What’s Unsaid | The UN is not climate neutral

Irwin Loy:

Today on What’s Unsaid: The UN's climate neutrality claims are false

Jacob Goldberg:

The UN doesn't know what carbon credits they’re buying and is claiming climate neutrality based on potentially harmful and ineffective carbon credits.

Loy:

This is What’s Unsaid. A new bi-weekly podcast by The New Humanitarian where we explore open secrets and uncomfortable truths around the world’s conflicts and disasters. My name is Irwin Loy.

The United Nations says its global operations are almost entirely “climate neutral”. But a new investigation, by my colleagues at The New Humanitarian and journalists from Mongabay, casts some serious doubt on these claims.

The UN is one of the most influential voices pushing for climate solutions. Here’s UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres:

Audio clip, Nov 2022, António Guterres

We are in the fight of our lives and we are losing. Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing. Global temperatures keep rising. And our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible. We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator. 

Loy:

This investigation shows that the UN’s green claims are based on buying millions of “carbon offset credits”. The problem: Experts say these do little to actually cut the emissions that fuel the climate crisis.

Our investigation found that at least 13 projects, funded in part by UN carbon credits, were linked to reports of environmental damage, health problems, and even displacement – the kinds of problems the UN itself works to prevent.

Before we unpack this, let’s take a step back. Carbon credits, offsets, greenhouse gas emissions, net zero, climate neutrality – what does it all mean? Here’s a quick rundown by Joseph Romm, who is a senior research fellow at the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media.

Joseph Romm:

Offsets are reductions of carbon dioxide emissions from an activity in one place to make up for emissions elsewhere. So typically a company that wants to keep polluting might pay a developing country to reduce its emissions instead. Now very related to offsets are the terms climate neutrality and net zero. Climate neutrality is if a company purchases enough offsets to cover all of its emissions, then, in theory, we can call ourselves carbon neutral or net zero. Carbon credit is a tradable unit representing one tonne of CO2. Offsets can be turned into credits and sold on the international market. And that gets us to the greenwashing claim; they're not actually doing anything good for the environment, they're just pretending to so that they can get some environmental public relations credit. And that is what is called greenwashing. And greenhouse gas emissions are the things that trap heat. That's what is causing global warming. The number one greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide from burning hydrocarbons, coal, oil and natural gas. You burn a hydrocarbon, you burn carbon, it becomes CO2.

Loy:

This is What’s Unsaid. I’m Irwin Loy, staff editor at The New Humanitarian. In today’s episode of What’s Unsaid: The UN's climate neutrality claims are false. Here to talk about the investigation is The New Humanitarian’s investigations reporter, Jacob Goldberg. Jacob, hi.

Goldberg:

Hi Irwin, good to be here.

Loy:

So Jacob, you were part of a team of journalists who investigated the UN’s carbon credit portfolio for a year. What did you find?

Goldberg:

We found a few things when we started looking into the UN's portfolio. The first thing I discovered was that the UN's carbon credit portfolio is not public. I believe that before we started looking into it, no one really knew what carbon credits the UN was buying. And this might be the first time that anyone's thought to analyze their portfolio. I also found that most UN entities that use offsets to claim climate neutrality, don't know what carbon credits they're buying. They outsource those purchases to another UN agency. And when I asked most UN entities what carbon credits did you buy? They said, go talk to the UNFCCC, which is the UN's climate change body. And the third thing that I found was that after I got records of purchases from the UNFCCC and from a few other UN entities that do keep records themselves, that questions of carbon credit quality arise. A carbon credit can only offset your emissions and allow you to claim climate neutrality if it does exactly what it says it's doing, if it does its job as advertised, which is to reduce a metric ton of greenhouse gas emissions. But there's a lot of criticism and analysis of certain types of carbon credits that says that entire categories of carbon credits don't do what they're claiming to do. Entire categories of carbon credits are not reducing emissions, at least not to the extent that they claim to. And we found lots of those types of carbon credits in the UN's portfolio.

Loy:

So no one really knows where these carbon credits are going. But first, let's take a step back. Carbon credits are this go-to formula for people who want to go green. Many of those people are businesses and as we see UN agencies. For a long time, they were seen as a good thing: you can be carbon neutral, you can offset your emissions. Why is buying carbon credits a problem?

Goldberg:

Carbon credits were seen as a good thing in the 90s and early 2000s, when major carbon credit markets emerged. Including the Clean Development Mechanism, the CDM, which is run by the UN. And it’s also where the UN buys most of the carbon credits they used to offset their own emissions. But carbon credits were seen as a solution to the problem that it would be too expensive to decarbonize, to transition away from fossil fuels. And industrialized countries – and countries are the main customers of carbon credits – couldn't do it quickly enough. And had no other way to contribute to slowing down climate change. The solution was they can just pay up companies in the Global South to reduce emissions for them and subtract those emissions from their annual emissions reports. What's emerged in recent years, and especially in the last couple of years is a lot of reporting investigating carbon credit quality. Like I said earlier, carbon credits are not always as good as they claim to be, as they advertise themselves to be. There's a lot of variance in carbon credit quality. And what has emerged a lot in reporting over recent years is that the market seems to be dominated by low-quality carbon credits. And inevitably, those are the credits you find when you look into most organisations’ purchases.

Loy:

You know, there's also the problem that if you're buying carbon credits to offset your emissions, you're not actually reducing your emissions. How do experts see that as being part of the issue?

Goldberg:

That's true. Carbon credit quality aside, I think lots of experts say that you cannot buy your way out of the climate crisis. You have to reduce your emissions locally, through your own operations. That question supersedes all the criticism that we included in our investigation. You can always say that offsetting is not the solution. But if you do claim that offsetting has a utility and fighting climate change, then the secondary question arises, which is, is it actually doing anything? And very often they're not.

Loy:

You found that many of the carbon credits bought by the UN are of low quality. What does that mean in practice? Can you give us some examples of what low-quality carbon credits and low-quality projects are?

Goldberg:

I think the easiest to understand and probably the first line of defence when analysing a carbon credit is called additionality. The criteria of additionality asks, are the emission reductions that this project and all of its credits, are the reductions it achieves, are they in addition to what would have been reduced in another situation. Let's say we're talking about a hydropower dam and the hydropower dam claims to reduce a million metric tons of carbon dioxide. The project has to prove that those million tonnes would not have been reduced if the project did not have the ability to sell carbon credits. It can only claim those reductions and offer them for sale if the only way that those reductions would have happened is with the money that they earn through carbon credit sales. And in that example, hydropower dams, they don't really rely very much on revenue from carbon credit sales, they rely on government policy and the revenue from the sale of electricity. They don't rely necessarily, or in most cases, on carbon credit sales. So any displacement of fossil fuel energy that they claim would have happened in any event, so you cannot sell those credits. You can't sell those reductions.

Loy:

Right. And so it seems like there's a lot of hydropower energy projects involved in these sorts of what's described as low-quality projects, where you are in the Mekong region and in Bangkok. But in Southeast Asia more specifically, there are these hydropower projects that are being built, and they would have been built anyway, the argument goes, because governments want them to be built, the private sector wants them to be built, with or without a carbon credit scheme involved. Is that about right?

Goldberg:

That's right.

Loy: 

Okay, so how much money did the UN actually spend on buying these sorts of carbon credits from low-quality projects?

Goldberg:

We calculated that the UN spent just under $8.5 million on carbon credits between 2012 and 2022. I should say that not all UN entities gave us their spending data. So some spending is not included in that calculation. But from what we found $8.5 million, and of that about 3.3 million went to hydropower and wind projects. So renewable energy projects, which are the type that many experts say do not rely on carbon credit revenue, and should be eligible to sell carbon credits. Wind and hydropower are just two types of renewable energy projects. There are others like geothermal and solar. And renewable energy projects are just a fraction of the types of projects that experts say are not additional or are of low-quality for other reasons, but we concentrated on what would be easy to explain and those were the renewable energy projects. So 3.3 million credits from those. But we also found that around half of what the UN bought belonged to project categories, project types, that some experts say are high-risk. Meaning they have the lowest likelihood of being additional. So you could say that half of them or just above half of them raise questions.

Loy:

Now, speaking about some of these high-risk projects, the investigation is online right now at thenewhumanitarian.org. Reading it, I'm struck by the fact that several of the projects that you've talked about, that you've reported on, it appears to be a situation where it's linked to environmental damage, health concerns, and even forced displacement. Can you tell us more about these projects?

Goldberg:

So these harms are alleged harms that some projects cause. They're separate from the question of whether they actually reduce emissions in the atmosphere. These are things that other journalists and NGOs have reported on, not because they were interested necessarily in carbon credits, but they were looking at the harms caused by, for example, a hydropower dam on the surrounding community, orr a waste-to-energy plant at a landfill. And these projects that have been reported on by others previously, they happen to be registered by the Clean Development Mechanism as projects that can sell carbon credits, I looked at all of the projects that I could trace to the UN's portfolio and I did a Google search and I looked at environmental databases to see if any of these projects had come up before as being potentially harmful. Thirteen of them had accusations like that against them in earlier reporting. I'll talk to you about two of them. One is called the Okhla waste-to-energy plant in New Delhi. The UN bought around 4,000 credits from this project, and it's been accused of emitting toxic particles way above the permitted limit in New Delhi. And the people in the neighbourhood have been protesting that landfill and the waste-to-energy plant for years. And they have a case in the India Supreme Court about it trying to either shut it down or get it to make changes that would stop those harmful particles from being emitted. That's still ongoing. Another project that's particularly infamous is the Teles Pires hydropower dam in Brazil in the Amazon. And the construction of that dam involves blowing up a part of a river that was sacred to an Indigenous community and has also been linked to deforestation. And some research says that by flooding the forest around it, this dam is actually causing vegetation to decompose and that actually releases more emissions into the atmosphere. More than double than this dam claims to reduce.

Loy:

You would think that the UN would have information on rights abuses linked to projects and buyers carbon credits from. So who's at fault here? Is it the people who are buying the carbon credits or the people who are selling these credits?

Goldberg:

Right. So the onus also falls on the certifiers of carbon credits. In the UN’s case, that's mainly the Clean Development Mechanism. And to get a project certified to issue credits, it has to be validated by third-party consultants. It has to be approved by the CDM board. And all of the projects I just mentioned, they have been through that process and they have been approved and they're allowed to sell carbon credits. So it's not clear why these are getting through and why they're allowed to continue selling carbon credits.

Loy:

So the UN has an agency that is supposed to oversee the quality of the projects where it buys carbon credits. How come it's still possible for these low-quality and high-risk projects to be approved and used as offsetting?

Goldberg:

Well, there is a UN agency that, like I said before, is responsible for buying carbon credits on behalf of most other UN entities. Most UN entities don't know what they're buying. They don't select the types of credits they're buying or the types of projects they come from. There are some guidelines but we couldn't get their answer on what those guidelines exactly were. So the UNFCCC buys these credits in bulk from another organisation called the Adaptation Fund. And the Adaptation Fund, like the CDM, is an outgrowth of the Kyoto Protocol negotiations in the 90s and 2000s. And they fund the projects that help mitigate the effects of climate change. But to fund those projects, the Adaptation Fund raises money by selling a portion of all credits created by the CDM. We heard it was 2%. And they use that revenue to fund their operations and climate change adaptation projects. So since the UNFCCC is buying them in bulk, they're not necessarily looking at what they're buying. And then as a result of that, UN entities also don't really know what they're buying. The way one UN official described that process to us is that these credits are assigned randomly.

Loy:

We're speaking about carbon credits, and a lot of businesses, a lot of agencies, buy carbon credits. Why focus specifically on the United Nations?

Goldberg:

The UN is not the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, not by far. There's 100 companies that emit 70% of all greenhouse gases. That should definitely be pointed out. Also, governments have more control than the UN over how much investment goes into the fossil fuel industry, as opposed to renewable energy. But the UN has a major role to play in guiding governments toward actions that would slow the pace of climate change. The UNFCCC, which I mentioned earlier, the same UN entity that buys carbon credits on behalf of most other UN entities, is the same one that oversaw the Paris Agreement negotiations, that organises the COP meetings every year, that bring world leaders together to discuss how to fight climate change. So they're a leader in addressing climate change, and they're also an organisation that seems to have spent millions of dollars on carbon credits that don't do what they say, and uses them to claim that the entire UN entity is almost completely climate neutral.

Loy:

So if the UN is using carbon credits to claim that they're climate neutral, this sounds like a form of greenwashing. How do you see it?

Goldberg:

I spoke to experts who did describe it as a form of greenwashing. And I guess it really depends how you define greenwashing. But if you define greenwashing as a type of marketing, or public communication that signals that an organisation or a country is doing something to reduce the harm of climate change, or to prevent climate change, but what they're describing doesn't actually do those things, then I think it meets that definition. But that wasn't the goal of this reporting. I think greenwashing is a flexible term. I think the main point of what we did here was to show that the UN doesn't know what carbon credits they’re buying and is claiming climate neutrality based on potentially harmful and ineffective carbon credits.

Loy:

What about what others in the aid sector are doing? Obviously, the UN agencies are just one part of the international aid sector. But there are international NGOs and others who have their own policies. How do they view carbon credits, and carbon offsetting, and climate neutrality?

Goldberg:

Yes, we spoke to a couple other NGOs and humanitarian organisations who are taking a different approach from the UN. So the UN is buying carbon credits, using them to lower their reported emissions at the end of every year. And then claiming up to 99% climate neutrality. Oxfam UK, they also buy carbon credits, but they told us that they don't claim those credits as reductions of their own emissions. They buy them because the money goes toward potentially helpful climate mitigation projects in the Global South. And those projects might be doing something good, but they're not saying that they're climate neutral because of them. We also spoke to MSF, because earlier this year they released a sustainability roadmap where they publicly announced that they were not going to buy carbon credits anymore. They're going to concentrate exclusively on reducing their emissions locally. A lot of experts told us that that's the way to go. But there's a reason why not all organisations are taking that approach. There's a major limit on how much you can reduce locally. And that really depends on where energy comes from in the country where you're based. It's not up to a single organisation to decarbonise, or at least there are limits to it. The UN committed in 2014 to become climate neutral by 2020, and the only way they could meet that goal was by offsetting. They couldn't avoid fossil fuel energy completely in the six-year period or seven-year period. There is no way they could have done it. And that's why it seems like they used carbon credits to meet that goal.

Loy:

So if carbon credits and offsetting emissions aren't the answer, what are some other possible solutions?

Goldberg:

Yes, we thought long and hard about what alternative approach we could recommend to organisations that want to do something better, more effective at preventing climate change than buying carbon credits. And it was really hard. All of the organisations that I've mentioned earlier, including the UN, are taking certain measures to reduce their emissions locally. The UN itself, they are trying to make their facilities more energy-efficient. They're encouraging staff to fly economy instead of business class. And they're trying to reduce single-use plastic. But that's not going to get you to climate neutrality. An organisation doesn't have control over whether their energy grid involves fossil fuels. So I think there's a limit to what a single organisation can do to prevent climate change. But what a lot of experts told us is that, at the very least, they should not be claiming climate neutrality. Especially not based on carbon credits, and especially not based on low-quality carbon credits.

Loy:

So, The New Humanitarian conducted an investigation into the aid sectors' broader carbon footprint a couple years ago. Your investigation is sort of building on that. And it turns out, then as now, getting a full picture of actual emissions and a carbon footprint can be quite difficult. Through all of this, I think one view that I hear sometimes from aid workers is that humanitarian groups do this life-saving work in really difficult environments. As you say, where you can't really guarantee what your fuel source is, what your energy source is. So when you're doing life-saving work, surely reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it takes a backseat, I think is the argument. How do you see that?

Goldberg:

I'll just point out that I haven't heard anyone say anything like that. But if I did hear someone say something that I would say: First of all, climate change is a huge contributing factor to humanitarian situations. And any organisation should, to the extent that it can, try to not contribute to climate change. And that goes even more so for the UN which has all these very public commitments to being a leader on preventing climate change. It's true, the UN's work needs to be done, they should do what they can to save lives. And if some amounts of fossil fuels are required to do that, that's not really what my investigation was about. It was about them claiming to be climate neutral. If they're going to use fossil fuels to operate, and the only way to counteract that is through carbon credits, the experts I spoke to said they shouldn't be saying they're climate neutral. Maybe there are ways for them to invest more in decarbonising their own operations. There probably are, maybe they can look into that.

Loy:

You brought your findings to multiple UN agencies? How did they respond? Is this an issue that people are talking about?

Goldberg:

The impression I get is that, at the UN, this is not something they're talking about, or at least not to me. They maintain that every credit they buy represents the reduction of one metric ton of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They haven't budged from that. They have not remarked at all on the question of carbon credit quality, and I think that's to be expected. The CDM, and everyone who buys a credit, is not going to admit that it's not credible. The billions of dollars rest on them claiming that each credit represents the reduction of one metric ton. So I don't know. I don’t know what's going on inside the UN, and they also did not respond to lots of questions about how they choose their carbon credits, how they screen low-quality carbon credits, and whether they're following their own guidelines on making sure that their credits are doing what they claim to.

Loy:

There are people connected to the UN who do have opinions on this. You brought your findings to the Special Rapporteur, that’s an independent expert on rights and the environment, David Boyd. What did he tell you?

Goldberg:

David Boyd took a look at a summary of our findings which outlined the millions of credits that came from wind and hydropower projects. He looked at the findings about projects that have been accused of harming communities. And he said that he was very troubled by the findings. He said the UN needs to conduct an independent investigation, or commission an independent investigation, into what carbon credits they bought, and whether they did what they claim to, and what impacts they've caused. And he said that the results of that investigation need to be made public.

Loy:

So to me, that sounds like there's potential here for this to open up a way to talk about something that really hasn't been discussed within the UN, which is how effective its climate neutrality programmes and its carbon offsetting schemes really are. How do you feel after working on this for a year about the potential to change something or to at least begin the discussions about it?

Goldberg:

I feel optimistic. I think there's some real low-hanging fruit here, which is that the UN can look into its previous purchases of carbon credits. They have all those records and they can see whether they believe any of them were low-quality, and they can revise their climate neutrality claims based on their own findings. They can tell the truth about what they actually achieved through those purchases.

Loy:

Jacob, thanks for joining us on What’s Unsaid.

Goldberg:

Thanks for having me.

Loy:

That’s it for today’s episode of What’s Unsaid – A podcast about open secrets and uncomfortable truths around the world’s conflicts and disasters. You can read the entire UN carbon offsets investigation on TheNewHumanitarian.org.

What are people afraid to talk about in today’s crises? What needs to be discussed openly? Let us know: send us an email: [email protected]. Subscribe to The New Humanitarian on your podcast app for more episodes of What’s Unsaid – our new podcast about open secrets and uncomfortable truths. With new episodes every other week. Hosted by Ali Latifi, and me. This episode is produced and edited by Marthe van der Wolf, with original music by Whitney Patterson. And hosted by me, Irwin Loy.