Pasar perdagangan kredit karbon di hutan-hutan umum Brasil memiliki peluang besar

Peta dasar yang menunjukkan hutan hujan Amazon
Peta yang memperlihatkan daerah publik di Amazon Brasil
Investigasi selama enam bulan mengungkap bahwa banyak usaha kredit karbon menghasilkan keuntungan dari tanah publik yang sebenarnya mereka tidak memiliki hak, dan gagal membagi pendapatan dengan mereka yang melindungi hutan
24 Juli 2024 jam 6:00 pagi
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Banyak hutan hujan Amazon Brasil diselamatkan di balik perisai hijau tanah publik yang dilindungi
Dalam beberapa tahun terakhir, perusahaan telah meluncurkan proyek pelestarian untuk mencari barang komoditas yang menguntungkan yang dikenal sebagai kredit karbon.
Tetapi investigasi Washington Post selama enam bulan menemukan bahwa sebagian besar proyek — yang telah menghasilkan puluhan juta dolar — tumpang tindih dengan tanah publik.
Bila digabungkan, usaha tersebut mengklaim cukup lahan publik untuk menutupi negara bagian Maryland — enam kali.
PORTEL, Brasil — Dalam dua dekade terakhir, sebuah komoditas keuangan baru yang dikenal sebagai kredit karbon telah menjadi salah satu alat paling penting di dunia dalam memerangi perubahan iklim. Perusahaan dan organisasi yang ingin mengimbangi emisi karbon mereka telah menghabiskan miliaran dolar untuk kredit tersebut.
Hutan hujan Amazon, karena ukurannya dan pentingnya lingkungan global, semakin menarik perhatian mereka yang mengejar kredit karbon. Di sini, orang-orang ini disebut “kowboi karbon.”
Mereka telah meluncurkan proyek pelestarian di seluruh wilayah tersebut, menghasilkan kredit karbon senilai ratusan juta dolar. Kredit-kredit itu, pada gilirannya, dibeli oleh beberapa perusahaan terbesar di dunia
Proyek-proyek itu telah membantu mengubah Amazon Brasil menjadi pusat industri global yang banyak tidak dipertanggungjawabkan dengan penjualan, menurut riset pasar, hampir $11 miliar.
Namun, investigasi Washington Post selama enam bulan menunjukkan bahwa banyak usaha swasta secara berulang kali dan, kata pihak berwenang, secara illegal mengklaim tanah publik yang dilindungi, menghasilkan keuntungan besar dari wilayah yang sebenarnya mereka tidak memiliki hak legal, dan kemudian gagal membagi pendapatan dengan mereka yang melindungi atau tinggal di tanah tersebut. Penggunaan tanah seperti itu untuk menjual kredit juga memberikan kontribusi sedikit dalam mengurangi emisi karbon.
Salah satu jenis pohon terbesar di hutan hujan Amazon adalah castanheira, atau pohon Brazil nut.
Frekuensi dengan proyek-proyek ini menggunakan properti publik, jumlah lahan yang terlibat, dan nilai kredit yang dihasilkan sebelumnya tidak pernah dilaporkan.
Post menemukan bahwa lebih dari separuh proyek pelestarian hutan kredit karbon di Amazon Brasil tumpang tindih dengan wilayah publik. Jumlah tanah publik yang diklaim oleh usaha swasta tersebut adalah lebih dari 78.000 mil persegi, enam kali ukuran Maryland. Perusahaan yang membeli kredit karbon dari proyek-proyek tanah swasta untuk mengimbangi emisi termasuk perusahaan internasional terbesar: Netflix, Air France, Delta Air Lines, Salesforce, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Airbnb, Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., Boston Consulting Group, Spotify, Boeing.
Diagram menjelaskan bagaimana pasar kredit karbon bekerja

Bagaimana pasar kredit karbon dimaksudkan untuk bekerja

Karbondioksida dikeluarkan ke atmosfer oleh industri dan aktivitas seperti penerbangan udara dan transportasi.
Organisasi dan individu membeli kredit karbon untuk mengimbangi atau mengurangi emisi mereka.
Uang dari penjualan kredit karbon digunakan untuk mendanai proyek pelestarian yang bersertifikat yang melindungi hutan atau menghasilkan energi terbarukan, misalnya.
Proyek-proyek ini dimaksudkan untuk mengurangi jumlah CO2 di atmosfer. Perusahaan dan individu yang mendanainya menerima sertifikat pengurangan emisi.
Penyidikan Post didasarkan pada tinjauan ribuan halaman catatan perusahaan dan pengadilan, wawancara dengan puluhan orang di seluruh hutan, dan analisis geospasial proyek kredit karbon di Amazon. Dalam melakukan analisis geospasial — yang paling komprehensif hingga saat ini — Post membandingkan batas-batas 101 proyek pelestarian swasta yang diajukan ke dua sertifier internasional, Verra dan Cercarbono, yang beroperasi di pusat pasar kredit karbon global, dengan peta pemerintah wilayah publik di Amazon. (Empat usaha dihapus dari analisis karena file peta mereka rusak.)

Sebagian besar proyek masih dalam proses untuk mendapat sertifikasi. Namun 35 sudah tersertifikasi. Dan diantara itu, sebagian besar — 29 — tumpang tindih dengan tanah publik. Proyek-proyek tersebut sejauh ini telah menghasilkan lebih dari 80 juta kredit karbon, setidaknya 30 juta diantaranya telah dijual.

Tidak jelas berapa yang diperoleh dari penjualan awal, karena informasi transaksi terperinci tidak tersedia secara publik. Tetapi nilai perkiraan saat pembeli menggunakannya untuk mengimbangi emisi lebih dari $212 juta, menurut analisis berdasarkan tarif pasar tahunan.

Analisis Post tidak menemukan bukti bahwa pembeli bertindak secara tidak benar. Sembilan perusahaan yang diidentifikasi dalam artikel ini merespons permintaan komentar, mengatakan mereka berupaya memastikan kredit karbon yang mereka beli berkualitas tinggi atau bahwa mereka mengurangi penggunaan kredit.

Brazilian authorities are starting to investigate. Three projects were targeted last month by federal police, who issued five arrest warrants and alleged that nearly two dozen companies had conspired to improperly net nearly $35 million in carbon credit sales.

In this opaque global market, some projects earn carbon credits by increasing the use of renewable energies. Others recycle waste or plant trees or improve agricultural practices. But in the Brazilian Amazon, the approach that has been most popular — and profitable — is known as “avoided deforestation” ventures. These projects win credits by essentially maintaining the status quo — by preserving forests seen to be at risk.

The Post’s investigation not only exposes failings in the global system for vetting such ventures but also calls into question the value of some projects in addressing global warming. Much of the Brazilian Amazon is safeguarded by a green shield of publicly protected lands: national forests, indigenous territory, federal and state reserves. But when polluting companies buy credits generated by supposedly preserving land that was already protected, their money contributes next to nothing.

“The system is very gameable,” said Joseph Romm, a climate researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “And the victim is the planet, and all of humanity who suffers because we’re not reducing emissions, but get to pretend we are.”

Remote river town of Portel in the Amazon has attracted numerous carbon credit projects. Several of the ventures overlap with public lands. Gracionice Costa da Silva Correa, 43, a Portel community organizer, has worked for decades to secure state protection for her communities — only to find out several years ago that those same regions had been used by carbon credit projects without authorization. Marivaldo Pereira de Oliveira, 49, lives on protected territory in Portel and encouraged his neighbors to resist the unauthorized use of public lands by carbon credit companies. Raimundo Macedo Brabo, 53, lives on protected lands in Portel. Ana Mendes for The Washington Post

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Portel was described by one carbon credit project as a violent “backwater” controlled by a “mafia” of illegal loggers and corrupt politicians. Interviews and public records call that assertion into question. (Ana Mendes for The Washington Post)An unusual report

West’s question is now at the core of an investigation being led by a Pará state official named Andréia Barreto. Responsible for agrarian cases at the Pará state public defenders’ office, Barreto had once believed she was familiar with just about every type of land dispute in the Amazon. But then in late 2022, an unusual report came across her desk.

The report, written by the environmental human rights organization World Rainforest Movement, told of foreigners pursuing carbon credit deals worth millions of dollars in faraway Portel. Barreto, a cerebral attorney with straight black hair, bought several books about the obscure market, assembled a team of investigators and reserved boat passage to the distant city.

Barreto said she found that Verra had over the past decade approved three large carbon credit projects, despite what appeared to be a significant irregularity. Maps showed the project areas overlapped with several public tracts, much of which had been set aside in 2012 for local river communities. So Barreto, often working on the case until 10 p.m., tracked down the deeds that appeared to show the lands were private, finding 34 in all.

A hard-charging Midwesterner with barely a sprig of hair, Greene moved to Brazil around 2010 and quickly immersed himself in “complex real estate situations,” according to a biography included with project descriptions. He opened up a real estate brokerage firm specializing in carbon offset projects and, by 2011, was boasting to a Dutch public broadcast journalist that “we know absolutely everything about the laws in the Amazon.”

One of his partners was Morioka, whose land deeds opened up an opportunity to do large-scale carbon credit preservation projects in Portel.

Portel was described in reports associated with Greene’s projects as “a backwater mafia-lead [sic] city” where a cabal of illegal loggers, corrupt politicians and labor unions were destroying the forest and imprisoning thousands of poor river dwellers in a system of “oppression.” One of the few resisting, in Greene’s telling, was Greene. “If I stop, Portel is basically finished,” he told the Intercept Brasil in 2022.

The projects, according to reports submitted to Verra, had dispatched river scouts to surveil the forest and report illegal loggers to environmental authorities, and were helping impoverished river people resist loggers seeking to displace them. “We have saved innumerable river people from being killed and stripped of their land by illegal loggers,” reported his company’s website.

But a review of public records and academic research, a visit to the project areas, and interviews with 40 people familiar with the region or projects, including 16 of Greene’s current and former employees, offered a different picture.

The threat of widespread destruction and rampant violent crime was largely exaggerated, according to crime and deforestation data. None of those queried — including police officials, politicians, environmental authorities, community leaders and former employees — could confirm that projects ever conducted regular surveillance.

“There was never any patrolling,” said Sergio Gibson, an employee credited in project reports as having coordinated the surveillance.

Former employees, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of being associated with the projects or reprisals by Greene, accused the American businessman of fictionalizing Portel’s security situation, inflating the projects’ social impacts and brushing off their concerns over irregularities.

Heitor Gama, a Brazilian anthropologist, said he spent a month on Portel’s rivers, where he quickly began to question whether the programs were authentic. Reports submitted by the company to Verra and publicly available on its database has repeatedly asserted that the projects were bringing land tenure to the rural poor. But no one got property rights, he said, just a document that said they’d been entered into an agrarian registry. Most people Gama said he encountered had never heard of the preservation programs.

In response to lawsuits by state authorities alleging that he wrongfully used public land, Greene has denied all improprieties in filings submitted to Pará state court, claimed that the projects have not been profitable and said they have benefited local communities. He canceled a scheduled interview for this article, and he did not respond to a list of detailed questions emailed to him regarding his business practices in the Amazon.

Investigasi yang telah dilaksanakan Post tidak hanya mengeksplorasi kelemahan dalam sistem global dalam memeriksa ventures tersebut, tetapi juga mempertanyakan nilai sebagian proyek dalam menghadapi pemanasan global. Sebagian besar hutan Amazon Brasil diselamatkan oleh perisai hijau tanah publik: hutan nasional, wilayah pribumi, cadangan federal dan negara. Namun ketika perusahaan pencemar membeli kredit yang dihasilkan oleh proyek yang dipercayai melestarikan tanah yang sudah dilindungi, uang mereka memberikan kontribusi yang hampir tidak ada apa-apa.

“Sistem ini sangat rentan,” kata Joseph Romm, seorang peneliti iklim di University of Pennsylvania. “Dan korban adalah planet ini, dan seluruh umat manusia yang menderita karena kita tidak mengurangi emisi, tetapi berpura-pura kita melakukannya.”