- The Southern Cardamom REDD+ project in Cambodia can resume issuing verified carbon credits again after a review prompted by allegations of rights abuses of local communities.
- Verra, the leading certifier of carbon credits, reinstated its certification of the project, run by U.S. NGO Wildlife Alliance, despite Human Rights Watch citing evidence that “overwhelmingly points to abuse.”
- In a February 2024 report, HRW detailed allegations of forced evictions, physical violence, the destruction of homes and property, and intimidation by rangers working for Wildlife Alliance with the support of state security forces.
- Activists have slammed Verra for not carrying out an on-the ground investigation and instead relying on documents provided by Wildlife Alliance — which they say continued to carry out evictions even as the review was underway.
PHNOM PENH — Carbon credit certifying agency Verra announced on Sept. 10 that it has lifted the suspension of the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project in Cambodia following a roughly 14-month review of the project’s audits. Verified emissions reductions, better known as carbon credits, can now once more be issued by Cambodia’s flagship REDD+ project.
The 465,000-hectare (1.15-million-acre) REDD+ project in the dense rainforest of Cambodia’s southwest is jointly managed between New York-based NGO Wildlife Alliance and Cambodia’s Ministry of Environment, but has been mired in controversies that came to a head in February 2024 when Human Rights Watch released a 118-page report detailing abuses linked to the REDD+ project.
The allegations leveled against Wildlife Alliance and its partners focused around a lack of securing free, prior and informed consent from the 29 communities — totaling around 16,000 people, including Indigenous peoples — whose land was absorbed into the REDD+ project. Other abuses reported by community members included forced evictions, physical violence, the destruction of homes and property, and intimidation by rangers working for Wildlife Alliance, the Ministry of Environment and military police officers who often accompany the rangers.
Wildlife Alliance strongly denied the findings of Human Rights Watch’s report.
While similar issues have long been raised about Wildlife Alliance’s conservation methods for more than a decade, the complaint filed by HRW prior to its report saw Verra suspend the issuance of new carbon credits from the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project on June 19, 2023.
The project remained suspended until Sept. 10, when Verra said in a statement that, along with validation and verification bodies, it had reviewed all audits of the project. Verra then came to the conclusion that Wildlife Alliance’s actions to address alleged harm and mitigate future risks demonstrated that the project was fit to issue credits again.
Wildlife Alliance also issued a statement on Sept. 10, noting that since the allegations came to light, the NGO has hired a conservation communication officer to liaise between rangers and communities, appointed voluntary focal points within each community inside the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project area, as well as ramped up human rights training for 204 staff while also ensuring access to pro bono legal counsel for community members.
“Going forward, we will provide the necessary financial and technical assistance to any of our partner communities that choose to seek communal land titles,” the statement added. “We will also establish the Southern Cardamom REDD+ Community Fund so that future investment in community initiatives is directed by elected community representatives.”
In tandem with Wildlife Alliance and Verra, carbon credit marketing firm Everland, which brokers the sale of credits from Southern Cardamom REDD+ along with other projects in Cambodia, issued a similar statement, but stressed “that these improvements are above and beyond the requirements of Verra’s standards and are built upon recommendations that emerged from the project’s ongoing consultation with communities.”
Renewed community approval
Wildlife Alliance said that between June 2023 and September 2024, it had conducted a secret ballot among the 29 communities living within the project area, with increased participation from community members compared to previous surveys.
“On average, 93% of community members voted in favour of the project,” Wildlife Alliance said in its statement, “with support ranging from 81% to 98% in the communities where many Indigenous Chorng reside — in O’som and Areng.”
Wildlife Alliance said in its statement that the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project had been operating on “dwindling reserves” during Verra’s review period, adding that in 2023 the NGO spent $2 million in community development and alternative livelihood programs in a bid to reduce pressure on the Cardamoms.
Mongabay requested comment from three representatives from Cambodia’s Ministry of Environment, including Chuop Paris, the country’s REDD+ point person, but none could be reached by phone or responded to messages.
Jerry Seager, Verra’s senior director of program quality, was quoted in Verra’s statement as saying that sufficient actions had been taken by Wildlife Alliance, but that ongoing improvements and actions would need to be implemented over the next year.
These actions will be measured in the form of a progress report set to be submitted by Wildlife Alliance in early 2025.
“Verra takes allegations of human rights abuses extremely seriously, and we are committed to ensuring all projects we certify uphold high ethical standards,” Seager said via Verra’s statement. “This process is another example of Verra’s commitment to provide credible oversight and ensure greater integrity in Verra’s programs.”
Lack of independent review
The flurry of statements issued by Wildlife Alliance, Verra and Everland largely skimmed over the alleged abuses, focusing instead on the future of the project and steps taken by project proponents to avoid future issues.
“During an entire year-long process, Verra didn’t interview a single victim of this project,” said Luciana Téllez Chávez, senior researcher on environment and human rights at HRW. “Their report has no independent findings: it simply restates the assertions of the Wildlife Alliance that they don’t think they did anything wrong. It’s like a police department relying on an officer’s word, even when the evidence overwhelmingly points to abuse.”
Similarly, Peasant Voices in Conservation, an informal network of Indigenous and Khmer farmers who live alongside or in protected areas, academics and activists, criticized Verra for not sending an independent team to Cambodia to investigate the communities’ complaints on the ground, relying instead on a desk-based review of documents — many of which were provided by Wildlife Alliance.
“Evictions have continued at the very same time that Wildlife Alliance was being investigated by Verra,” said a representative of Peasant Voices in Conservation. “They are occurring right now. The steps outlined in the report have no hopes of stopping the abuses. Wildlife Alliance, over its twenty-year history, has built up an army of enforcers including military police, soldiers and Ministry of Environment officials. Human rights training for a select few Wildlife Alliance staff will not stop further abuses.”
Indeed, abuses tied to REDD+ projects have raised questions about the viability of carbon offsetting in authoritarian countries. The need for land, already a precious commodity in Cambodia, puts REDD+ project proponents into direct conflict with the already weak land tenure that many Cambodians face, particularly Indigenous communities whose ancestral lands are rarely recognized and who face even higher bureaucratic hurdles when seeking land titles.
The full extent of wrongdoing committed in the name of conservation has yet to be uncovered, the network’s representative said, adding that HRW “only uncovered a small fraction” of alleged abuses.
The Southern Cardamom REDD+ is just one of Wildlife Alliance’s carbon credit-generating projects, with the neighboring Samkos REDD+ project currently under development in the Cambodian stretch of the Cardamom Mountains. This project, like the Southern Cardamom REDD+, has already come up against illegal logging linked to large-scale infrastructure and allegations of harassment among farmers living in Pursat and Battambang provinces where much of the roughly 282,000-hectare (697,000-acre) project is being established.
Whether the Samkos REDD+ project will be able to fend off multiple threats to the forest while respecting the rights of the communities who call these parts of Cambodia home remains to be seen, but reports from earlier this year suggest that, globally, the carbon credit market is faltering.
The value of credits purchased cratered from roughly $2 billion in 2022 to $723 million in 2023, with the apparent crisis of confidence in the carbon market stemming from skepticism over the climate value derived from REDD+ projects, the recent spike in suspensions of large projects, and associated rights violations.
“It is very clear that those invested in REDD+ schemes will go far to cover over and ignore abuses of Indigenous and peasant farmers,” the Peasant Voices in Conservation representative said. “This problem will only get worse as more REDD+ projects come online. Verra is currently incapable of regulating the REDD+ projects it verifies.”
Banner image: A Wildlife Alliance/Ministry of Environment ranger on patrol in the Cardamom Mountains, by Andyb3947 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
New report details rights abuses in Cambodia’s Southern Cardamom REDD+ project
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