Projects to regenerate Australia’s outback forests to store carbon dioxide have received millions of carbon credits, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, even though the total tree and shrub cover in these areas has decreased, according to a new analysis.
It’s the latest claim to cast doubt on the integrity of Australia’s carbon credit system, which the federal government and polluting companies rely on to meet targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Analysis by six academics, including former carbon credit scheme integrity chair Professor Andrew Macintosh, has been submitted to a review of the system commissioned by climate change minister Chris Bowen.
Carbon credits are issued for projects that use government-approved methods to store or avoid greenhouse gas emissions. One carbon credit is meant to represent one tonne of carbon dioxide. The credits can be sold to the government or polluting companies, which use them to offset their on-site emissions.
Macintosh, a professor of environmental law and policy at the Australian National University and former head of the government’s Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee, said the analysis found compelling evidence of widespread problems with forest regeneration projects.
He said some projects using the Human Induced Regeneration (HIR) method had received carbon credits for managed forest regeneration when it had not occurred, and others for regeneration that would have occurred from all ways because it was mainly due to the rains.
Q&A
What are carbon credits?
show
Carbon credits are used by the government and polluting companies as an alternative to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Instead of reducing their own pollution, they can choose to buy carbon credits that are meant to represent a reduction in emissions elsewhere.
Each carbon credit represents one tonne of carbon dioxide that has been prevented from entering the atmosphere or has been absorbed.
Approved methods of generating carbon credits in Australia include regenerating native forest that has been cleared, protecting forest that would otherwise have been cleared (known as “avoided deforestation”) and capturing and the use of emissions that are filtered from landfills to generate electricity.
The credits are bought by the government through the $4.5 billion emissions reduction plan funded by taxpayers or polluters in the private market.
Thanks for your comments.
ANU and University of NSW academics said in almost all cases they found tree growth followed the same rainfall-driven pattern in both managed carbon credit project areas and neighboring areas which had not been managed to capture carbon dioxide.
The team looked at 169 projects that together received about 24 million credits between 2015 and 2021. They said 92 projects in NSW received 13.6 million carbon credits, but the combined area of forest and sparse woody vegetation cover in the affected areas was more than 10,000 hectares less than when the projects were first recorded. In Queensland, they said, 73 projects were found to receive 9.9 million carbon credits, while forest cover declined by more than 50,000 hectares.
Macintosh, who has previously described the carbon credit system as a “sham” and a fraud on taxpayers and the environment, said the results were alarming but should not come as a surprise. He said decades of research in mostly dry landscapes indicated that changing livestock and wildlife grazing practices, the method used in human-induced regeneration, had relatively little impact on tree cover and bushes
He said the analysis should prompt “some inquiry within the Commonwealth government”, and that responsibility rested primarily with the Clean Energy Regulator, which administers the scheme.
“The manner in which it has occurred and has been allowed to continue raises material questions about the Australian Government’s ability to operate schemes of this nature,” he said.
Disputed claims
The claims are the focus of the government’s review of the carbon credit scheme led by Professor Ian Chubb, a former national chief scientist. They are contested by some companies that manage nature-based projects to store carbon in vegetation.
Climate Friendly, which was set up nearly 20 years ago by former CSIRO scientists and aims to achieve 100 million tonnes of emissions reductions by 2025, said it had “a huge volume of data” showing that older projects had increased forest cover once grazing practices. were changed He said he expected satellite data to show that forest cover had begun to increase at more recent project sites this year.
Their argument is that high rainfall is necessary for significant regrowth, but it would not have happened without changes in grazing practices. He said projects that reduced the amount of grazing in a given area had a similar impact on forest growth as projects that stopped land clearing.
Climate Friendly said this was supported by 81 CSIRO field measurements which found there was more carbon stored in regenerating trees at three project sites than had been credited. He argued that the model used to estimate carbon credit claims, known as FullCAM, was inherently conservative.
Climate Friendly co-chief executive Skye Glenday said the company believed there should be more freedom to make carbon credit data public.
“If you’re buying a ton [of carbon abatement] you can be sure you’ll get a ton,” he said.
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s afternoon update
Our Australian Afternoon Update email breaks down the day’s key national and international stories and why they matter
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertisements and content funded by third parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
GreenCollar, which describes itself as the biggest investor in Australia’s environmental markets, has said it was confident its native forest regrowth projects were delivering real emissions reductions, but there were wider problems with measurement and governance.
As Guardian Australia reported, GreenCollar released a joint statement with Macintosh and colleagues last month outlining “fundamental problems” with the plan’s governance. He said he disagreed with Macintosh on a number of points, but agreed that the scheme needed to be revised to improve the measurement of how much carbon dioxide is taken out of the atmosphere and to improve the governance of the monitored system by the Net Energy Regulator.
In a statement in response to Macintosh’s latest paper, GreenCollar chief executive James Schultz said the company was eager to work with individuals and organizations who were “equally eager to achieve the carbon reduction system and the highest market that Australia can achieve.” He said the carbon credit methodologies were “not static”.
“They evolve as advances in scientific and technical knowledge move forward,” he said. “In every project we manage, GreenCollar is dedicated to real, measurable and verifiable results that actually deliver results for our environment.”
GreenCollar and Macintosh said the regulator had too many features and was potentially in conflict. They called for some of their powers, including preparing methods under which carbon credits are created, to be given to other agencies.
The Clean Energy Regulator has rejected these criticisms. In a statement in June, he said Macintosh and his colleagues had not presented strong evidence of the system’s lack of integrity and based their analysis on an incomplete data set. In response to the latest document, a spokesman for the regulator said it welcomed the government’s review and noted it was due to report by the end of the year.
“Judgment Call”
Chubb has acknowledged that there is a widespread view that the governance of the scheme needs to change.
Speaking at the Australasian Emissions Reduction Summit last month, he said there was “a view, through no fault of our own, that the regulator has been asked to multitask which some people see as a potential conflict and that we should seek to simplify.” He said there had been a widespread call for greater transparency to enable data validation.
Professor Ian Chubb, a former national chief scientist, is leading a government review of the carbon credit scheme. Photograph: Andrew Sheargold/AAP
The review panel has not given insight into the submissions of Macintosh and its colleagues regarding the need for changes in the methods used to generate credits. Some of the proposed changes have industry support. Several companies pursuing projects to reduce landfill emissions have supported the analysis by Macintosh and his colleagues who found that the method covering their industry generated meaningless credits and led to increased emissions .
Chubb said on the conference call, “Somewhere along the line, this group [the panel] he will have to make a judgment call about where the weight of evidence lies, and if and how we can improve it so that the issue of trust improves and the value of the whole plan increases.”
Chubb, Macintosh and companies working in the field support the use of carbon offsets to help reduce emissions, but have said they should not be used as an excuse for polluters to delay their own cuts . Chubb recently said that large emitters should not be able to use offsets to avoid doing something to reduce their own emissions.
Others have gone further. A recent report by the Australia Institute, a progressive think tank, cited expert opinion that emissions offsetting should be a last resort, used only in hard-to-cut sectors and should not ‘be available for all pollutants.
Bill Hare, a climate scientist and executive director of Climate Analytics, said many environmental policy experts supported a larger shift in how and when the credits could be used. Was…