Damned lies and carbon credit verification: who checks if sequestration is real?
- Media Manager
- Sep 28, 2023
- 2 min read
Microsoft Start - Crikey
Written By: Bernard Keane
Published: September 28th, 2023
Hundreds of carbon sequestration projects on uncleared land have attracted taxpayer funding and generated carbon credits since 2015 under the Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF) — despite the scientific consensus suggesting reducing grazing from uncleared land has minimal impact on woody vegetation, and thus how much carbon is sequestered.
This conflict between hard science and a program purporting to generate genuine carbon credits at taxpayer expense could be settled by verifying that human-induced regeneration (HIR) actually works, based on actual projects — the oldest of which are now well established and, if advocates are correct, supporting widespread native forest regeneration.
In fact independent third-party verification has never been a part of the ERF or of the millions of carbon credits issued based on purported HIR projects. Until recently, there has been minimal disclosure of data relating to projects benefiting from taxpayer funding by the Clean Energy Regulator (CER) — even the most basic data about projects was shielded behind legislated privacy and commercial confidentiality protections.
In response to sustained criticism of the ERF and of the integrity of large volumes of carbon credits — sparked by ANU professors Andrew Macintosh and Don Butler in 2022 — the current government commissioned Ian Chubb to lead a review of Australian carbon credit units (ACCUs). The Chubb review sided with the CER and explicitly rejected the scientific consensus — and several expert submissions — around rainfall vs withdrawing land from grazing, simply asserting that the review “does not accept that a correlation between rainfall and vegetation growth undermines the method”. It cited no literature or experts to support this, and went on to give the ACCU system a clean bill of health.
But even Chubb and his team conceded there was a lack of transparency and capacity for independent verification.
“Current restrictions on data sharing and disclosure in the scheme’s governing legislation go further than required to protect privacy and commercial-in-confidence information, and the blanket nature of these restrictions is undermining transparency, trust and confidence in the scheme,” the review concluded.
It recommended “provisions in the governing legislation should be amended to maximise transparency, data access and data sharing …”
The CER — which had previously rejected all criticism as the product of critics not having access to project data — has since released data on the location of the areas where the native forests are supposed to be regenerating, known as carbon estimation areas (CEAs). However, it immediately claimed the information couldn’t be used to assess if projects were actually sequestering any carbon — which defeated the entire point of the Chubb recommendation.
