A new analysis finds the level of deforestation 'avoided' by carbon offset schemes is too high to have occurred in the first place, likening them to 'paying someone not to drive to work when they never drove to begin with'.
ACCUs are used as "offsets" by companies that want to reduce their carbon footprint. After a company reduces emissions as much as it can, it buys offset credits to make up for its remaining emissions. But offsets are also the central plank of Australia's main emissions reduction policy, the Emissions Reduction Fund .
The ERF is a $4.5 billion reverse auction that buys ACCUs at the cheapest rate someone is willing to sell them for. So far, the government has committed to spending more than $300 million on ACCUs created through "avoided deforestation" via the ERF. More than a fifth of the money spent through that fund has already gone to that method.Not 'enough bulldozers in NSW' for assumed clearing According to the report authors, there is simply no way all the emissions reductions paid for by those credits are real. They examined past rates of deforestation and compared them to the amount of deforestation claimed to have been avoided through these ACCUs. The report found the amount of "avoided deforestation" would not have realistically occurred in the first place. Mr Merzian said the amount claimed as "avoided deforestation" was a fantasy because it would have been impossible for that much deforestation to have occurred. "It's hard to think that there are even enough bulldozers in New South Wales to follow through on the inflated land-clearing rates that sit behind this methodology," he said. The federal government assumed that any farmer who had approval to clear forest under a particular type of permit in NSW would have cleared it, and so it was eligible for ACCUs if they committed to not clearing it. But about 2 million hectares of land had approval for clearing under those permits. For that area to have been cleared in 15 years, the clearing rates in NSW would have had to increase dramatically. For the assumption to be true, the report says, clearing rates would have had to increase by up to 128 times. Some avoided deforestation credits are created when landholders have permits to clear land but choose not to. Even just looking at the land that generated ACCUs by simply not being cleared, the government has paid for avoided deforestation that would have represented a 750 per cent increase in clearing rates, had it occurred. It means the government is assuming that clearing an area that would have previously taken between 128 and 1,936 years would have occurred in just 15 years, according to the report.Megan Evans, an expert in environmental governance from the University of New South Wales, said this problem had been acknowledged by many before, but not quantified until now. "A lot of the time you can have a permit to clear, but you never actually had any intention of doing so. And that's exactly what this report has quantified and showed," Dr Evans said.Carbon Markets Institute chief executive John Connor said he welcomed critiques of the way carbon credits were created, but questioned the calculations in the report. He argued the credits were not for emissions reductions in the next 15 years, but emissions reductions that were expected to occur over the next 100 years.
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