Posted
on 30 June 2010
Brussels, Belgium– Europe should concentrate
on making real emissions cuts in Europe,
WWF said yesterday as it released an annual
assessment highlighting worsening difficulties
with the assessment of carbon offset projects
in the developing world.
The study found no improvement
in the work of evaluators assessing greenhouse
gas offset projects in developing countries
within the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM),
noting that on a scale of A (best) to F
(worst) the ‘best’ grade - achieved only
by a single evaluator - was a D.
The study analysed the
reception by the CDM Executive Board of
projects passed by evaluators. Once registered
by the board, emissions saved by these projects
are regarded as Certified Emissions Reductions
(CERs) that can be offset against emissions
in industrial countries.
However, this year’s
study of more than 900 project proposals
found that the board directly accepted only
36 per cent of proposals (2009, 41 per cent),
demanded corrections to 57 percent of proposals
(51 per cent), and dismissed 7 per cent
(6 per cent).
‘Since our rating in
2009 discrepancies did not decrease – they
increased’, said Juliette de Grandpre, climate
policy officer at WWF Germany.
In 2007 a study commissioned
by WWF showed that many CDM projects are
of questionable quality and do not lead
to emission reductions. That report also
called into question the role of the independent
assessors.
The key to certification
is to verify whether CDM projects really
need the additional revenues from CER’s
to be carried out – the so-called additionality
criteria. In most cases the projects are
not registered automatically because the
board disagreed with the evaluators’ assesments
that CDM funding was necessary to the projects.
‘The CDM is based on
the assumption that a project can not be
carried out without the financial support
gained by generating and selling CER’s.
However, the ranking confirms that so far
all attempts to prove additionality have
failed’, said de Grandpre. ‘Rather than
investing in this questionable offsetting,
industrialized countries and companies would
be better advised to focus on reducing their
emissions at home.
‘Due to the shortcomings
in project evaluation, large amounts of
non-additional CO2 certificates might be
awarded. This might lead to a boosting of
global emissions, quite contrary to the
intended reductions for which the system
was put in place.’
‘Europe is driving the
carbon market,’ said Jason Anderson, Head
of European Climate and Energy Policy at
WWF. ‘In fact, there’s so much credit around,
it’s undermining the European emissions
trading system and allowing the EU to keep
emitting while still claiming to meet reduction
targets. But even worse is that the offset
credits are being generated by a system
showing these kinds of lasting inadequacies
– it could mean Europe is actively making
climate change worse, not better.’
It is certainly positive
that the CDM Executive Board created a system
of measurements and sanctions for the certification
agencies, but this system is not operational
after three years of development. Also,
important information about the shortcomings
of the UN assessments of assessors is not
publicly accessible.
Although this new system
includes a plan of zero tolerance for compliance,
the report found “that within current thresholds,
an assessor could wrongly validate additionality
in nearly two thirds of projects before
a spot check would be triggered.”
WWF is calling for clear
rules and strict procedures to be established
for climate project evaluators at the next
CDM board meeting in Bonn in late July.
Commissioned by WWF,
the Öko-Institut analysed, for the
second time, to what degree DOEs (Designed
Operational Entities) fulfill the requirements
of the UNFCCC CDM Executive Board (EB).
More than 900 projects have been evaluated
for this analysis. The rating is based on
a statistical evaluation of decisions by
the EB on projects that were validated positively
by a DOE and which are later either registered,
rejected, reviewed or requested for correction
by the EB.
