Shell, BP & Forests: "If You Look At Hundreds Of REDD+ Programs, None Of Them Have Actually Worked"

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Beyond the ethical and PR concerns, campaigners have long expressed concerns about the environmental effectiveness of the schemes — not least how long it will take some of the trees to absorb drivers’ carbon, and how long the forests may exist.

Projects are deemed successful if they store carbon for around 100 years. But it's very hard to know who will be assessing the schemes by then. And trees only provide temporary storage for harmful gases. When trees die they decay, releasing the stored carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. So what happens to the land after the trees come to the end of their natural lives is also a problematic unknown. Future misuse or destruction of that land could reverse any offsets companies claim today, as the equivalent tonnage in carbon stored in these trees is likely to have been ‘spent’ a long time before this happens — through offsetting programmes such as Shell’s Drive Carbon Neutral initiative.

This is not a new concern. Former director of Rainforest Foundation UK, Simon Counsell, was among a group of environmental NGOs working in tropical forests who wrote to the World Bank in 2017, expressing concern over the role Redd+ was playing in offsetting global emissions. Counsell, co-founder of environmental watchdog Redd Monitor, laments the “many vested interests throwing money at the projects.” He told DeSmog: “If you look at hundreds of Redd+ projects, none of them have actually worked. At best what happens is that you stop deforestation in one area but it’s moved somewhere else. You have to protect the projects in perpetuity.”

That doesn’t mean such schemes can never be effective. With better regulation, international agreement on how to count emissions stored in trees, and sufficient oversight, NBS could prove their worth. As Frances Seymour, a climate expert and fellow at the World Resources Institute, says, ”we’re losing tropical forests and other valuable ecosystems at historic rates … if we don’t mobilise some significant finance to create a value proposition for the governments that host these forests to protect them, a reasonable person could argue that that is the greater risk.”

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https://www.desmog.co.uk/2020/07/06/big-oil-forest-fever

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1. These "vested interests " .?

Maybe their definition of ROI is different than others?