DISCREDITED: The Voluntary Carbon Market in India : CSE
Date & Time Oct 5, 2023 06:30 PM in India
The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) is a public interest research and advocacy organisation based in New Delhi. CSE researches into, lobbies for and communicates the urgency of development that is both sustainable and equitable. The scenario today demands using knowledge to bring about change. In other words, working India’s democracy. This is what we aim to do.The challenge, we see, is two-pronged. On the one hand, millions live within a biomass based subsistence economy, at the margins of survival. The environment is their only natural asset. But a degraded environment means stress on land, water and forest resources for survival. It means increasing destitution and poverty. Here, opportunity to bring about change is enormous.But it will need a commitment to reform – structural reform- in the way we do business with local communities. On the other hand, rapid industrialization is throwing up new problems: growing toxification and a costly disease burden. The answers will be in reinventing the growth model of the Western world for ourselves, so that we can leapfrog technology choices and find new ways of building wealth that will not cost us the earth. Our aim is to raise these concerns, participate in seeking answers and in pushing for answers, transforming these into policy and so practice. We do this through our research and by communicating our understanding through our publications. We call this knowledge-based activism. We hope we will make a difference.
We are all set to release our new groundbreaking investigative report ‘Discredited’-a report on the voluntary carbon market in India.
Join us on Oct 5 at 6.30 PM to hear about the findings and the proposed way ahead from the project team Trishant Dev Rohini Krishnamurthy Sunita Narain and Avantika Goswami.
Description
The global voluntary carbon market (VCM) sector has exploded in recent years, and India has been an integral part of this boom. The country has become the world’s second largest source of projects for carbon offsets. As of June 2023, over 1,400 projects are registered or are under various stages of consideration in the two major crediting programmes — Verra and Gold Standard. Indian projects account for one-fifth of the total carbon credits issued under these two programmes. But this boom brings with it a strong whiff of fraud, finds a new investigative report by Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) and Down To Earth. ‘Discredited: Does the Voluntary Carbon Market Benefit People and Climate in India?’ begins by asking some fundamental questions: does VCM help in the reduction of global GHG emissions? Does it guarantee financial benefits to carbon-sequestering communities and sectors which would otherwise not get financing? The team’s expose is an eye-opener: it shows how there are no rules in this market which is under a shroud of secrecy and opaque at best.
