More than half of the 27 million carbon credits produced by one of the world’s largest offsetting projects did not correspond to actual emission reductions, leading carbon registry Verra has said following a two-year review of Zimbabwe’s Kariba forest protection initiative.
Verra is now seeking compensation for the millions of “excess” credits from Carbon Green Investments (CGI) – the project’s developer – after the registry’s technical analysis found the threat to the forest had been overstated in the project’s original forecast.
The Kariba REDD+ project, which aims to protect an area 10 times the size of New York City, has long faced accusations by several media outlets and carbon market analysts of exaggerating its climate credentials through flawed carbon accounting and of failing to provide promised benefits to local communities.
The conservation project stretches across national parks, forest reserves and wildlife corridors along the southern shore of Lake Kariba in the Zambezi River basin in northern Zimbabwe.
Dozens of big companies, including Gucci, Volkswagen, Nestlé and Dutch electricity firm Greenchoice, bought millions of Kariba’s credits and used them to offset part of their own emissions and back up various green assertions.
Overstated deforestation risk
According to a report by Bloomberg, the project generated more than $100 million in revenue after being set up over a decade ago by South Pole, a major Swiss carbon credits broker, and CGI, which is run by a Zimbabwean businessman. South Pole walked away from Kariba in late 2023 when Verra suspended the project and began an internal review following an investigation by The New Yorker magazine.
Nearly two years later, Verra announced last week that its review had found 57% of Kariba’s nearly 27 million credits were issued “in excess”. That is because the actual deforestation observed in a reference area chosen by Kariba’s project developers to predict how much CO2 the scheme would conserve was “significantly lower” than initially estimated, Verra said.
This calculation is known as the baseline against which a project’s performance is assessed. Critics have repeatedly questioned the accounting method and said flawed methodologies compromise the integrity of carbon offsets. Previous studies by independent rating agencies suggested Kariba may have produced as many as 30 times more credits than it should have done by exaggerating the threat to forests that were never really at risk.
Compensation process
Verra said last week that, despite finding them worthless, the millions of “excess” credits already used by buyers would remain valid. But, at the same time, the carbon registry has requested CGI to compensate for them by buying and cancelling an equivalent number of credits from other projects.
Verra “received a positive response related to this process” from CGI, a spokesperson subsequently told Climate Home News, without giving further details.
CGI’s founder, Zimbabwean tycoon Steve Wentzel, did not reply to a request for comment. In an online statement, CGI said it remains dedicated to Kariba’s “mission of forest conservation” and “committed to continue working toward resolutions that uphold the highest standards”.
The company also said it had asked Verra for a “moratorium” on the compensation process until it reviews the registry’s carbon assessment.
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Separately, Verra also invited the holders of nearly 5 million Kariba credits that have been purchased but not yet used for offsetting to “voluntarily” eliminate those credits, which in that case would be counted towards the compensation.
South Pole, CGI’s former partner in the scheme, said last week it had asked Verra to cancel 2.5 million credits it still held “to help address the discrepancies in issued credits and uphold the environmental integrity of the project”.
‘Big concerns’ remain
But Jonathan Crook, at the nonprofit Carbon Market Watch (CMW), said Verra’s handling of the Kariba case leaves many questions unanswered and raises big concerns.
“It is not clear what, if anything concrete, will happen if CGI refuses this request [for compensation], thereby raising real questions over whether anyone will actually be held liable, which would be a shockingly inappropriate outcome to this scandal,” he added.
Verra has a patchy track record in obtaining compensation from discredited projects. Nearly 2 million phantom credits linked to failed methane-cutting rice cultivation projects in China have yet to be paid back more than a year since Verra shut down the schemes and sought recompense from their developers.
As Climate Home revealed last year, energy giant Shell was directly involved in the projects and used the majority of the credits to offset – on paper – real greenhouse gas emissions created by its vast fossil fuel operations.
Climate Home understands that Verra is still pursuing compensation for the excess credits from the companies involved in the rice cultivation projects, but there is no fixed timeline for the process to be completed.
Questions over permanence
CMW’s Crook also raised concerns over the future integrity of the remaining 11.6 million Kariba credits deemed by Verra’s review to be of good quality. An underlying principle of REDD+ projects is that carbon stored in forests must be maintained over a long period of time – up to a century – to reliably offset the release of fossil carbon.
But, with the Kariba project no longer registered with Verra, any carbon supposedly conserved through the scheme now “faces a significant risk of being re-released into the atmosphere over the coming years and decades without any clear solution to remedy the situation”, Crook added.
More than 5 million credits from the Kariba project had been kept in a so-called buffer pool, an insurance fund with credits set aside for unexpected losses in stored carbon.
Verra said it had decided to “take pre-emptive action” and cancel all those credits. Additionally, a monitoring system will track deforestation in the project area in the years ahead and extra credits will be cancelled if observed forest loss goes beyond Kariba’s contributions to the buffer pool, the registry said.
“We are following our processes to ensure integrity and deliver what is right for the climate and communities,” the Verra spokesperson added.
