrocket and force smallholders and subsistence farmers to sell their land to big corporations6. Driving up prices to the essential need of shelter. Consolidating power further into the hands of the wealthy, who have enough land to be unaccountable to it, since if they destroy it they can just move elsewhere. Which is, of course, not helping us to lower CO2 emissions. Remember, that is the point of all this, to "offset" CO2.
The Jenu Kuruba say: “WCS, stop your dirty work” © Survival
this Carbon Credits concept is, in short, destroying landscapes, continuing colonial & ethnic cleansing processes, and attaching a money-value to life itself ... all in the name of letting companies "offset" their emissions, er, I mean, pay out some money so they don't have to stop polluting. Because that's what this is, isn't it? "A fine is a price" — it's just a little less money for their pockets, & they don't have to change anything fundamental.
...
so, yeah, an economist got up in front of the mostly-biologists attending the conference & gave "exciting updates" about trying to apply this Carbon Credits system to the marine environment. & we in the audience did not ask questions, because we were all biting our tongues trying not to start something and derail the remainder of that presentation session (since other people were presenting after the economist).
Afterwards, freed from the auditorium, we gripped our one-too-many coffees and calmed our nerves by talking about how Carbon Credits do not work. Did the economist know? How couldn't they know? Wasn't this common knowledge at this point?
It isn't, it can't be, Carbon Credits are too good of an excuse for the status quo. but I swear I see people screaming their lungs out about this all around me, all the time. The whole auditorium knew. Just not the person who had the space and time to speak, and the microphone.
If the schedule hadn't been so breakneck, maybe someone would've started something in the moment. In any case, we should've said something, I should have said something to an organizer of the conference instead of just my colleagues on the same wavelength. But in this instance — I am, I have been, starting something, issuing a complaint and request for improvement the moment the conference officially closed and feedback opened.
& here, right now, on this blog: I'll direct you to Mongabay and Survival International. Greenwashing & Carbon Colonialism are real horrors eating at the world. I'm asking you to be as annoying about this as possible.
Never hold your tongue. do better than we did, than I did, in-the-moment. & if you also fumble it, then do what you can retroactively, & steel yourself for the next opportunity to respond to "...any questions?" with "YES, how do you justify any of this?"
...
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1 ) Wildfires destroy almost all forest carbon offsets in 100-year reserve, study says. Financial Times.
2 ) Decolonize Conservation. Edited by Ashley Dawson, Fiore Longo, and Survival International.
3 ) Accounting for nature in euro area economic activity. European Central Bank Economic Bulletin, Issue 6/2024.
4 ) Here’s Just How Huge Big Oil Would Be If It Were a Country. Time, 2023.
5 ) Murcia, C. Edge effects in fragmented forests: implications for conservation. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 1995; 10(2):58-62.
6 ) Merrell, I., Wheatley, H., Pate, L., Glendinning, J., Nelson, B., and MacKessack-Leitch, J. Rural Land Market Insights Report 2024. A report commissioned by the Scottish Land Commission.