Rachel Kyte is Vice President for Sustainable Development at the World Bank. Her solution to climate change? Carbon markets. No surprises there, then.
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Forestry for Life was a forest carbon trading company set up in 2009 with the aim of raising US$5 billion by 2013. The plan failed dramatically, and this year the company’s founder and director, Matthew Ames, appeared at the Old Bailey, charged with fraud.
The debate about whether California should allow REDD carbon offsets in its cap and trade scheme (AB 32) continues. Over the weekend, the Sacramento Bee published two opinion pieces, one opposing REDD credits and one in favour.
Recently, REDD-Monitor wrote about a company called Advanced Global Trading that sells voluntary carbon credits to the public as an investment.
On 16 May 2013, the Insolvency Service announced that Hildon Green Energy Markets Ltd had been wound up after an Insolvency Service investigation. The Insolvency Service reports that the company “marketed near worthless carbon credits to the public for investment”, by “promising vastly exaggerated returns”.
There are many reasons not to buy voluntary carbon credits as an investment. The price is likely to fall over time. There is no secondary market. And you’re more than likely to be ripped off when you buy carbon credits.
A round up of the week’s news on REDD, in chronological order with short extracts (click on the title for the full article). REDD-Monitor’s news page is updated regularly. For past REDD in the news posts, click here.
Yesterday, Indonesia’s Constitutional Court ruled that indigenous peoples’ customary forests should not be classed as “State Forest Areas”. This is a landmark ruling and an important step for the recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights in Indonesia.
Bai Shan Lin, a Chinese logging company, has big plans for Guyana: forest concessions covering 960,000 hectares; a 20-kilometre river gold mining concession; a 500-hectare Guyana-China Timber Industry Economic and Trading Cooperation Park and a 160-hectare real estate development.
MH Carbon was established in September 2010 and went into voluntary liquidation in May 2013. During this period, the company sold carbon credits to more than 5,000 people, at a total cost of £18.7 million.
Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has extended the moratorium on new forest concessions for a further two years. Despite the flaws in the moratorium an extension is better than a return to business as usual. But the President has missed out on a chance to strengthen the moratorium.
This week, Global Witness released a new report investigating a land grabbing crisis in Laos and Cambodia. The report looks at two Vietnamese “rubber baron” companies, Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) and the Vietnam Rubber Group (VRG). Global Witness found that these companies “have leased vast tracts of land for plantations in Laos and Cambodia, with disastrous consequences for local communities and the environment”.
WWF loves “sustainability”. With “sustainability”, there’s no need to address over-consumption, or the never-ending growth of capitalist expansion. Consumption can increase, as long as it’s “sustainable”.
Avaaz has launched a petition to stop Aceh’s proposed spatial plan, which would involve the conversion of 1.2 million hectares of forest, “into plantation and mining areas and other purposes”.
In January 2013, REDD-Monitor wrote about MH Carbon, a company selling carbon credits to the public as investments. REDD-Monitor’s question, as with any company doing this, is whether the company is a boiler room scam. Last week, MH Carbon went into voluntary liquidation. |
    
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 Content written by Chris Lang / REDD-Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
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