Hey, Mexican CAR developer here. I really like your channel and the criticism to carbon markets is genuinely based on critical thinking. I am sure we will agree more quality will decrease quantity and get offsets to the right price to incentivise que right projects. In the other hand, I think in this case your missing some of the picture. There are a lot of ejidos that have never touched their forest that right know have huge pressure for urbanization, for example Calakmul, second largest tropical forest in the americas, and their tourism boom. I don´t work specifically with IFM protocol. But since there can´t be REDD+ projects in Mexico, the growing pressure for deforestation and the great methodologies Climate Action Reserve has, your picking on the top 10% best projects in the world. Yes there will be bad projects, but 30% sounds too much in this case. For a perfect, additional, forest restoration projects you need a 50 USD offset or modern slavery to achieve them (like the Uganda projects you like). I really like your content but social context is very important to evaluate methodologies and projects, and that might be the hardest par for carbon markets to address.
I personally know a case of an indigenous community in Panama, that manage their land is a way that each family receives a certain share of the 10000ha land that they have. This land is then used for traditional agriculture. They started out with assigning 50 ha plots, then 25 ha plots and are now at 10 ha plots per family. They came up with reducing the attributed size per family because they want to preserve the forest as much as possible. In the future, they are expected to have a big increase in population. Even though historic deforestation had been low so far, they might need to change that due to the expected increase in population. How do you account for that if you are only looking at past deforestation?
The SEMARNAT rules around forest harvesting honestly confuse me. Maybe CAR was right to not issue credits for avoided emissions because SEMARNAT doesn't allow harvesting to outpace growth. But on the other hand a bunch of these areas seemed to have been harvested down to low stocking levels before the project... I give an example at 3:00. What does SEMARNAT think about that? At any rate, the bigger issue of additionality on land that has been untouched for decades (including freaking parks), is still the major thing to worry about here.
Curious about your statement “I’m only interested in what has happened in the past”. While this may not be the case for the example to which you are speaking to, I am curious to know how you think about the consideration for changing market conditions 5, 10, 15, or more years in the future that have the potential to fundamentally alter the financial incentives for a given acre? Would you say it’s inappropriate to enroll an asset into a carbon project today if harvest levels have been relatively low historically but you project and can support that the harvest pressure of an asset is likely to increase over the next 5, 10, or even more years in the future? Certainly, if there legitimately is no evidence that suggests demand will increase in a given project area, and there has been no evidence of harvest activity in the past, then I agree that there may be limited, or no justification for the carbon project. I often wonder, however, if chasing additionality isn’t always really what we are seeking but rather, maybe we are sometimes (and maybe even more often than not) seeking to compensate landowners to eliminate (or certainly reduce) harvest optionality where it indeed exists. Curious to hear your thoughts.
Honestly, I'd be very suspicious of such projections. Over the past 40 years there have been dramatic swings in timber value and societal feelings. If they've managed to conserve the land for that entire period despite strong financial incentive to harvest... well that's a much stronger indicator to me of intent than a set of projections or attestations. So I really prefer rely on hard evidence, and in terms of additionality that can often only be found looking in the past. There are just too many bad actors putting forward scenarios in which they claim that in 5-10 years time the would have had to harvest all their trees. It's this cheating on additionality claims that's lead to John Oliver rants and The Nature Conservancy protecting forests that haven't been touched for a century. Now I do separate additionality from baselining, and a lot of people don't do that. Personally, I do still see the need to forecast deforestation pressure in the future to estimate a business-as-usual scenario and issue credits. But for the simple question of that specific landowner's intent? Did the landowner intend to conserve these trees the whole time? The only hard evidence that I can trust is that landowner's past actions (shown to me via historical satellite data).
Hey, Mexican CAR developer here. I really like your channel and the criticism to carbon markets is genuinely based on critical thinking. I am sure we will agree more quality will decrease quantity and get offsets to the right price to incentivise que right projects. In the other hand, I think in this case your missing some of the picture. There are a lot of ejidos that have never touched their forest that right know have huge pressure for urbanization, for example Calakmul, second largest tropical forest in the americas, and their tourism boom.
I don´t work specifically with IFM protocol. But since there can´t be REDD+ projects in Mexico, the growing pressure for deforestation and the great methodologies Climate Action Reserve has, your picking on the top 10% best projects in the world. Yes there will be bad projects, but 30% sounds too much in this case.
For a perfect, additional, forest restoration projects you need a 50 USD offset or modern slavery to achieve them (like the Uganda projects you like). I really like your content but social context is very important to evaluate methodologies and projects, and that might be the hardest par for carbon markets to address.
Hi Elias, excellent explication, my friend you are very friendly. Thanks you.
I personally know a case of an indigenous community in Panama, that manage their land is a way that each family receives a certain share of the 10000ha land that they have. This land is then used for traditional agriculture. They started out with assigning 50 ha plots, then 25 ha plots and are now at 10 ha plots per family. They came up with reducing the attributed size per family because they want to preserve the forest as much as possible. In the future, they are expected to have a big increase in population. Even though historic deforestation had been low so far, they might need to change that due to the expected increase in population. How do you account for that if you are only looking at past deforestation?
Hi Elias - Do you have a list of the 30 names you looked at and the 11 that have no history of forest harvest?
The SEMARNAT rules around forest harvesting honestly confuse me. Maybe CAR was right to not issue credits for avoided emissions because SEMARNAT doesn't allow harvesting to outpace growth. But on the other hand a bunch of these areas seemed to have been harvested down to low stocking levels before the project... I give an example at 3:00. What does SEMARNAT think about that?
At any rate, the bigger issue of additionality on land that has been untouched for decades (including freaking parks), is still the major thing to worry about here.
Curious about your statement “I’m only interested in what has happened in the past”. While this may not be the case for the example to which you are speaking to, I am curious to know how you think about the consideration for changing market conditions 5, 10, 15, or more years in the future that have the potential to fundamentally alter the financial incentives for a given acre? Would you say it’s inappropriate to enroll an asset into a carbon project today if harvest levels have been relatively low historically but you project and can support that the harvest pressure of an asset is likely to increase over the next 5, 10, or even more years in the future? Certainly, if there legitimately is no evidence that suggests demand will increase in a given project area, and there has been no evidence of harvest activity in the past, then I agree that there may be limited, or no justification for the carbon project. I often wonder, however, if chasing additionality isn’t always really what we are seeking but rather, maybe we are sometimes (and maybe even more often than not) seeking to compensate landowners to eliminate (or certainly reduce) harvest optionality where it indeed exists. Curious to hear your thoughts.
Honestly, I'd be very suspicious of such projections. Over the past 40 years there have been dramatic swings in timber value and societal feelings. If they've managed to conserve the land for that entire period despite strong financial incentive to harvest... well that's a much stronger indicator to me of intent than a set of projections or attestations.
So I really prefer rely on hard evidence, and in terms of additionality that can often only be found looking in the past. There are just too many bad actors putting forward scenarios in which they claim that in 5-10 years time the would have had to harvest all their trees. It's this cheating on additionality claims that's lead to John Oliver rants and The Nature Conservancy protecting forests that haven't been touched for a century.
Now I do separate additionality from baselining, and a lot of people don't do that. Personally, I do still see the need to forecast deforestation pressure in the future to estimate a business-as-usual scenario and issue credits. But for the simple question of that specific landowner's intent? Did the landowner intend to conserve these trees the whole time? The only hard evidence that I can trust is that landowner's past actions (shown to me via historical satellite data).