Welcome back to Bonn! Wasting no time, the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body kicked off the meeting yesterday with a session to engage with Parties and stakeholders. ECO appreciates the Supervisory Body’s attempts to have more consultations and to boost stakeholder participation. The bad news is, their attempt is largely failing. Deadlines for written inputs on critical documents are impossibly tight (sometimes only a week!), and interaction during the meetings is left until the very end, when minds have mostly been made up. This has meant that the long list of questions shared for the stakeholder consultation sadly could not be covered in detail during the consultation. So ECO will take this opportunity to outline once again what needs to be front and center in the future deliberations on Article 6.4.
Firstly, REDD+ projects pose such inherent risks in terms of permanence, additionality, quantification and human rights infringements as to make them incompatible with Article 6.4, whether at the project level or jurisdictional level. To prejudge their eligibility with any specific guidance is a mind-bogglingly bad idea indeed.
Secondly, ECO remains concerned about the ongoing revisions to draft recommendations on removal activities and methodological requirements (which ECO hasn’t seen any work on). The questions in the stakeholder consultation fuel this concern: some suggest that methodological principles such as downward adjustment may not apply to all crediting approaches, or that different rules for quality depend on whether a credit is authorised. All credits under 6.4, whether authorised or MCUs (which in this case is Mitigation Contribution Units, not the Marvel Cinematic Universe), could be used for offsetting and thus the same stringency is required for all. While it was reassuring to hear several Parties agree with ECO on these points, it’s deeply worrying these points are even on the table.
Simultaneously, ECO worries about the many other operational tools that are being developed. Members have limited time to adequately consider the many risks ranging from permanence issues to severe environmental, social, and human rights violations. These concerns have not been adequately addressed so far.
And finally, carbon markets are not climate finance. Climate finance is needed for mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage. It should be provided by developed countries in the form of grants, and not as a license for the grantee to continue to pollute: carbon credits are bought primarily to offset ongoing pollution. Moreover, carbon credit transactions often serve intermediaries (primarily from the Global North) more than they serve developing countries. As a reminder, the science is clear: there is no room for offsets. We need real action to phase out all fossil fuels and to stop deforestation and forest degradation. Using these activities to offset emissions elsewhere eliminates any mitigation benefits they have.