REDD-Monitor || This week’s briefing by Simon Counsell and Jutta Kill investigates the Katingan Peatland Restoration and Conservation project in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia.1 The briefing can be downloaded here.
The Katingan REDD project covers an area of 149,800 hectares of peatlands and forest. In 2013, the company running the project, PT. Rimba Makmur Utama (RMU) received an Ecosystem Restoration Concession. Three years later the company received an extension for the remaining project area.
RMU claims that the project will avoid 447 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions over the 60-year project period. It is the world’s largest forest carbon project in terms of the number of carbon credits generated. By August 2024, the certifying organisation Verra had issued more than 41 million carbon credits to the Katingan project.
The number of carbon credits is so large because:
- the project area is part of one of the largest peat domes in Indonesia — and peat stores huge amounts of carbon: and
- RMU claims that without the REDD project, more than 85% of the forest within the project area would have been clearcut and converted into monoculture acacia plantations for the production of pulpwood.
One of the largest buyers of carbon credits from Katingan is Shell. The oil giant has bought millions of carbon credits from Katingan, which it has used to claim that shipments of liquefied natural gas are “carbon neutral”, among other things.
Other Big Polluters that have bought carbon credits from Katingan include Tokyo Gas, Volkswagen, PetroChina, Delta Airlines, TotalEnergies, and Boeing.
The project’s aim is “to protect and restore 149,800 hectares of peatland ecosystems, to offer local people sustainable sources of income, and to tackle global climate change”. The last aim is farcical given that the project is selling millions of carbon credits to some of the world’s biggest climate polluters.
The carbon credit ratings company BeZero currently gives Katingan an “AA” rating. That suggests that Katingan carbon credits have a “very high likelihood of achieving 1 tonne of CO₂e avoided or removed”.
Renoster, on the other hand, gives the project a score of 0.45. (Renoster notes that it was “not able to verify the project’s peat storage remotely, particularly after several fires have encroached upon the project”.) Renoster’s score indicates that every carbon credit sold by the Katingan REDD project represents only 0.45 tonnes of avoided CO₂ emissions.
“Implausible and unverifiable” additionality claim
Counsell and Kill write that RMU’s claim that without the Katingan REDD project, the forests would have been converted to acacia plantations is “unverifiable and implausible”.
The Katingan project description document claims that in 2008 a company called PT. Natural Wood Kencana had submitted an application for conversion of 50,000 hectares to acacia plantations. And two more companies were expected to submit applications in 2010.
But RMU has never made public the application for acacia plantation concessions, or any other documentation confirming the rejection of the application.
And in 2011, the Indonesian government issued a moratorium on the conversion of peatlands, that became a permanent measure in 2018.
Counsell and Kill write that,
It is questionable whether an application for conversion of the largest peat dome on Borneo into industrial acacia plantations would have received all the required licenses and permits even if its initial application predated the moratorium.
RMU chose reference areas hundreds of kilometres away from the project area to calculate the rate of conversion of forests to acacia plantations. Some reference areas were on other islands, with different conditions for conversion and a massive pulp and paper industry than in Kalimantan, and therefore way more demand for acacia pulp.
Counsell and Kill write that,
The Katingan Project is another example of how open to subjective judgement carbon standards and auditing decisions are. Depending on assumptions made by the project proponent and judgements by auditors (paid by the project proponent) about the plausibility of the assumptions and hypothetical emissions without the carbon project, estimates of alleged emission savings can differ by millions of tonnes of CO₂ for a single project.
Land disputes and fires
Approximately 50,000 people live in 39 villages around the Katingan REDD project area, including Indigenous Dayak Misik communities. Their traditional lands include the forests inside the project area. In a 2016 article, journalist Carolyn Beeler wrote that a combination of new conservation laws and the Katingan project has cut people off from their land.
She spoke to Masdansyah who lives in a riverside village built on stilts. He previously harvested trees and burned a plot of land for farming outside the village. Now that land is inside the Katingan REDD project. “Now I can’t do anything with my land,” Masdansyah said. “All I can do now is fish.”
Because the project prohibits the use of fire and imposes severe penalties on people caught setting fires, many farmers have switched to using pesticides to remove grass. This increases the cost of farming and damages soil and water sources.
In 2015 and 2019, large fires affected the Katingan REDD project, burning 9,000 hectares and 2,000 hectares of peat forest respectively. The fires came from adjacent oil palm plantations and spread into the Katingan project area.
Counsell and Kill conclude that,
As with all REDD projects, there is a mismatch between the time over which fossil carbon released by users of Katingan Project carbon credits such as Shell interferes with the climate (hundreds to thousands of years and more) and a 60-year project lifetime of the Katingan project. Rimba Makmur Utama will not be able to guarantee that carbon continues to be stored in the forests and peat domes underneath the forest after the end of the 60-year lifetime of the project. Yet the climate impact of fossil carbon releases which users of its carbon credits claim has been nullified, continues to interfere with the climate for millennia. Compensation of the climate damage can thus at best be considered temporary, yet is advertised as permanent.
1 This is the third in a new collection of posts on REDD-Monitor under the headline “Crooked Carbon Business”. The posts are based on a series of briefings about carbon offset projects written by Simon Counsell and Jutta Kill.
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