Thread by @aygoswami

✨NEW✨: Our report 'Discredited' - published yesterday is a deep dive on the voluntary carbon market in India with a focus on communities on the ground who are carrying out the emissions reduction activities that lead to the sale of offsets to companies

🧵below for highlights

For this, @TrishantDev @rohinikrish9 visited close to 40 project locations in 4 Indian states and spoke to project developers, farmers, rural households, activists, traders, local leaders, and NGOs.

We encountered a shroud of secrecy. Some developers spoke to us providing surface level publicly available info, others stonewalled or claimed to be in a "silent period"

The global VCM isn't just a buyer-seller market; there are dozens of intermediaries each profiting off the transactions. By how much? We don't know because - conveniently - they are "commercial" transactions

India has a huge role in this ecosystem - it is the world's second largest source of carbon credits in the global VCM

Now to the case studies:

"Improved cookstoves" are intended to displace polluting biomass "chulhas" or stoves. But rural households ALSO use LPG stoves given thru a govt scheme. In some cases they pay upto Rs 2350 for an IC, which is also earning revenue through carbon credits??

In the Araku valley tribal farmers tend to trees for which the carbon rights - the right to sell credits and earn money - is handed over to a Paris based project developer. The farmers get "free saplings and trainings", but no $$ from the VCM for their labour

Biogas plants use manure to generate methane for stoves, avoiding biomass. But these stoves get subsidies from a State gov, & rural households also pay for a portion of the project cost, of which carbon finance is a miniscule portion - who is earning the carbon revenue?

The report has more such detailed case studies, but the bottom line is the current VCM isn't benefiting climate or communities - it serves the interest of the retinue of project developers, verifiers & others who make a profit out of the lucrative carbon "business"

Download the report here:

Watch the launch presentation and press release here: cseindia.org/discredited-th…
cseindia.org/discredited-th…