I’ve got a tough video topic today. I’m proposing that community cobenefits are harming forest carbon projects.

The thing is, we’ve created a system where climate benefits are interlinked with community cobenefits. The money from many forest carbon projects goes to building schools, water treatment plants, and supporting communities. This is great in concept, but what it’s done is made it impossible for these projects to be allowed to fail. Admitting that one of these projects failed to prevent deforestation would be a humanitarian disaster.

So people don’t admit it! Projects with horrible deforestation brush it under the rug. Good people who care about the community hide the project’s true climate impacts. And good people who want the community to get the most financial benefits, exaggerate the claims of what the project is doing by manipulating baselines or project boundaries.

We’ve created a system where it’s impossible to be objective about carbon project performance without looking like a monster. It’s going to blow up in our face if we don’t disentangle carbon from the human factor. Similar standards don’t exist for any other type of carbon offsetting. Imagine if we forced the contractors installing methane capture devices on landfills to give back to the community!

Good news though, no matter what, forests still have a TON of ecological cobenefits. Forests still restore soils, clean our water and air, and provide habitat for countless wildlife. These benefits are interlinked with the climate benefits.

Anyway, I go into a lot more detail in the video. Including a lot of examples.

DISCLAIMER: I do not work for Pachama. I stopped working at Pachama in Sept. 2021, and the perspectives in these videos do not in any way represent Pachama's own.