BUSINESS: CARBON COWBOYS MAKE A MOVE ON VANUATU

ECO2 Forests’ multi-million dollar deal a worry Bob Makin Many in Vanuatu see the internet start-up of this forestry (re-forestation) company as the arrival of what in the United States is termed as “carbon cowboys”. This company’s executives call themselves “eco-imagineers”—some say this is a further reason to worry. Presently, re-forestation in Vanuatu means just one place, Espiegle Bay, north-west Malakula. It means one company, Eco2 Forests. This company says it owns 20,000 acres of Big Nambas territory for a “multi-million dollar carbon credit deal”. ECO2 speaks of 31 square miles of re-forestation even though they only have a title comprising only 900 hectares. A recent tour by environmental and forestry personnel learned that only one lease, the original for 900 hectares, had been completed. The price paid for that lease seems to have been a truck and roughly A$20,000. The company and its executives have been making expansive internet claims concerning their properties and product, a cultivar of the Asian paulownia tree called kiri, for more than a year now, all in the name of carbon trading. The idea behind forestry for carbon trading is that trees suck carbon dioxide from the air, making them a tradeable ‘offset’ for greenhouse gas emissions. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol emanating from that major environmental conference in Japan sets rules for obtaining credits through re-forestation. Whilst environmentalists generally support the principal of re-forestation for the purpose of carbon sequestration in Vanuatu, it is extremely important to governments and communities that such projects are undertaken properly and in accordance with established protocols. ECO2 Forests says it will be seeking enlistment through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol, but this is no easy matter. It begins with establishing what the base line happens to be. There is quite a lot of vegetation already where they plan to grow kiri trees, and that means achieving this starting point figure will be daunting, to say the least. For a company which has not admitted to any local presence and only answered a few questions in the media, carrying this out and calculating the leakage of carbon in the removal of that secondary bush, before going any further, ought to be a real worry for the eco-imagineers. Then, there is the question of additionality. What does the commercial undertaking add, by way of carbon sequestration, in a country in which logging has been banned for 20 years? Owing to the complexity of registration, only a handful of companies worldwide have managed to become registered under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which also involves third party auditing and approval before any carbon credits are sold. Vanuatu does not have a cadre of professionals ready to administer the CDM mechanisms. Early sales of carbon credits by ECO2 are therefore a really big worry. Like the missing acreage. There has to be an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), but how to fit that with the missing acres is also a worry. In Vanuatu, land is leased out, but ownership remains with the customary landowners and his descendants in perpetuity. There must be consultation with stakeholders. Firstly, this would have to establish any ‘tabu’ areas such as burial grounds and places of earlier settlement.And stake-holders have a variety of interests, especially who will receive the benefits of the undertaking. The company has promised up to 300 jobs for local landholders. The custom owners, however, say there are to be 600. The kind of work likely, for a start, is bound to be large-scale bush clearance, and it is certain to be hard work of a kind largely unknown to Vanuatu’s subsistence gardeners. ECO2 Forests is a publicly listed company in the United States. Forestry (renewable resource lumber) and carbon credits are what they say they are concerned with in Australia and South America, as well as Vanuatu. Vanuatu authorities are disturbed that the public disclosure information of the company (as evidenced in the missing acreage) falls short of the actual situation. ISLANDS BUSINESS spoke to the University of the South Pacific’s Dr Justin Rose, who teaches environmental legislation at the Law School of the Emalus Campus, Port Vila, concerning the ECO2 Forests project. He said: “This project proposal, together with recent reports coming out of Papua New Guinea about carbon traders seeking to quickly acquire the sequestration rights to forests from rural landowners, highlights the need for the Vanuatu government to give some urgent consideration as to how best to regulate forest carbon sequestration projects, both the afforestation and avoided deforestation ones. “The aim should be to engage in the international financial mechanisms while ensuring that projects genuinely sequester CO2, that benefits are equitably shared with local people, and that negative social and environmental impacts are minimised