Make Transparency a Source of Pride for Great Bear Offsets

Minister Chong's three main rationalizations published in The Tyee for the Great Bear carbon offsets are: a) the government is proud of them; b) they are innovative; and c) The Tyee had an article lauding them in June before it posted Ben Parfitt's criticism. Unfortunately, these rationalizations do not address the substance of Mr. Parfitt's thoughtful critique of this complicated and potentially dangerous carbon accounting scheme.

During estimates debate in the B.C. Legislature, I applauded the government for their leadership in the development of Reconciliation Protocols with Coastal First Nations, noting the inclusion of carbon as a potential source of benefit sharing as an innovation. In some respects, the government can be proud of this innovation, but that doesn't legitimize how these benefits are being utilized.

Minister Chong fails to mention that in order to qualify as an offset project, developments need to be "carbon projects" from the start. In the case of the Great Bear Initiative, all of the work though the 1990s to 2009 that led to the legislated conservancy areas and Ecosystem Based Management must have been for carbon sequestration or avoidance of GHG emissions.

Great Bear's great expectations

Offsets were clearly not the driving force behind the preservation of the Great Bear Rainforest. In fact, even the project's biggest proponents have said as much. For example, this detailed history of the initiative by Merran Smith and Art Sterritt from 2007 only mentions carbon as an aside. However, this has not prevented the government, the environmental community, the Pacific Carbon Trust, and First Nations from attempting to rewrite history to turn the Great Bear Rainforest into a carbon offset "project."

An example of this historical revisionism appears in the preamble to the 2011 Coastal First Nations Atmospheric Benefits Sharing Agreements, which states that carbon was part of the initiative from as early as 2006. No documentation has been made publicly available to substantiate this claim.

As Ben Parfitt in The Tyee and Gordon Hoekstra in the Vancouver Sun both point out, the lack of transparency surrounding the carbon claims of the Great Bear Initiative is appalling. We don't have any idea how the base case scenario was calculated to substantiate the claim that there are a million tonnes of carbon offsets available for First Nations to sell on the open market each year (about $15 million per year in potential revenue).

Single buyer problems

Unfortunately for the B.C. government, the only bulk buyer of these offsets to date, is the troublesome Pacific Carbon Trust (PCT), which uses money that was intended to be spent in classrooms, hospitals, and seniors' care facilities to buy questionable offsets so the BC Liberals can declare the government "carbon neutral." To date, there have been no major purchases of the Great Bear offsets on the open market.

There are three important problems with the PCT as the sole bulk purchaser of the Great Bear offsets.

First, the PCT is constrained by law from buying offsets from projects that started earlier than Sept. 2007. Based on that stipulation, the PCT should not even be able to purchase these offsets: the preamble to the Atmospheric Benefits Sharing Agreements rewrites the start of the Great Bear "carbon initiative" to 2006 or earlier.

Second, there are legal concerns with the Crown purchasing offsets from First Nations that are derived from Crown Land. In the Atmospheric Benefits Sharing Agreements, the government of B.C. does not concede ownership of the carbon in the Great Bear rainforest; rather, the government allows First Nations to claim the financial benefit from a certain amount of that carbon without the Crown contesting their right to do so. However, to then buy carbon offsets from the Great Bear, the Crown would use public money to buy back something to which government still claims sole and exclusive rights. The intent of the carbon sharing agreement with First Nations was for them to attract private money, not tax dollars.

Third, no Crown agency reports their forest carbon emissions in their mandated carbon neutral accounting. In this context, it requires the worst kind of accounting to justify declaring the BC Government carbon neutral through the purchase of forest carbon offsets from Crown land. For example, BC Hydro doesn't have to report approximately 1.5 million tonnes of permanent GHG emissions that will result from clearing land associated with the Northwest Transmission Line. How does it make any sense that the PCT can use offsets in the Great Bear as "credits" to declare the government carbon neutral, when emissions from Crown forests are not included as "debits" in the carbon neutral accounting process?

Let's be sure we are offsetting

I have fought for solutions to the impending global climate crisis for years, and that's why I believe carbon offsets from forests are highly problematic. They are particularly dangerous when used by politicians to give people the false hope that their government is doing something to address climate change when its own jobs strategy -- weighed heavily to promoting natural gas pipelines and liquefied natural gas processing plants -- will massively increase B.C.'s total emissions. Ironically, some of these plants will be located in the heart of the Great Bear Rainforest.

The preservation of the Great Bear Rainforest has been rightly applauded worldwide as an important conservation initiative. These efforts should not be distorted and manipulated to make money off of carbon.