No hope for the large but deeply troubled adolescent?
One of the smarter attacks on the offset market comes from Nick Davies at the Guardian, who describes said market as a “large but deeply troubled adolescent: Confused, unpredictable, and difficult to trust”. As much as it pains me, I would have to add ‘arrogant, meddling, and lacking regard for tradition” to the bio.
But it gets worse. The teenager analogy is apt because most of its vices are symptoms of awkward youth, and could conceivably be addressed as the market matures. Things like insufficient monitoring methods and insufficient regulation are all ugly disasters, but they are, after all, growing pains. So fine.
The much gloomier news is that the Additionality problem (I am calling it a problem) is so inherent and fundamental in the structure of the offset market that there will be no working through it or growing out of it. It is, to extend the analogy, in the genes.
Additionality is the idea that in order for a carbon sink project to constitute a legitimate carbon Offset, it has to be something that wasn’t going to happened without the funding. If it was going to happen anyway, then the money is aid or sponsorship or something, but it hasn’t affected the atmosphere even a little bit. This makes perfect sense and if we are going to look to offsetting as a serious response to climate change then Additionality absolutely needs to be there.
The problem is that, especially where places like Indonesia and Central Africa are concerned, Additionality really undermines the possibility for meaningful local decision-making or self-determination.
I heard this point about remote transactions affecting local land use before, but I mostly shucked it off at the time because everyone’s land use is affected by remote transaction in one way or another. Now I think Additionality makes it even more explicit then that.
Let’s say people in village X are engaged in slash and burn agriculture because that’s the way for them to get good abundant food with low-tech agriculture. The people of village X might be eligible to receive technical assistance through an offset project to do agroforestry or something, but only if they don’t want to.
If they have ever expressed an interest in doing agroforestry, or tried to go about it themselves, then you can’t be sure it wasn’t going to happen anyway, and the idea of calling it an offset becomes a sham.
It is the most elegant catch-22 I’ve come across since the original.
Climate change might be number one on the planetary list of Very Important Issues, but deep democracy and political self-determination in the global south is probably number two, and I might even have the order wrong at that. Somebody should look into this. Is anybody looking into this?
Perhaps this is the market-mechanism response:
Because village X has self-determination, they would only chooses to forgo beneficial slash-and-burn agriculture in favour of less beneficial agroforestry if they decided that the benefit of the proferred technical assistance outweighs the loss from changing agricultural practices. The loss to the community is real, yes. But the loss is offset by the cash I mean technical assistance, and the carbon still stays out of the atmosphere.
And if village X /doesn’t/ have self-determination, then you can hardly blame the offset mechanism for undermining something that didn’t exist to be undermined.
I now place my hands on my forehead, cry “Milty, OUT” and faint to the floor, cleansed.
Hugh
November 18, 2008 at 1:05 am
oh good, hugh is looking into this.
Yes well, I think that would work so long as village x didn’t get too proactive about it. Agreeing to an externally-proposed trade off is one thing, but too much initiative and they could loose the cash I mean technical assistance. Anyway it sounds like a go to me. Bring on the projects.
More projects!
Jane Boles
November 18, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Ah I see now, so the amount of CIMTA a given village should be offered should, all other things being equal, be inversley proportional to the interest that village has shown in carbon offset activities. Thus there is a strong incentive in not making eye contact when you happen to saunter past the offsets booth.
Maybe people can make money by consulting with communities on how to look the least environmentally concerned. Maybe somebody could call up small towns, asking them about their existing environmental initiatives and giving advice on how to downplay and explain them away.
Presumably it’s in a community’s best financial efforts to stay carefully uninvolved with any governmental initiatives or cultural trends towards sustainability for its own sake. Competing perverse incentives!
Or perhaps the world really does break down into those communities who were going to cut emissions no matter what (Victoria) and those that were never going to do it without financial incentivizing (Prince George) and by using this two-pronged attack we will conquer them both.
Hugh
November 19, 2008 at 11:16 pm
I think I’d be great at coaching people on how to affect an air of apathy. I’m like berkeley in a chetwynd suit. this is something to think about, for when the fish farm doesn’t hire me.
Jane Boles
November 21, 2008 at 9:30 am
[...] deforestation rate to an area with no detectable deforestation. Which brings us back to the zanier side of REDD, where potential target forests have to be quantified by the risk they [...]
As if 830 000 ha would slip under the radar. « all of my favorite missions were ill-defined
December 10, 2008 at 5:04 pm