Tucked on the edges of a biodiversity hotspot, the Tumring project in Cambodia is supposed to prevent a rainforest the size of Chicago from being chopped down.
Its supporters claim it has been doing exceptionally well. The Cambodian government hailed it as the “most successful” community-based forest conservation scheme on the carbon market and a climate solution.
Satellite images tell a different story. Tumring is experiencing dramatic deforestation, losing over 22% of trees in the project area since the scheme began. The Cambodian government does not account for this loss in official monitoring reports.
Nor is this an isolated case. In a joint investigation, Climate Home and Unearthed found similar discrepancies in two Brazilian projects, based on data from two different satellite monitoring platforms. Companies like Uber, ArcelorMittal and Marathon are still using credits from these three projects to offset their emissions – and there is nothing to stop them.
It raises serious questions for Verra, the largest standard setter in the voluntary carbon market, which oversees the projects.
Project owners disputed the findings, while Verra said it “is committed to refining and improving its methodologies based on the best available science and data”.
Mind the gap
By protecting trees the Tumring project generates carbon credits – or offsets – which are then used by polluters to compensate for their own emissions elsewhere. Texan oil firm Marathon is a major buyer, while the Cambodian and Korean governments, project partners, are planning to use a portion of the credits as part of their national net zero plans.
But the emissions avoided through the project are likely to be overstated given the deforestation rate appears to be higher than claimed. Project owners recorded just 3,450 hectares (ha) of forest loss in monitoring reports between 2015 and 2019, the most recent data submitted. Our analysis using the online tool Global Forest Watch showed forest loss was four times higher in that period, at 14,000 ha.
Climate Home and Unearthed looked at offsetting projects after a source raised concerns about apparent discrepancies between what project owners were declaring in their monitoring reports, and what could be seen through satellite images.
The team compared project filings with data developed by the University of Maryland and made available on the Global Forest Watch online platform. A second source of satellite data, Forobs, developed by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, was used to check the findings. This showed a similar trend.
Redd+ weaknesses
Verra is a major proponent of the UN-backed scheme Redd+, which stands for “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries”. It is designed to protect areas at risk of being deforested. Companies can buy carbon credits from these projects to discount their own emissions.
Critics have long raised concerns about weak quality control of this kind of project. An investigation published by The Guardian and Die Zeit earlier this year alleged more than 90% of Verra’s Redd+ projects were not driving emission reductions, largely because developers exaggerated the threat forests were facing. Verra disputed the findings.
Climate Home and Unearthed found that, in addition to inflated baselines, underreporting of forest loss throughout a project’s lifetime and light-touch regulation can lead to far too many credits being generated.
“The findings point out deep flaws in the forest carbon offset mechanism”, said Souparna Lahiri. The fact deforestation is increasing, instead of going down, “is deeply concerning” and “strengthens our conviction that the mechanism of offsetting cannot be fixed”, he added.
Self-reported deforestation
Each carbon credit represents a ton of CO2 kept from being released into the atmosphere by protecting trees. If a larger portion of forest is cleared than project developers claim, the volume of emissions they avoid will be overstated. When used by companies or governments to compensate for their emissions elsewhere, these credits would have a negative climate impact.
Verra says its role is to make sure that, when a company does invest in a carbon project, it has integrity and meaning, verified by the best standards and science. Monitoring reports are a crucial part of how progress is measured, since they disclose setbacks such as rising deforestation.
Monitoring reports are audited by third parties, then submitted publicly on a project’s page, alongside a host of other documents. In practice, they can be difficult for the public to understand and evaluate. There’s no standardised way to monitor projects.
The way the Cambodian government and its partners monitor deforestation in the Tumring area is opaque. They use national land cover data produced by Cambodia’s environment ministry that is not available publicly. It has a low tree cover threshold, meaning an area needs as little as 10% of trees to be counted as forested. To put it another way, you could chop down 90% of tree cover in a previously untouched section and still claim the forest was intact.
Cambodia has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world, according to Global Forest Watch. Photo: Un Yarat / US Embassy Phnom Penh
The Cambodian government has previously tried to discredit independent analysis showing that deforestation is higher in the country than state records.
Wildlife Works, which worked as a technical consultant for project validation and verification, said it “had no connection to the project” since completing the job and directed questions to the Cambodian government.
The Cambodian government did not respond to a request for comment. The Korean government told Climate Home and Unearthed that only credits from 2021 onwards would be used to offset national emissions.
Industry transparency
The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, an independent governance body for the industry, has called for greater transparency, urging offsetting projects to make all their information accessible to a “non-specialised audience” so a project’s climate impact can be better assessed.
Gilles Dufrasne, from the NGO Carbon Market Watch, said: “Current practice on the market simply isn’t up to standard and this lack of transparency needs to be plugged. More credible, and transparent, use of forest monitoring data is part of this.”
Sylvera, a carbon offsets analytics provider, noted in its 2022 State of Carbon report that the majority of the company’s D-rated projects, of which Tumring is one, “grossly under-reported the deforestation in the project area and have exceeded the baseline emissions”.
Samuel Gill, Sylvera co-founder and president, told Unearthed and Climate Home: “The technology to largely resolve issues like underreporting or overcrediting already exist and are being deployed.” He added: “These improvements take time to filter through the system and in the next few years we should see considerable uplift in project quality as a result.”
In theory, Verra already has various mechanisms to prevent worthless credits linked to deforestation from flooding the market and to punish project developers responsible for any irregularities.
Project owners are required to set aside in a “buffer pool”: a portion of credits that cannot be traded on the market. These act like an insurance policy: if trees meant to be protected end up being felled or burned in a fire, credits in the pool should be cancelled to ensure the integrity of the credits previously sold for offsetting purposes.
Additionally, complaints may trigger a project review and, if a developer is found to have issued too many credits, it can be sanctioned or made to pay a compensation.
But carbon market experts have doubts over the effectiveness of the system, saying the size and use case of buffer pools may be too limited. Only one project has ever had credits from the buffer pool cancelled, according to the Verra register.
Recurring problem
Over 17,000 kilometres away from Tumring, the Rio Preto-Jacundá Redd+ project is meant to achieve the same goal and protect an area of the Brazilian Amazon state of Rondonia.
The project has sold more than one million credits, with big name buyers including German utility Entega, Bank of Santander’s Brazilian arm, and Brazilian financial services giant Banco Bradesco.
From when it began in 2012 to 2020, the latest year available in monitoring reports, the project recorded 5,884 ha of loss, with a sharp increase from 2016. Global Forest Watch data shows it lost 8,200 ha of forest – 33% higher than the numbers declared by the project owner, Biofílica Ambipar.
The scheme’s “without project” scenario, to show what would happen under business as usual, predicted 9,922 ha of loss in the same period.
‘On watch’
Sylvera, an offsetting rating agency that independently checks and verifies projects using a combination of satellite imagery and machine learning, has placed the Rio Preto project “on watch”, after noting significant and increasing deforestation within the project area.
Biofílica Ambipar, which runs the Rio Preto scheme, said it “works continuously to monitor, identify and report any illegal activity to the Brazilian public environmental authorities”.
The company says it relies on the Prodes system to monitor forest loss in the area. Created by the National Institute for Space Research in 1988, Prodes is also used by the Brazilian government for its official annual deforestation reports.
“According to the Prodes system, the deforestation rates in the region are lower than those informed by Global Forest Watch, which is not as accurate in classifying deforestation,” Biofílica Ambipar said.
Prodes is used to detect large-scale changes in primary forest, but it can miss smaller changes. The system uses satellite images that only detect clearcut logging of more than 6.25 hectares – an area equivalent to nearly nine football pitches – missing smaller-scale forest loss. The University of Maryland data, made available through Global Forest Watch, captures losses as small as 0.1 hectares, while also picking up forest degradation.
Still selling credits
Another Biofílica project was abruptly cancelled last year after part of it was legally deforested by the landowner. But carbon credits generated by the scheme are still on the market.
The Maísa project covered over 25,000 hectares of forest in the state of Pará controlled by a family-owned agroindustrial company, which runs eucalyptus, Brazil nuts and açaí plantations.
When the project began in 2012, the firm agreed with Biofílica to protect the trees and invest in better forest management practices in exchange for a share of the profits from the sale of carbon credits.
Since then, polluters including steel giant ArcelorMittal have bought hundreds of thousands of its credits.
But starting from last year the landowner began clearing increasingly larger areas of the forest in what Biofílica says was a breach of their agreement.
The project developer decided to stop the project, but it is still listed on the Verra register and its credits continue to be used for offsetting purposes. Over 38,000 credits have been retired since the project was stopped by Biofilica – more than 4,000 of them purchased by Uber to compensate for the emissions spewed by its fleet of cars in Central and South America.
Uber said that it “only invests in projects certified, traceable, and auditable by Verra, the United Nations, Gold Standard, and Climate Action Reserve [other verifying bodies for offsetting schemes] after a thorough investigation”.
Lure of agribusiness
Biofílica told Unearthed and Climate Home that the company had made it a policy to stop selling credits from the Maísa project as soon as it became aware of the legal logging. It added that “the project is currently in the process of being terminated and audited in line with Verra procedures.”
Asked what would happen to old credits in the project that are still available on the market through third-party sellers, Biofílica’s spokesperson said: “It is important to highlight that the credits that are still being sold by traders and brokers refer to credits verified in previous years, when there was still no legal deforestation scenario in the area; that is, they were audited and verified credits.”
However, when trees are cut down, the carbon stored in them is released back into the atmosphere, no matter if they were originally protected, negating any potential climate benefit. Experts say good projects need to ensure the carbon they sequester or avoid will remain out of the atmosphere for at least 100 years.
When asked what happens to credits in projects that are cancelled, a Verra spokesperson said projects are required to deposit a percentage of their credits into buffer pools which can be drawn on if a portion of the forest is lost.
Maísa’s buffer pool contains 131,600 credits which have currently been placed on hold, meaning Verra still needs to decide their fate. That is only 20% of the total credits put on the market for offsetting purposes, most of which have already been used.
Biofílica spokesperson suggested that what happened with the Maísa project was a sign that Redd+ projects can struggle to compete with the economic opportunities offered by agricultural production in the Amazon.
They said: “Maísa shows the reality of the Amazon region and illustrates the difficulties that all actors interested in conservation face in making carbon projects financially viable.”
The post Exposed: carbon offsets linked to high forest loss still on sale appeared first on Climate Home News.
Exposed: carbon offsets linked to high forest loss still on sale
The launch of the Africa Energy Bank (AEB) has been put back yet again, raising doubts about the institution’s future ability to finance fossil fuel projects – its main objective – as global lenders retreat from such investments over climate concerns, experts told Climate Home News.
The bank, which had been billed to launch in September after a series of delays, is now scheduled to begin operations in November, according to the head of the African Energy Chamber, an advocacy body for the continent’s oil and gas sector.
Even as the world aims to transition away from fossil fuels, many African leaders have made clear they want to continue exploring and extracting the continent’s large oil and gas deposits – estimated at around 125 billion barrels of crude and over 600 trillion cubic feet of gas – to boost economic development.
As a group, Africa sided with a number of powerful oil-and-gas producing nations in blocking progress on negotiations to craft a global roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels at last year’s UN COP30 climate talks, although some countries did individually support the proposal.
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Meanwhile, major projects under development across the continent – including the 1,443-km East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) and Dangote’s 700,000-barrel-per-day Kenyan refinery – show that African governments see oil and gas as playing a significant role in meeting their energy and economic needs for many years to come.
In 2022, at a gathering of the African Petroleum Producers’ Organization (APPO) in oil-rich Angola, ministers from its member states adopted a resolution to create the Africa Energy Bank to finance projects for the production, use and trade of oil, gas and broader energy sources.
African control over energy resources
An article on the APPO website explains that the bank was conceived as a way to overcome “disenchantment” with fossil fuels among “the international community” which it said had crystallised around the “energy transition” concept.
“If Western countries, after having long taken advantage of the energy sources they now revile to develop, can afford the luxury of abandoning them, this is not the case in Africa,” it adds, noting that many of the continent’s economies are still largely dependent on oil and gas revenues.
A separate web page about the bank, also hosted on APPO’s website, says its objectives include financing the exploration, production and refining of oil and gas, as well as supporting member states in transitioning from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources “while ensuring energy security”.
Said Addi, a former executive with Shell and energy commodities trading house Gunvor, said the new bank was judged necessary because financing for hydrocarbons from many traditional international lenders has become constrained.
In trying to fill this financing gap, Africa is not simply setting up another fund to support oil and gas, he added. “It is also an attempt to give African countries greater control over how their energy resources and infrastructure are financed,” he explained.
Nigeria to host the AEB
The energy bank – a joint initiative of APPO and the African Export–Import Bank (Afreximbank) – has so far suffered several delays and is almost two years behind schedule. The initial plan was to start operations in January 2025, with Nigeria as the host country, but the bank’s opening was delayed to June of that year to allow Nigeria time to finalise the construction of the bank’s headquarters in Abuja.
After the government announced the completion of the offices in late November 2025, a new launch date was set for January 2026, which was moved back to April, June and then September. Now it has shifted again to November, raising concerns that the institution may be losing momentum.
Former Shell executive Addi said that if the capital is eventually paid in, the bank becomes operational and its first projects are commercially credible, then the delays will be regarded as normal teething troubles in setting up a multilateral institution. But, he added, scepticism will be justified if it continues to stall.
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Baron Lamarré, an oil and gas expert and former Petronas oil trader, said that missing “three deadlines in a row is not normal”, and warned that if the timeline slips again, “the story flips from ‘ambitious institution finding its footing’ to ‘good idea that lost momentum before it found any’.”
The Nigerian government, APPO and Afreximbank did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
The funding challenge
The Africa Energy Bank is targeting base capital of $5 billion, with plans to scale up to $120 billion within five years by mobilising private-sector funds. However, it is expected to start operations with initial seed capital of $500 million.
The funding plan is to have the 18 member countries of the APPO contribute $83 million each to the bank as equity for a combined $1.5 billion. Afreximbank, other non-APPO African countries and investors outside the continent are expected to provide the remaining $3.5 billion.
But even the initial $500 million has not been easy to mobilise. In May, APPO Secretary-General Farid Ghezali called on members to deliver on their pledges towards the startup goal before the end of June. But the delays suggest this may not have been met, with experts saying Africa may be finding it difficult to self-fund its oil and gas projects in the absence of international capital.
Lamarré said every extension of the deadline points to the fact that “raising fossil fuel capital in Africa without the majors and their financing networks is brutally hard”.
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Since 2020, Western lenders, export credit agencies and insurers have been in steady retreat from African hydrocarbons, he said, while oil majors are divesting their African assets, handing over fields to smaller local operators whose credit ratings are not high enough to borrow cheaply.
Even capital from China and the Gulf, which has partially filled the gap, cannot match the volume, tenor or pricing that Western investors once offered, Lamarré argued.
“If mobilising the first $500 million of seed capital [for the AEB] has taken this long, that’s the clearest signal yet of how steep the climb to $120 billion looks,” he said, noting that the continent’s energy financing gap is as large as $30 billion-$45 billion per year.
Africa’s investment landscape, meanwhile, has been shifting. While foreign direct investment dropped from a 2024 peak, inflows remained roughly one-third above the continent’s long-term average in 2025, according to the 2026 World Investment Report from UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD). They are concentrated in a few sectors including critical minerals needed for renewable energy technologies, battery manufacturing and advanced industrial production.
At the same time, data on global energy investment from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that fossil fuel investment in Africa has declined over the last decade.
“Trojan horse” for fossil fuels
While the Africa Energy Bank struggles to get off the ground, climate campaigners have criticised its primary aim of financing oil and gas on the continent at a time when the world is starting to move away from high-carbon fuels to cleaner alternatives.
Bhekumuzi Dean Bhebhe, founder of Africa Change Lab, described the bank as a “Trojan horse”, arguing that its focus on fossil fuel financing runs counter to the global energy transition and the African Union’s Agenda 2063 goals of sustainable development and inclusive growth.
The energy bank, he warned, “risks locking Africa into a new cycle of debt, dependency and fossil fuel entrenchment”, adding that its financing blueprint does not pave the way for a climate-resilient future. “In truth, it is to deepen the same extractive, carbon-heavy pathways that the continent should be moving away from,” he added.
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Kenya-based climate and energy expert Joab Okanda said the AEB’s plan to finance oil and gas is “a misplaced priority” and it should instead back clean energy in line with the policies of some of Africa’s major export markets like Europe.
In addition, the new bank could struggle to mobilise enough resources to advance large-scale oil and gas projects, he added, noting that its proposed $5-billion initial capital is equivalent to the cost of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline alone.
The AEB’s aim of backing more fossil fuels should be flipped “to support countries that are oil-dependent to start working on their transition plans”, Okanda said.
The post Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes appeared first on Climate Home News.
Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes
A booklet published by the UK’s opposition Conservative party includes a “cost of net-zero” that appears to have been doubled by a spreadsheet error.
The “common sense” policy document argues that “what people ultimately want is a government competent enough to solve the problems for which it takes responsibility”.
In a section that says “sophisticat[ed]…modelling” should not be a substitute for “political judgement”, the “Right Way” document disparages various estimates of the cost of net-zero.
The Conservative document then claims – incorrectly – that the government’s official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), had put the cost of net-zero at close to £1tn. It says:
“In 2020, the CCC estimated that its route to net-zero would cost £957bn.”
In fact, the CCC’s 2020 estimate was exactly half this amount – £478bn – and last year it published a revised figure of £108bn, largely as a result of the falling cost of electric vehicles (EVs).
Spreadsheet error
The Conservative party’s erroneous claim appears to stem from another report that had accidentally added up numbers twice, using a spreadsheet published by the CCC in 2020.
The 2020 spreadsheet contains a table listing the additional investments that would be needed to build a net-zero economy, from low-carbon electricity generation through to heat pumps and EVs.
These extra capital expenditures, listed as “CAPEX”, add up to a total of £1.38tn over the 30 years of 2020-50. They are set against operational savings, listed as “OPEX”, of £0.90tn.
Added up over 2020-50, the combined CAPEX and OPEX figures come to a total of £478bn.
In addition to the annual sectoral CAPEX and OPEX figures, the CCC’s 2020 spreadsheet also has a line giving combined totals for each year. It appears that someone has added all of these numbers together, resulting in the savings and costs being counted twice.
This double-counted total for the cost of net-zero amounts to £957bn – as shown in the image below – and it appears to be the source of the claim in the Conservative booklet.
At the time of publication in 2020, the CCC said that the £478bn net cost of net-zero amounted to less than 1% of GDP over 30 years – and that the large investment needed would not only result in savings due to lower fossil-fuel imports, but that it would boost GDP overall, by around 2%.
In 2025, the CCC revised its estimates for investment costs and operating savings to £670bn and £562bn respectively, giving a net total of £108bn over 2025-50, or less than 0.2% of GDP.
Earlier this year, the committee said that cutting emissions to net-zero would cost less than a single fossil-fuel price shock and that doing so would have benefits worth £110bn per year.
Paper trail
The erroneous claim in the Conservative document is referenced to the CCC’s 2020 advice on the UK’s sixth “carbon budget”, which, as explained, does not contain the £957bn figure.
The earliest online use of the £957bn figure found by Carbon Brief is a 12 January 2026 article in the Spectator, by retired engineer and self-described “accidental energy analyst” David Turver.
A day later, Turver repeated the mistaken number in a report for the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs. His report cites figure 5.3 of the CCC’s 2020 advice.
However, as set out above, the CCC spreadsheet containing the data for figure 5.3 only adds up to £478bn, half the figure claimed by Turver.
It appears that Turver accidentally added up all of the numbers in the CCC spreadsheet, without noting that it already included a line for the annual total. This results in double-counting the cost.
(Turver’s report also triggered a slew of inaccurate headlines stating that net-zero would cost £7.6tn – or even £9tn. These figures, which came from Turver’s report, were based, among other things, on the implicit assumption that fossil fuels and the cars, boilers and power plants that use them are all free.)
After Turver’s report and article in January 2026, the erroneous £957bn figure was repeated in March by the Great British Think Tank. The organisation has the tagline “data, not vibes” and says of its work: “Every figure [is] sourced from official public bodies.”
The £957bn figure then appeared in the Conservative “Right Way” document in October 2026.
