New data shows carbon credits not as effective as they may appear

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Carbon credits Are supposed to offset emissions released into the atmosphere. Alan Kohler takes a look at what the data says about how they're working.

Transcript

00:00There's a bit more than 2 trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, normally

00:07expressed as parts per million.

00:09That's about 700 billion tonnes more than 200 years ago and that's what's dangerously

00:14heating the planet.

00:16And this is roughly what a tonne of carbon dioxide looks like.

00:21Now one way we're dealing with this problem is by paying people to get it out of the atmosphere

00:26and the system for achieving that is by giving them a certificate for every tonne of CO2

00:31that they're responsible for removing and they can sell that on the market.

00:36These are also called offsets.

00:38Right now you can get $37 for one of those certificates on the Australian market.

00:42That transaction is really the basis of Australia's plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to

00:4743% of 2005 levels by 2030 and net zero by 2050.

00:53The companies that do most of the emitting are supposed to reduce their emissions, but

00:57they can't, so they're allowed to buy those offsets instead.

01:01Most of them come from something called human-induced regeneration, which means land management

01:06to help native forests to regrow and soak up carbon dioxide, as long as they wouldn't

01:10have grown anyway.

01:12But some researchers at ANU and the University of New South Wales have published the following

01:15graph in a paper debunking the whole system.

01:19The vertical green bar is when 75% of the human-induced regeneration projects were registered.

01:26The line is the amount of forest cover in the areas covered by the scheme.

01:31It's increased, so some carbon dioxide is out of the atmosphere, but not much.

01:35And anyway, it was increasing before the humans that are inducing the regeneration started

01:40earning their certificates.

01:42In fact there's a global controversy about the integrity of offsets.

01:46Someone in the United States has just been charged with fraud for selling fake offsets.

01:51It's an argument that's not going to go away, and it's central to the whole project of dealing

01:54with climate change.

01:56Maybe we'll just have to, I don't know, reduce emissions.

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