The Marathi language, like several other Indian languages, uses a variety of endearments for referring to nature and animals. The moon is affectionately called an uncle, a squirrel an older sister and the cat a maternal aunt. These linguistic patterns highlight the close connection of our culture with nature, where nature is seen as a difficult but proficient relative, one to be looked at with fond indulgence and relied upon for everyday needs.
Ancestrally, we’ve looked at the natural world as an integral part of not just our daily lives but also our spiritual lives, with nature often representing the purer, more ethereal parts of ourselves. Indian religion and philosophy also focuses on the concept of the essential oneness of all life and life forms. So it’s easy to see why some people would be horrified at the thought of putting a price on nature. While others argue that the very fact that we haven’t priced nature so far has led us to our present situation of a rapidly changing climate, widespread ecological destruction and mass species extinction.
Carbon offsets, especially for nature-based projects, elicit a similarly divergent response. A carbon offset or a carbon credit is a tradeable certificate that represents one tonne of carbon dioxide sequestered or avoided from being emitted into the air. Carbon offsets can be claimed for a wide variety of projects from mineralising rocks to store carbon dioxide to heating biomass under low oxygen conditions to create biochar. Depending on who you talk to, carbon offsets are either seen as a messiah, sequestering large amounts of carbon and helping us inch closer to our 1.5-degree Celsius Paris Agreement target or a menace that is actually undermining decarbonisation efforts by allowing large emitters to emit unabated while purchasing relatively cheap offsets with questionable carbon offsetting claims.
While both arguments hold merit, completely dismissing carbon offsets as a tool for climate mitigation and adaptation, is akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Better regulation and accountability, improved digital monitoring and measurement, and increased buyers’ willingness to pay a premium for high-quality, ethical projects can spur the creation of ecologically and environmentally beneficial projects that not just sequester carbon but provide a range of other benefits like green livelihoods, increased biodiversity, improved climate resilience, and better soil and water health.
Quality of carbon offsets
For much of the last decade, the market for voluntary carbon offsets was focused on renewable energy credits. These were generated in lieu of avoided emissions from using renewable energy instead of coal or petrochemical-based energy. Data from Bloomberg shows the number of renewable energy credits sold increased from 2.5 million in 2010 to over 72 million in 2021.
As markets mature, however, these credits are increasingly coming under the scanner. Critics question their “additionality”. Additionality is an important aspect in determining the quality (and hence, price) of a carbon offset because it focuses on whether the project would have existed or been financially viable without the carbon revenue generated from selling offsets. If the answer is yes, then the project is not additional and therefore not contributing to reducing greenhouse emissions on a net and global scale.
As renewable energy projects become more and more financially viable with prices per unit of electricity generated at par or sometimes even less than that of fossil fuel sources, the additionality of renewable energy carbon offsets is becoming increasingly harder to prove. Since these credits are amongst the cheapest in the market, they continue to be popular, but as market scrutiny increases, there is a perceptible shift towards projects where additionality is clearly proved. The question many buyers are now asking is, if most renewable energy projects would have existed regardless of whether they generate carbon revenue or not, then how are they contributing to reducing emissions?
With buyers slowly beginning to question the quality of renewable energy credits, we are witnessing the birth of a burgeoning market for nature and community-based carbon credits. These include projects like forestry, regenerative agricultural practices, addition of biochar to land, efficient cookstoves, biogas, water filters and so on. These credits promise benefits beyond just carbon: everything from sustainable development to poverty alleviation to an improved environment. But do they live up to the hype?
The answers to these questions aren’t simple or straightforward. While carbon markets are bringing unprecedented finance to the ecological protection and restoration space, the market frenzy is also creating opportunities for greenwashing and creative carbon accounting. Recently the world’s biggest certifier of voluntary carbon credits was called out for massively overstating the reduction benefits of some of its projects. An independent study found that 90 per cent of prevented deforestation or REDD+ credits did not represent actual emission reduction. This was because they used grossly inflated values of how much deforestation would have actually taken place without project intervention. While it’s hard to conclusively say if the inflated emission reduction is a result of greenwashing or simply because some of these things are notoriously hard to measure, the bottom line is that more rigorous, real-time and remote measurement of nature-based projects in the forestry and agriculture sectors is critical for the market to be fair and effective.
Also Read: A fierce battle rages between India’s economy and ecology. ‘Pricing’ nature’s services can help
Projects that work
While there are certainly some projects that are, because of lack of rigorous monitoring, prone to overstating their impact, there’s also an abundance of quality projects that are bringing not just climate benefits but also helping communities build climate-resilience and increase their incomes, while sequestering carbon and improving biodiversity. Good examples of these in India are the Araku Valley Project run by the Naandi Foundation and the Bagepalli Reforestation Project run by the Fair Climate Network. Both these projects were able to harness the power of carbon finance, coupled with philanthropy to promote community-led ecological restoration that focused on planting back lost trees in the landscape and transitioning communities to more sustainable, multi-crop agricultural practices that sequester carbon and improve biodiversity. With safeguards in place to ensure community acquiescence and participation, along with regular and diligent monitoring, carbon finance can support philanthropic and government efforts in helping communities both mitigate and adapt to climate change.
This isn’t to say that the carbon offsets market is a replacement for emission reductions. There is undoubtedly an urgent need to decarbonise and a lot of our efforts need to focus there. However, even if we were to stop emitting all carbon into the atmosphere today (an unlikely scenario), at nearly 420 parts per million, carbon levels in the atmosphere today are higher than they have been in the last 400,000 years at least! Since the start of the industrial revolution, we have put over 1.5 trillion tonnes of carbon into the air and still continue to put about 35 billion tonnes a year, every year. At this rate, it is clear that along with decarbonisation, removing excess carbon from the atmosphere should remain a key priority for all players across the government, private and civil society sectors.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, we responded with a range of measures that included prevention, care and emergency response. Our responses included everything from new vaccines to improved hospital facilities to public safety measures like lockdowns and masks. The climate crisis is an emergency as consequential as a pandemic, if not more, and will require a range of responses from mitigation to adaptation to evacuation (in the case of low-lying islands like Tuvalu) to emergency response to climate-change-induced extreme weather events.
Carbon offsets, similarly, are just one tool in our large and varied toolkit to respond to climate change. For an effective and comprehensive response, they need to be coupled with a range of other measures that include decarbonisation, alternate fuels, renewable energy, sensible consumerism, ecological restoration, prevention of species extinction and climate adaptation.
Shubham Gupta is a 2019 batch IAS officer currently posted as Assistant Collector, Etapalli and Project Officer, Integrated Tribal Development Project, Bhamragad. He tweets @ShubhamGupta_11. Krutika Ravishankar is a co-founder at Farmers for Forests, which protects and restores biodiverse forest cover in close collaboration with communities. Views are personal.
This is the second article of a three-part series that explores India’s climate crisis and the potential of carbon credit markets to mitigate environmental damage and spur economic development. Read all the articles here.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)