At COP26 in Glasgow last November, countries agreed on new rules for a global carbon market, which some analysts say could be worth as much as $180 billion by 2030.
Last March, the French multinational, better known as Total before rebranding last year, announced a plan to create a 40,000-hectare acacia plantation in the remote central savannas of the Republic of Congo.
TotalEnergies’ offset is being planted on the Batéké Plateaux, an 8.98 million hectare savanna that stretches across the Republic of Congo and into neighboring Gabon and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
They can also readily be turned into commercial wood products – which is what FRM and TotalEnergies plans to do with them once they reach a harvestable size.
While FRM will supervise the project, the entity that holds the lease is called Forest Neutral Congo , which an FRM spokesperson told Mongabay is a “fully owned subsidiary” of the firm.
According to Nieto-Quintano, while the region is sparsely populated, it is nonetheless inhabited.
The limited transparency from FRM about the plantation is compounded by the challenges civil society advocates and journalists face in the Republic of Congo, which is ranked 118 out of 180 in the Reporters Without Borders 2021 World Press Freedom Index.
FRM also declined to provide detailed figures on its carbon accounting, pointing Mongabay instead towards TotalEnergies’ press release, which says the acacias will sequester 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year.
FRM and TotalEnergies say they will use the Verified Carbon Standard to check and validate their carbon sequestration figures and monitor the project’s integrity over its near 100-year life span.
A separate project managed by FRM and listed on Verra’s registry suggests those auditors might need to look closely at the consultancy firm’s math.
That plantation produces charcoal for sale in the capital city Brazzaville’s markets, not lumber or plywood.
Were it to be accepted, FRM’s confusing climate math might wind up being necessary to preserve TotalEnergies’ expected carbon savings, though.
As TotalEnergies celebrates its move towards environmental responsibility on the Batéké Plateaux, it is engaged in a very different project in the north of the country, and one with far greater significance for the climate: exploring for oil in a carbon-rich rainforest.
Yet, according to confidential communications seen by Mongabay, the company began conducting aerial reconnaissance of the Mokelé-Mbembé block late last year, in what could be the first step toward moving from exploration to production in the remote area.
First established as part of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, efforts like the U.N.’s Clean Development Mechanism created a market awash in shaky projects that often did little to reduce carbon emissions and which eventually all but collapsed.
Advocates for carbon markets say they’ve learned hard lessons over the past few decades, and that this time around those markets will work better than they have in the past.
As the visible impacts of climate change grow along with public anxiety related to it, financial institutions and multinationals want to signal that they’re part of the solution.
And industry partnerships like the LEAF Coalition require their members — who include Amazon and Nestlé, among others — to develop a road map for gradually decarbonizing their operations in alignment with the rules of the Science Based Targets initiative .
Yet many of those companies, including those who’ve spent decades lobbying against climate policy and waging disinformation campaigns, are either pondering or have already made pledges to reach net-zero emissions.
Convincing the public that they’re making progress on their net-zero goals often means acquiring offsets, either through voluntary markets or by developing them on their own.
“On the one hand, fossil fuel companies have enormous resources, and they should be investing massively in natural climate solutions along with their own transition,” Lubowski said.
At COP26, human rights groups pushed hard for language related to free, prior, and informed consent rights to be included in compliance market guidelines, but they lost out in favor of a softer clause on grievance procedures.
“We’re already in that logic of, we anticipate that these projects might harm people but we’re still doing them.
For oil and gas companies looking to set up their own offset projects, working in countries like the Republic of Congo where they have preexisting relationships and knowledge of the terrain is an appealing option, particularly if those projects are generating revenue for the government.
For projects developed by oil and gas companies, violations of Indigenous rights or the use of questionable carbon savings figures could be insult piled on top of injury.
“Total is expanding its liquefied gas extraction projects all around the world, but at the same time it claims that it has a 2050 net-zero goal.