Thousands of delegates will gather in Glasgow in a few days for United Nations talks aimed at staving off catastrophic climate change.
But the important work has become mired in controversy because financial backers sometimes make unrealistic claims about the environmental savings the projects deliver — and use that as a license to justify ongoing pollution.
It isn’t generating credits yet, but when it does, it will become part of a portfolio that the oil giant uses to claim it has helped neutralize the environmental impact of its fossil fuels.
The Scottish government told Greenpeace that it also plans to count the trees towards its national climate goals, risking the carbon removal being counted twice in the global tally of CO₂ emissions.
If global consensus is reached on how to define offsets and use them, the UN market could begin to replace the unregulated private trades that have boomed in recent years.
The project started selling credits in 2017, but the Indonesian government declared the land a protected area two years later, lowering the risk of deforestation.
Shell also uses the Cordillera Azul project in Peru, which seeks to conserve 1.6 million hectares of forest, to back up its carbon-neutral advertising.
Shell said that it will work with the owner of the Katingan project to fully understand the impact of the new protections on the land.
Until governments can agree on a global framework for trading offsets, environmentalists will continue challenging claims made by companies.