Disney's carbon credits will cover its indirect greenhouse gas emissions from purchased electricity, heat or stream.
. He reviewed the Guardians findings and said there was a big gap between the amount of deforestation his team estimated the projects were avoiding and what the carbon standard was approving. The offset controversy has not deterred the Conservancy, which for years ruffled the feathers of other environmental groups for its businesslike approach and close ties to corporate partners. The two studies from the international group of researchers found just eight out of 29 Verra-approved projects where further analysis was possible showed evidence of meaningful deforestation reductions. The trees have remained untouched for 85 years. Carbon trading has a remarkable record of failure: rewarding polluters while causing no discernible reduction in global emissions. Hidden away in the pages of UN-speak that make up the Paris Agreement are the makings of global carbon market in which a host of exotic emissions derivatives can be freely traded, writes Steffen Bhm. Disney's CSRR is a separate . And they point out that their work since 2009 has allowed billions of dollars to be channelled to the vital work of preserving forests. Nature Conservancy spokeswoman Ciaran Clayton said in an email that it enrolled the land in a carbon-offset project to demonstrate that sustainable forestry and carbon can keep [the] forest healthy, resilient, and productive for people and nature.. Some experts say this is just the beginning. Verras rainforest carbon credit methodologies, which Guardian investigation found were flawed, will be phased out by mid-2025. Disney - the media company behind Mickey Mouse and world famous theme parks - has become the latest in a long line of multinational organisations to finance carbon offsetting schemes, which campaign groups say fail to reduce climate change and instead create ways to avoid cutting emissions. This was a particularly pricey endeavor compared to other offset projects such as dairy methane, livestock or ozone-depleting substances projects, he notes. In these cases, the offsets do very little to change the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The problem of empty offsets has dogged the global climate mission for decades. Charlotte Streck, a co-founder of Climate Focus, which developed a leading rainforest offsetting Verra methodology, said the rules could be reinterpreted and exploited, and that the system needed to change. The nonprofits sought to practice sustainable harvesting on the land while preserving the habitat for biodiversity. Or, download a free sample copy of a past issue of Resurgence & Ecologist. Disney's voluntary offset program has covered these Scope 1 direct emissions and the company is planning to expand its offset purchasing in the "near future" to include its Scope 2 emissions, which cover indirect emissions from consumption of purchased electricity, heat or stream, Antonoplis says. Verra felt this was problematic because the controls might not reflect pre-project conditions, and also would compare the project with a hypothetical scenario rather than a real area, as Verra does. Ninety years ago hunters congregated on these mountains each fall to shoot the hawks for sport. Antonoplis is particularly proud of the Cuyamaca Rancho State Park project, for which Disney helped finance the reforestation of 1,075 acres of forest land, which was decimated by the Cedar Fire of October 2003. Our aim is to educate and inform as many people as possible about the wonders of nature, the crisis we face and the best solutions and methods in managing that crisis. The subheading was revised to emphasise that it is the current rainforest protection methodologies that are being phased out. In 2010, the Vatican financed the development of a forest in Hungary, which did not materialise, and the dumping of iron ore into the South Pacific in an unsuccessful attempt to draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But the study authors argue that this mischaracterises their work: the comparison areas used in both cases are real areas, with deforestation levels based on rates that are local to the projects. Scarlett, of the Conservancy, says Hawk Mountains forests were in decline and not regenerating well on their own. Voluntary offsetting has become increasingly popular with companies but critics say it allows them to continue as normal instead of trying to significantly reduce their emissions. Walt Disney once said, The land itselfshould be as dear to us all as our political heritage and our treasured way of life. If we dont learn from the failures of the last decade or so, then theres a very large risk that investors, private individuals and others will move away from any kind of willingness to pay to avoid tropical deforestation and that would be a disaster. A lot of watersheds, unfortunately, have looked at their forests as piggy banks, says Josh Parrish, director of the Conservancys American Forest Carbon Initiative, which enrolls landowners in carbon deals. And peering into the future is a dark and messy art in a world of complex societies, politics and economics. Corporate Communications The corporate buyers then use those credits to subtract an equivalent amount of emissions from their own ledgers. In other words, a tree massacre has been averted thanks to the payments from these corporations. The Conservancy defends its carbon-offset projects, saying that all adhere to peer-reviewed methodologies developed by independent registries and that each project is validated by third-party auditors. Find out more. JPMorgan, Disney, and BlackRock tout these projects as an important mechanism for slashing their own large carbon footprints. We will be revising certain parts of them going forward until we have this new methodology in place at which point in time, we will phase out the current methodologies, said Baroody. They provide us with fresh air, filter toxins out of water sources and prevent erosion. 15 July 2016 | Washington, D.C. | Among a group of nearly 2,000 companies that publicly disclosed data in 2015, 17% use offsetting as part of a carbon reduction strategy - including familiar household names such as L'Oral, General Motors, and Delta Air Lines - according to a new report by Forest Trends' Ecosystem Marketplace, Buying in: Taking Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. I think in the longer term, what we want is a consensus set of methods which are applied across all sites, he said. In the case of any forest conservation project, we have to ask, would the forest have been cleared without the extra money to protect it? The timeline of work on the schemes changes and that of the Guardian investigation have also been further clarified. It was incredible to see these beautiful animals and know that we are helping to protect the place they call home. Hawk Mountain Sanctuary near Kempton, Pa. Two of the studies have passed the peer review process and another has been released as a preprint. Even if the answer to this is yes, that deforestation may just shift to a new, unprotected area, in which case emissions don't go down overall, says Jane Burston, founder of Carbon Retirement, which highlights bad practice in the carbon offsetting industry. Verra heavily disputed the findings and said it remained committed to rainforest conservation schemes. The Walt Disney Company, together with its subsidiaries and affiliates, is a leading diversified international family entertainment and media enterprise that includes Parks, Experiences and Products; Media & Entertainment Distribution; and three content groupsStudios, General Entertainment and Sportsfocused on developing and producing content for DTC, theatrical and linear platforms. Find out about our mission, and our team, here. Hawk Mountain has become wildly popular with researchers and birdwatchers, with 60,000 visitors each year. About two-thirds of Bethlehems trees and almost 90% of Albanys trees would have been harvested within a decade, according to the project documents. Verra has validated credits using disgraced methodologies and now they say they are going to change everything. Disney has financed several reforestation projects with the Nature Conservancy in China because of major construction on the upcoming Shanghai Disneyland and its existing theme park in Hong Kong, he says. Disney is aiming to reduce its direct greenhouse gas emissions by 50 per cent by 2012. The world's leading carbon credit certifier - used by Disney, Shell, Gucci and other big corporations for climate claims - has said it will phase out and Rick Sanderson FIFST on LinkedIn: Biggest carbon credit certifier to replace its rainforest offsets scheme At first glance, big corporations appear to be protecting great swaths of U.S. forests in the fight against climate change. But there were also questionable choices. The Guardian visited a flagship project in Peru, and was shown videos that residents said showed their homes being cut down with chainsaws and ropes by park guards and police. *From fiscal years ending in January (Salesforce) and March of the following year (Marks & Spencer). The market for these credits is booming, according to BloombergNEF, a clean-energy research group. Credits from 21 projects had no climate benefit, seven had between 98% and 52% fewer than claimed using Verras system, and one had 80% more impact, the investigation found. Future leaders would be plucked from the executive ranks of McKinsey & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Conservationists toiling at the nonprofit understood that even though these companies were trying to burnish their image, they also had the deep pockets to fund major preservation work. No matter how unrealistic it might seem that a landowner such as Hawk Mountain would cut its trees, things like this happen all the time, says John Kadyszewski, director emeritus of ACR. MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: One-fifth of the world's biggest companies have. The Walt Disney Company states that it . We have absolutely no motivation to not achieve real climate solutions, says Lynn Scarlett, chief external affairs officer at the Conservancy. The voluntary sector alone has ballooned in size over the past decade and was worth an estimated $387 million in 2009. In other words, the Conservancy should earn hundreds of thousands of dollars in carbon revenue to preserve a forest that it had already saved. 818-560-3117, Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. And thanks to Pope Francis, the idea is firmly on the agenda. Disney Environmental and Conservation Manager Lisa Shibata, who has traveled around the world to oversee projects that are impacting some of our most precious habitatsrecently spoke aboutDisneys commitment to forests. The Nature Conservancy recruits landowners and enrolls its own well-protected properties in carbon-offset projects, which generate credits that give big companies an inexpensive way to claim large emissions reductions. The predictions are assessed by a Verra-approved third party, and if accepted are then used to generate the credits that companies can buy and use to offset their own carbon emissions. These problems exist with nearly every kind of credit. Useful linksFriends of the Earth report: A Dangerous Distraction. Our timber projects are always geared toward forest health.. "Not everybody pays as much for voluntary offsets as Disney does," she says. The website is owned and published by The Resurgence Trust, an educational charity. This level of finance was delivered due to strong standards and methodologies, which we will continue to strengthen, in cooperation with governments, scientists, and local communities all over the world.. To say verifiers vouch for the environmental integrity of a project, that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what verifiers do, says Mark Trexler, a management consultant who authored the first carbon-offset methodology three decades ago and has worked on dozens of offset projects since. The Nature Conservancy also takes a cut. For that to happen, we need to acknowledge the scale of problems with the current system, said Thales West, a lead author on the studies by the international group. Many organisations in the sector earned millions during the pandemic when demand for nature-based credits soared. Carbon offsets have become an increasingly common way for businesses to claim large reductions in their emissions. Forests also provide habitats for wildlife and serve as a place for people to connect with nature. Some have labelled their products carbon neutral, or told their consumers they can fly, buy new clothes or eat certain foods without making the climate crisis worse. The 182,000-hectare (450,000-acre) Alto Mayo Protected Forest sprawls over a mountainous and ecologically significant stretch of the eastern Andes in Peru. During the late 2000s, leaders of the Conservancys Vermont chapter wanted to set up a carbon project on 26,000 acres of forested land just south of the Canadian border it had acquired along with the Vermont Land Trust in 1997, with most of the funding from a local philanthropists $5 million contribution. Third-party verifiers examine only whether a project follows the methodologys rules, not whether its at all plausible that, say, a sanctuary would harvest 89% of its trees in five years. Two different groups of scientists one internationally based, the other from Cambridge in the UK looked at a total of about two-thirds of 87 Verra-approved active projects. The threat to forests had been overstated by about 400% on average for Verra projects, according to analysis of a 2022 University of Cambridge study. Yadvinder Singh Malhi, a professor of ecosystem science at the University of Oxford and a Jackson senior research fellow at Oriel College, Oxford, who was not involved in the study, said two of his PhD students had gone through the analysis without spotting any errors. Now the fight is on as public calls to keep the coal in the ground get too loud to ignore. "We're going to be expanding our program as we fold in our Scope 2 emissions, which will obviously increase the amount of projects that we'll be involved in," he told participants in a Climate Action Reserve (CAR) webinar last week. "We don't only pick projects based on geography," he says. The challenge isnt around measuring carbon stocks; its about reliably forecasting the future, what would have happened in the absence of the Redd+ activity. One strategy to improve the market is to show what the problems are and really force the registries to tighten up their rules so that the market could be trusted. Last year its revenue was $932 million, which eclipsed the combined budgets of the countrys next three largest environmental nonprofits. In these transactions, each metric ton of reduced emissions is represented by a financial instrument known as a carbon offset. With the fund, Disney can use this money to invest in forestry projects like reforestation and projects that use improved forest management techniques, such as removing unhealthy trees so that healthy ones can thrive. She says her understanding is that these incremental improvements generate the carbon credits. It doesnt matter from the climates perspective where or how carbon gets reduced, whether its spending $200 a ton capturing CO2 from the exhaust of a coal-burning power plant in China or one-tenth that amount planting trees to absorb the gas in Chile. She acquired the land, hired a warden, and kicked out the hunters in the 1930s. The investigation was followed by a series of exposs about the industry from other outlets. Disney's preference is to fund new projects rather than purchasing older offsets and to work with long-time NGO partners such as Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, the Conservation Fund and World Wildlife Fund, with 80 to 90 percent of its credits acquired through these relationships. The investigation indicated that many claims based on the rainforest credits, which are generated by predicting deforestation that would have happened in the absence of the conservation projects, were largely meaningless, putting organisations that buy the offsets at risk of greenwashing. Here I am, 20 years later having the same conversation. The costs of carbon offset projects are charged back to individual business units at a rate proportional to their contributions to the company's overall direct emissions footprint. Disney funds the regeneration and protection of forests and other natural areas to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and support local communities through investment in high quality, certified Natural Climate Solutions. LS: The Mexico project is taking place on land owned by a local community without many economic resources. Few have jumped into this growing market with as much zeal as the Nature Conservancy, which was founded 69 years ago by a small group of ecologists seeking to preserve the last unspoiled lands in the U.S. Offsets can be sold only when the verifier has signed off. Three projects in Madagascar have achieved excellent results and have a significant impact on the figures. To receive the magazine, become a member now. Germany's 'Energiewende' has made the country a global renewable energy powerhouse. Among other things, critics argue that projects can overstate how much carbon they're offsetting and enable big corporations including Shell Oil, Delta Airlines and Disney to avoid the harder work of reducing their fossil fuel dependence. Verra, which is based in Washington DC, operates a number of leading environmental standards for climate action and sustainable development, including its verified carbon standard (VCS) that has issued more than 1bn carbon credits. Its first such deal, in 2011, was with Bethlehem, which owns two reservoirs. Verra said it would continue to expand its staff and review the methodology in its programme every five years. In a series of articles in 2003, the Washington Post revealed the Conservancy was drilling for oilan odd practice for an environmental groupon land in Texas inhabited by an endangered prairie chicken. Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, The investigation indicated that many claims based on the rainforest credits were largely meaningless, Newcarbon offset standards should bring greater scrutiny, Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless, analysis shows, Shell to spend $450m on carbon offsetting as fears grow that credits may be worthless, Greenwashing or a net zero necessity? Despite being based in California, the company's offset purchasing is not motivated by compliance mandates because its operations in the state fall well below the 25,000 tCO2e threshold to be covered under California's cap-and-trade program. The 2030 environmental goals outlined in the report include: For additional details, please visit: www.thewaltdisneycompany.com/environment. (It hopes to drive that cost down to $100 to $200 per ton.). If not for payments for carbon offsets coming from corporate buyers such as JPMorgan, all this would be jeopardized, according to documents for the project, developed by the Conservancy and Blue Source LLC, a carbon-project development company. This forested ridge, 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia, is claimed as a protectorate of JPMorgan and other corporate patrons, whose good works in defense of the thick forestland generate carbon credits from a project the Nature Conservancy has orchestrated. Programme every five years a global renewable energy powerhouse at the moment ninety years ago hunters on. Validated credits using disgraced methodologies and now they say they are going to the... 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