The Carbon Boat - We cannot afford to sink (an analogy of Carbon markets)

"Criticism is something you can easily avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing." – Aristotle

The problem of climate change can be explained with the analogy of a sinking boat. After recent articles questioning the worth of forest carbon I ask: Can we afford to stop any of the current approaches we use? In this article I explain how each role is important, and why forest carbon credits are critical. When dealing with a new mechanism like carbon credits, it is important to engage in constructive criticism in order to make them better, rather than engaging in negative, even destructive criticism just to sell more adverts on your newspaper.

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The latest “study” commissioned by The Guardian[i] on the validity of forest carbon credits issued by VERRA, has sparked a flurry of debate about Carbon markets. In particular, about the validity of Voluntary Carbon Markets (VCM), and within those, REDD (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), a carbon mechanism based on protecting the enormous carbon sinks stored in wild ecosystems. ?

I will not go into the flaws of the study and the obvious bias of its sponsors. I think VERRA’s response[ii] does a good job of putting the study in context. Suffice to say, two things (1) carbon markets are young and they can improve. Some of us keep working on helping them get better; (2) The Guardian is in the business of selling adverts, and controversial articles (regardless of their veracity) create a lot of ‘clicks’ and ad revenue. The debate generated by the article reveals that many have a systemic misunderstanding of basic concepts in climate, conservation, and economic principles.

At this point I think most of us agree that climate change is real, and also, that we have destroyed and continue to damage some of our planet’s most important ecosystems. These large ecosystems not only act as carbon sinks but also host most of our planet’s biodiversity. So why is it so difficult to understand nature-based carbon credits such as REDD have a massive role to play in our plans to address climate change?

Let me explain with a simple analogy: Imagine we are all in a boat that is taking water.

There is a hole in the hull that is caused by two things: one is the damage to the wood of the hull (we could liken this to the destruction of forests, mangroves, grasslands); the other is damage to the hull by the movement of the boat making the hole bigger, letting more and more water in (liken this to human emissions from cars, industry and construction associated with economic activity and development).?

The boat has taken a lot of water (CO2) already, and is sinking. But there is a man using a bucket to bail water over board. He is working hard at it, but no matter how hard he works at it, water keeps coming in (you can liken his role to that of people working on carbon capture – the man is removing carbon). Carbon capture today is done through two main approaches: technologies that capture and store CO2 (they are expensive and small scale), and nature based solutions (including regenerative agriculture, reforestation, etc).?

But the hole in our metaphorical boat is still there, and getting bigger. Thankfully there is a lady trying to block that hole.?That is an important task, if we do not reduce the size of the hole, the boat will sink.?No amount of bailing water will be sufficient, unless we shrink the hole. The woman is reducing and avoiding emissions. How is she “blocking this hole”? Well there are two main avenues:

-Reducing the emissions from nature damaging activities. Nature is our single greatest store of carbon. As ecosystems get damaged they release carbon. Stopping land conversion, deforestation and degradation is massively important in our fight for climate, and that costs money. Why should we expect impoverished IPLCs (indigenous peoples) in rural areas not convert wild ecosystems into productive assets, if the benefit is for rich countries but the cost of keeping the landscapes wild is theirs? Why shouldn't these communities develop in the way Great Britain, or Germany have done? Income from REDD (and other voluntary carbon mechanisms) makes the protection of wild ecosystems competitive with other land uses, and couples the protection of the most important carbon sinks on the planet with the improved wellbeing of the communities that live within them. Currently, nothing else achieves making natural biodiverse ecosystems valuable to people more effectively than the voluntary carbon markets.

-Reducing emissions from industry, transport and general human activity. This is the rich-world’s responsibility. We are advancing but we do not want to let go of our over-consumption lifestyles (I would bet that even the Editor-in-Chief of the Guardian changes her mobile phone at most every couple of years, consumes more goods than 99% of the world population, and lives in a large house with very expensive energy bills). ?

We must accept that even if we all did all we could to become greener, it will take some time to significantly reduce emissions. What do we do until then? Further, we must accept that we cannot entirely stop using Oil & Gas (i.e. hydrocarbons). Not today and probably not ever. We can greatly reduce how much we use, and what for. But there will always be some emissions.

More important, no amount of industry emission reductions and carbon capture will be enough if we continue to destroy our planet. Nature, particularly large ecosystems in the tropical belt (land based and marine), are gigantic carbon sinks.

So to continue with our boat analogy, would you say that this lady’s job trying to block the hole letting water into the boat is useful? I believe so.

Should we stop focusing on the nature-based solutions part of emission reductions? That would be madness! We should do everything we are doing today, and more.

Somebody needs to pay for these two persons - the man bailing and the woman fixing the hole- working relentlessly to fix the problem. Some of the passengers whose activity is the cause of the hole have agreed to pay the salaries. Some have to do it by law, but most do not. Luckily, there is an instrument for that: voluntary credits. Count the amount of “water” (carbon) the lady stops from coming in, and pay her. Count the amount of “water” the man bails out of the boat, and pay him. The uncertainty of how much water ‘would have come in’ if the lady had not worked is reflected in the difference in price between types of carbon (yes avoidance credits are much cheaper than removal credits). Markets -despite what neo-Marxists want you to believe – are quite smart at adjusting prices downward when there is uncertainty. So after all, it seems there may be a place for Carbon Markets.

Now, there is a third man on this boat. He is drinking champagne, while reading Das Kapital. He is doing nothing to fix the problem but has appointed himself as head critic of the man and the woman’s efforts. He says that carbon credits paying these people are enabling the boat to continue to move (vid. pollution by human economic activity) and that is terrible. He seems to have a particular problem with the woman, because one cannot 100% accurately measure if she is being paid fairly. He claims she must stop because the system is worthless. He does not explain what will happen if she stops.

Next to him, an even grumpier fourth man states that this is all a scam, designed to perpetuate the power of “big oil” (sic). Everyone must stop what they are doing, and we should all get on a helicopter and return to land. That sounds great, doesn’t it? But this boat has many passengers, is far away from shore, and there is no helicopter on sight. The grumpy man fails to offer a viable alternative transport. In fact we know we only have the one boat. He stubbornly insists that paying the man and woman to fix the problem enables “polluters” to continue to damage the “boat” and they should stop. He does not seem to understand economics: having to pay for credits will increase polluters' costs and create an incentive to find ways to produce less carbon. And beyond that, their credits can compensate for those emissions that we cannot realistically avoid.?The fourth man does not care about such details. He says his job is to point out the flaws in what others are doing. He says that since he travels mostly by train, ‘buys local’, and attends protests, he is doing enough (nobody tells him his “reduced” carbon footprint is still almost ten times that of the average rural African’ citizen [iii]).

It is evident that the boat will continue sinking without the man bailing and the woman’s boat-fixing efforts, and it will continue moving along, no matter how loud the champagne campaigner and the grumpy man shout.

Ironically, research shows that the man and the woman working in our boat to keep it afloat are both seriously underpaid (the prices of carbon credits are too low). And it turns out that they are doing many more things than what they are being paid for (e.g. REDD projects may over-issue credits in some cases, but those credits are not getting paid additional dollars for the carbon capture of certain land management practices, the water and food security those ecosystems provide, or for the biodiversity they protect).?Why has The Guardian not taken a stance for legislation ensuring the man and woman working to fix our boat get paid more for their efforts? Why have they chosen instead to attack a system that generates payments from polluters in rich countries to indigenous peoples in poor countries so they continue acting as stewards of our planet's most important ecosystems? Why not sponsor a constructive study proposing the systems quantify all the other Ecosystem services protected by REDD projects to make up for any inaccuracy in carbon issuance?

Now, what can you do to help this boat from sinking? Considering we are all in the same boat, shall we stop the man and the woman fixing the problem? Or should we just try and help them do things better, more accurately? Do you want to join the man removing carbon, the woman focused on avoided emissions, the champagne critic or the grumpy activist man? ?I know what I want…..

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Josep Oriol?is founder and managing partner at Okavango Capital Partners, an investment firm focusing on climate, nature conservation and rural livelihoods. He has been involved in developing and implementing market based solutions for nature for almost twenty years, and has been involved in the launch and growth of voluntary carbon markets. Okavango Capital’s investments have helped protect millions of hectares of wildlife, secured c. $1bn in nature positive revenues, and benefited over 300,000 rural people.

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[i] https://www.theguardian .com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe

[ii] https://lnkd.in/e8CtzQGz verra response to Guardian article on rainforest carbon offsets

[iii]https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?locations=GB-ZF