20% Of Australia's Carbon Credits Are "Junk"; "Avoided Deforestation" In Areas Never 2B Logged
About 20% of carbon credits created under the federal Coalition’s main climate change policy do not represent real cuts in carbon dioxide and are essentially “junk”, new research suggests. The report by the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and the Australia Institute found “avoided deforestation” projects do not represent genuine abatement as in most cases the areas were never going to be cleared.
The projects involve landholders being issued with carbon credits and paid from the government’s $4.5bn emissions reduction fund for not removing vegetation from their land. Analysts from the two groups estimated taxpayers had spent about $310m buying more than 26m carbon credits generated through projects unlikely to have helped the climate. The credits had been used to help meet climate targets but in reality were likely to represent “hot air”, the report said.
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Between 2005 and June 2010, the state issued permits giving landholders the green light to clear 2.09m hectares of forest over the subsequent 15 years. Carbon credits were issued to landholders with this type of permit on the assumption all planned to clear their land within the allotted time. The report found this was implausible as it would have required the state’s rate of land-clearing to increase by at least 750%, and possibly more than 12,000%. Richie Merzian, the Australia Institute’s climate and energy policy director, said it showed landholders were being issued with credits, and being paid by taxpayers, to retain forests that they could not have cleared had they wanted to. “You would be hard-pressed to find enough bulldozers in the state,” he said.
Merzian said the problem was not with the landholders receiving the credits, many of whom were likely to be operating in good faith, but with a system that rewarded an unrealistic number of avoided deforestation projects. He said a well-designed offsets market would become increasingly important as the country moved towards a net zero target, and called on the emissions reduction minister, Angus Taylor, to “hit pause” on rewarding avoided deforestation projects “until the integrity issues can be resolved”. Taylor did not respond before publication.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/22/one-in-five-carbon-credits-under-australias-main-climate-policy-are-junk-cuts-research-finds