Almost four years ago, on December 23, 2019, Air France announced in a press release that it would offset "100% of its carbon emissions from domestic flights" (in other words, those in mainland France), by purchasing carbon credits from six environmental projects spread across South America, Africa and Asia. Among them was the Portel-Para project, located in the town of Portel (population 63,000) in the Brazilian Amazon, north of the country. It was supposed to avert "22 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent" in emissions.
Like the airline, many foreign companies (Boeing, Bayer, Toshiba, Takeda, Samsung and Kingston) and French companies (Veolia, Havas, Prisma Media and LCL) have supported carbon offset projects in Portel (whether Portel-Para, Rio Anapu-Pacaja or Pacajai), in order to reduce their environmental footprint.
These private initiatives, stemming from the international mechanism for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) created by the United Nations in 2005, were meant to fund forest protection in Portel. All three projects in Portel have been certified by the Washington-based NGO Verra, the leading international certification body for carbon credits.
'Fraudulent projects'
Except that, in fact, the companies' emissions have not been offset. "These projects are fraudulent," said Nilson Corrêa da Silva, 29, general secretary of the Portel Rural Workers' Union, which represents almost 5,000 people. "Those who buy these credits think they are helping combat climate change. But that's not the case: In practice, these projects don't exist."
In its press release, Air France promised that, thanks to Portel-Para, "fauna and flora would be protected" and that "jobs would be created through the support of entrepreneurial projects for the creation of a local agroforestry industry." But "none of this has been done," said Corrêa da Silva: "Only environmentally-friendly stoves, food baskets and T-shirts have been distributed" to the local population.
Back in September 2020, a study published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences questioned the effect on deforestation of 12 REDD+ projects (including the Portel-Para project) in the Brazilian Amazon between 2008 and 2017. "By comparing the current rate of deforestation with that which would have occurred in the same areas in the absence of the carbon offset programs [...], we found that they have very little impact," said Andreas Kontoleon, one of the study's authors and professor of environmental economics and public policy at the University of Cambridge, UK.
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