Carbon markets, geoengineering and other false solutions: What’s at stake at the current climate talks?

Guest article by Tamra Gilbertson, Indigenous Environmental Network, and Coraina de la Plaza, Hands Off Mother Earth Alliance

As global temperature records continue to be broken at unprecedented rates, delegates are gathering again in Bonn, Germany, for the 60th sessions of the Subsidiary Bodies of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC SB60). Over this week and next headline talks will focus on, among other things, climate finance, lessons learned from the first Global Stocktake (GST), agriculture and fleshing out the implementation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). 

However, the often overlooked but crucial negotiations on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement will also be taking place. Negotiators are now racing towards the 29th Conference of the Parties (COP29)—in November this year—as the deadline for concluding key aspects of the talks, in the hope that pilot projects can be launched in 2025. Article 6 largely deals with market-based approaches to mitigating climate change—carbon pricing, carbon trading and carbon offsets—and aims to create a kind of climate stock market which will inevitably allow some companies to continue to pollute whilst others (often the same ones) make money from the sale of carbon credits. 

The negotiations on this issue have been particularly challenging, and climate justice movements have continuously raised concerns over the wider human rights implications of the proposals currently on the table. In particular, Articles 6.2 and 6.4 are glaring attempts to continue to legitimise false climate solutions. Rather than reducing emissions at source, carbon offsetting ignores the root causes of climate change and is designed to delay and distract from real climate action, allowing big polluters and governments to continue with business as usual. This shifts the burden of mitigation away from those most responsible for the climate crisis, and constitutes a form of carbon colonialism. 

Article 6.4 attempts to replace the failed Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) with another trading platform, sometimes referred to as the Sustainable Development Mechanism (SDM) or euphemistically as the ‘mechanism database’. To add more fuel to the fire, the CDM’s junk carbon credits continue to be traded based on a decision taken at the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) last December to keep the CDM rolling for a few more years. The CDM, as with every other carbon offset market, has structural flaws meaning that a large proportion of the credits being traded come from projects that do not actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For instance, a few years ago research found that “85% of the offset projects used by the EU under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) failed to reduce emissions”. More recently, a broader body of research found even more CDM projects that were selling junk credits, including credits sold through the Teles Pires hydropower dam project in Brazil, which had damaged Indigenous and traditional communities and harmed biodiversity and fisheries. 

The Teles Pires dam project is by no means unique, and many projects selling credits through established carbon markets have caused numerous human rights violations including violating the rights of Indigenous Peoples. The inherent flaws in market-based approaches to climate mitigation also tend to further entrench the inequality faced by underrepresented groups such as Indigenous Peoples and women, and favour those who have economic power. 

Outside the UNFCCC negotiating rooms, we are already witnessing how carbon markets are acting as a magnet for other false climate solutions like geoengineering, which refers to large-scale technological interventions to manipulate the Earth’s oceans, land and atmosphere, to “fix” the climate. Geoengineering schemes range from spraying aerosols into the stratosphere to block sunlight from reaching the Earth (Solar Radiation Management), to sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere or capturing it from industrial pollution sites (Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)). Under current proposals, many CDR projects would be eligible for support under Article 6.4 and, in an attempt to force the large-scale roll-out of geoengineering technologies, industry and some governments are lobbying hard to include as many schemes as possible in the new carbon market structures. 

These geoengineering schemes do nothing to tackle the root causes of climate change; rather, reliance on speculative technofixes delays vital action to cut greenhouse gases. None have been able to demonstrate they can effectively sequester carbon or store it with any permanence, while efforts to cool the climate by increasing the Earth’s reflectivity are inherently unpredictable and risk further destabilizing an already destabilized climate system.