Dear Editor,
On 30 March 2023, an organization named Environmental Finance hosted a free webinar titled A Corporate Buyers Guide to REDD+ Forestry Sovereign Carbon Credit.
The webinar featured the following three presenters:
● Federica Bietta, Managing
Director, Coalition for
Rainforest Nations (CfRN)
● Malcolm Stufkens, Vice
Minister of Environment,
Honduras
● Kevin Conrad, Executive
Director, CfRN
Here I paraphrase what Kevin Conrad, Executive Director and founder of the CfRN, had to say about Winrock-ART-TREES carbon credits:
BEGINS
Guyana was allowed by Winrock-ART-TREES to invent a fictitious baseline of deforestation … allowed to get credit for emissions reductions that never occurred. The UNFCCC Paris Agreement does not allow these invented baselines. ART-TREES claims to be based on Avoided Deforestation. ‘The Paris Agree-ment is not based on that garbage’ (Conrad).
195 countries (including Guyana) have signed on to the Paris Agreement. The world has no need for the alphabet soup of standards like ART-TREES and Verra, or new bodies like the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) or the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative (VCMI).
Can you put Avoided Deforestation in the Paris Agreement? The answer is no. Article 5 of the Paris Agreement was agreed and is working. What value do these other standards provide? The answer is none. Countries should be supporting the REDD+ mechanism, as set out in the Paris Agreement.
ENDS
Through your newspaper, I ask Guy-ana’s Office of Climate Change to clarify in culturally appropriate language for lay readers like me:
a. The status of Guyana’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) commitment to the UNFCCC’s Paris Agreement, and the national policies and actions to reduce deforestation from the historical average level, recognising that deforestation rates in Guyana are linked closely to the London bullion price (legal market price of gold).
b. Exactly how the semi-annual estimates made by the Guyana Forestry Commission of deforested areas in hectares are converted into jurisdictional carbon credits in tonnes of carbon dioxide.
c. the relationship between the calculations and sale of Winrock-ART-TREES carbon credits and the Paris Agreement.
Yours truly,
Janette Bulkan
