A month ago, allegations arose regarding South Pole’s Bachu carbon project, accusing it of using forced labour from the Uighur community in Xinjiang, China. BP and Spotify were among the companies that had purchased credits from this project.
The year began with a scandal rocking the US$2 billion ($2.7 billion) voluntary carbon offsets market. British newspaper The Guardian conducted a nine-month investigation into Verra, the largest certifier of voluntary carbon credits globally, revealing that over 90% of their rainforest offset credits failed to deliver the promised emission cuts.
Verra issued over one billion carbon credits by January, approving 75% of voluntary offsets for clients like Disney and Gucci. The investigation exposed concerns about methodology, revealing companies’ overstatement of climate efforts, as purchased credits lacked tangible benefits. “According to two studies, only a handful of Verra’s rainforest projects showed evidence of deforestation reductions, with further analysis indicating that 94% of the credits had no benefit to the climate… The threat to forests had been overstated by about 400% on average for Verra projects, according to analysis of a 2022 University of Cambridge study,” says The Guardian.
In March, an exposé by investigative journalism platform Follow the Money revealed that leading Swiss carbon trading and consultancy firm South Pole’s biggest money-making project, a mega-forest conservation initiative in Zimbabwe called Kariba, had generated fewer credits than reported. Carbon rating firm Renoster estimated that the Kariba project claimed 30 times more carbon credits than it should have.
