REDD and the Carbon Market: A Solution to Climate Change or a New Ecological and Social Threat?

Abstract

In the face of climate change threats, the United Nations, under the Kyoto Protocol, promoted mechanisms aimed at reducing carbon emissions, incentivizing companies and developed countries to invest in Clean Development Mechanisms (CDM) in countries of the Global South, as a way to offset their own greenhouse gas emissions. These projects were quickly linked to the carbon credit market, turning carbon bonds into objects of trade and financial speculation. The REDD initiative is a similar mechanism, designed to address the impacts of deforestation and forest degradation on climate change. However, in addition to technical implementation problems, it presents perverse effects (leakage, hot-air credits, non-additionality, non-permanence, among others) that, paradoxically, tend to generate greater greenhouse gas emissions, adding to the social and environmental debt. The benefits it brings to local communities are scarce, and Indigenous settlements are excluded from them. The only real solution is a shift in the development model toward abandoning the irresponsible consumption of fossil fuels.