producing carbon credits
TRANSCRIPT
Producing Carbon Credits
How to conserve a forest in Cambodia and sell it in
Finland?
Noora Isomäki
Master’s Thesis
15/06/2021
University of Helsinki
Global Development Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences
Abstract
Faculty: Faculty of Social Sciences
Degree programme: Master’s Programme in Society and Change
Study track: Global Development Studies
Author: Noora Anniina Isomäki
Title: Producing Carbon Credits – How to conserve a forest in Cambodia and sell it in Finland?
Level: Master’s Thesis
Month and year: June 2021
Number of pages: 70 + references and appendices
Keywords: Cambodia, carbon markets, carbon offsets, green economy, political ecology, REDD+
Where deposited:
Additional information:
Abstract:
Carbon markets form a fundamental part of green economy, that is supposed to bring the world out of
climate crisis, while maintaining economic growth and human well-being. This thesis contributes to the
critical research on the green economy assumptions and draws from the political-ecological literature.
It explores voluntary carbon markets with qualitative methods, through a case study of a production
chain of carbon credits starting from their production in the Cardamom Mountains, Cambodia and
ending in their buying and re-sale by the Compensate foundation in Finland. The focus of the analysis
are the representations needed to create supply and demand for the carbon credit, and their effects.
The thesis examines the complexity of commodification of carbon credits. Carbon offsets rely on highly
technical auditing schemes. To produce carbon credits with forestry projects, the project developers
must describe a “baseline”. The baseline describes a threat, which the relevant area is facing, and the
conservation organization can tackle. I analyse how the representations of the threat make the
conservation area governable and justify intervention and how they, at the same time, are unable to
include the wider context, so they leave important drivers of deforestation unaddressed and instead
target small-scale activities of individuals and local communities. Similarly, I show how in order to sell
such carbon credits, climate change must be represented as a problem that can be solved by individual
climate action of responsible consumers rather than as a systemic problem. As an effect, both the
production and sale of carbon credits have a strong focus on targeting individuals at the expense of
leaving broader societal structures unaddressed.
This thesis highlights that the global North’s ability and moral justification to continue high-carbon
lifestyles through offsets, requires people living in the global South to change their livelihoods and
environments. Even if the communities in the conservation areas have some power to impact the ways
the offset project operates, the level of optionality is much lower than in the global North, where the
consumer is only subtly nudged to offset the distant damage they do. This approach is generally justified
based on orientalist and neo-colonial discourses, according to which the people of the global South are
unable to take care of their environments – and even themselves. The fact that no changes are demanded
from the people of the global North and no existing power structures or practices are challenged
arguably increases the desirability of the carbon markets as the major climate solution. This, however,
also makes it justified to call carbon markets a non-transformative climate solution.
Abbreviations
CCB Climate, Community & Biodiversity standard
CDM Clean Development Mechanism
CO₂e Carbon dioxide equivalent (unit of measurement used to standardize the climate
effects of different greenhouse gases)
CORSIA Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation
CPP Cambodian People's Party
CR Corporate responsibility
EU ETS European Union Emissions Trading System
FAO Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
GHG Greenhouse gas
IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
MoE Ministry of Environment
NGO Non-governmental organization
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
REDD+ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation
SCRP Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project
SDGs Sustainable Development Goals
UN United Nations
UNEP United Nations Environment Programme
UNFCCC United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
VCS Verified Carbon Standard (previously Voluntary Carbon Standard)
VCU Verified Carbon Unit
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1
1.1. How big is your carbon footprint? .............................................................................. 1
1.2. The story of the carbon markets .................................................................................. 2
1.3. Carbon offsets from Cambodia to Finland .................................................................. 6
2. Theoretical framework ..................................................................................................... 10
2.1. Political ecology of the carbon markets .................................................................... 10
2.2. Behind the carbon markets – decoupling and ecomodernism ................................... 11
2.3. Commodifying the ecosystem services ..................................................................... 14
2.4. Privatised or communalised? .................................................................................... 16
3. Methodology .................................................................................................................... 19
3.1. Data collection........................................................................................................... 19
3.2. Research challenges and ethics ................................................................................. 21
3.3. Case study approach .................................................................................................. 22
4. Analysis and findings: Complexities of carbon commodification ................................... 24
4.1. “Here is how we’ll stop climate change” – Selling carbon credits in Finland .......... 25
4.2. Journey of the carbon credit ...................................................................................... 31
4.3. Uncertainties in the money flow ............................................................................... 34
4.4. Representations of successes and threats .................................................................. 37
4.5. Excluded from problematisation: broader politics of deforestation in Koh Kong .... 41
4.6. Moving target ............................................................................................................ 46
4.7. Facing the critique – heated discussions around offsets ........................................... 51
5. Discussion: Non-transformative carbon markets ............................................................. 56
5.1. Climate action as a commodity ................................................................................. 57
5.2. Saving the world – agency and justice ...................................................................... 61
5.3. Contested views on ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kind of climate action ................................ 64
6. Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 68
7. References ........................................................................................................................ 70
8. Appendices ....................................................................................................................... 90
Appendix 1 ........................................................................................................................... 90
Appendix 2 ........................................................................................................................... 96
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1. Introduction
1.1. How big is your carbon footprint?
From 3790 kg CO₂e to 5100 kg CO₂e. After using several online calculators, I found that
somewhere between those values falls my personal carbon footprint of 2019. That was a normal
year, before the Covid-19 limitations, that I lived with mainly plant based diet, in a small
apartment, without a car, moving long distances by trains and busses. Trying to find out how
far I was from the goal, I found some differing results: Global average should be under 2 tons
(The Nature Conservancy, n.d.), 1,5 tons (Shrink That Footprint, 2012) or even 0,7 tons (Mänty
& Lettenmeier, 2019) by 2050. Some of my emissions can still be avoided, but small lifestyle
changes would not take me to any of these goals. After measuring, avoiding and reducing
personal carbon footprint, some say that the final step is to offset (e.g. Stevenson, 2020).
It is clear that the business as usual cannot continue if we want to keep the planet liveable and
the temperature from rising over 1,5-2 degrees (e.g. IPCC, 2018), but the suggestions for
answering the problem vary. Green growth or green economy is described as a way of
achieving both ecological sustainability and poverty eradication by decoupling environmental
destruction from economic growth (Bryant, 2019; Schandl et al., 2016; UNEP, 2018). Trading
in ecosystem services – something that nature provides and humans benefit from, such as trees’
ability to store carbon – has been described as “an archetypal application of green economy”
(McAfee, 2016, p. 333). By creating markets for carbon credits that each correspond to one
tonne of reduced or prevented CO₂e the idea of the carbon markets is to put a price on emissions
and thus make clean environment a rational outcome. Buyers of the carbon credits can be, for
example, individual consumers or companies. Companies buy carbon credits either when they
exceed their given emission cap and must buy credits to emit more, or voluntarily, as a part of
their corporate responsibility (CR) or public relations (PR) strategies, to claim carbon neutrality
to appeal to certain group of consumers. Consumers pay for carbon credits through “carbon
neutral” products or buy them individually to offset their personal emissions. Often offsets are
discussed in relation to air travel, but in theory any action’s emissions can be offset. In other
words, consumption increases one’s carbon footprint and offsets are marketed as a way to
decrease it. Prices of the credits vary depending on the time, the marketplace and the project
producing them. For example, from Gold Standard’s marketplace in December 2020 one could
buy credits from most projects for $15, $18 or $20 USD, meaning that I could have offset my
emissions of 2019 (say, roughly 4000 kg CO₂e) for about $60 to $80.
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This thesis builds on a case study around a production chain of carbon credits uniquely drawing
connections between their production and sale. The chain starts from an offset project in the
Cardamom Mountains, Cambodia and ends in the sale of carbon credits by Compensate
foundation in Finland. The focus on the representations that are needed to create both supply
and demand for carbon credits, and the impacts of these representations in the context of global
climate change mitigation and its justifications. Before discussing the case study and my
research question in more detail, I first briefly introduce the history of the carbon markets, their
ways of operating and the literature around them.
1.2. The story of the carbon markets
Carbon markets are the answer to the so called “market failure”, an idea that with correct
information, regulations, taxes and markets for emissions, climate change can be addressed by
internalizing the externalities, namely putting a price on carbon emissions and making the
decarbonisation of the society part of the everyday economy (Bryant, 2019, p. 9; Lohmann,
2011; Stern, 2009). The main argument for creating a market for carbon is that it is the most
cost effective way of reducing emissions – flexibility ensures that cuts happen where they cost
the least and the price inspires innovation for clean technologies (Bryant, 2019; European
Commission, 2016; Lohmann, 2011). Other arguments vary from carbon markets’ ability to
create profit to them allowing deregulation, and getting rid of clumsier command-and-control
instruments (Lohmann, 2011, p. 96). Rather than a single clear path, the history of the hundred-
billion dollar carbon markets has been seen deriving from, for example, growing influence of
neoliberalism, financialization, surplus capital seeking for new outlets and continuing political
dominance of the United States (ibid. p. 93).
Carbon markets developed from sulphur dioxide trading, started in the US in 1990. Sulphur
dioxide trading was interpreted as successful, even though in Europe more direct regulatory
measures resulted in greater sulphur dioxide emission reductions (Milieu, 2004). Still, the US
negotiators used the perceived success to push for market-based approaches for Kyoto protocol
in 1997. Their lobbying work was a success and they managed to overturn not only sceptical
European negotiators more in favour of a carbon tax, but also developing countries, that viewed
market-based approaches as something that might push responsibility of emissions to those that
have not emitted (Bryant, 2019, p. 5). The fear was overturn with a proposal of Clean
Development Mechanism (CDM), through which emission reductions from clean development
projects could be sold forward to count to the targets of the global North (Bryant, 2019, p. 5;
Grubb et al., 1999). CDM was first meant to work as a redistributive fund, but the US argued
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that with market logic the it would work more consistently and offer encouragement for
positive action rather than penalties (Bryant, 2019, p. 77).
Kyoto mechanisms consist of CDM, Joint Implementation (JI) and Emission Trading.
Emission trading works through cap and trade system, where carbon credits are created based
on agreed targets for reducing emissions and then distributed or auctioned to companies
(Bachram, 2004; Bryant, 2019, pp. 6–7; European Commission, 2016). If companies exceed
their target, they must buy more credits (Bachram, 2004, p. 7). CDM and JI on the other hand,
are based on the model called “baseline and credit”, in which the reduction is assessed
according to the difference between actual greenhouse gas emission and a baseline scenario of
what it would have been if the project did not exist (Bryant, 2019, p. 5). The model has been
critiqued for its hypothetical or imaginative approach: “Offsets are an imaginary commodity
created by deducting what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened” (a
journalist Dan Welch, quoted in Davies, 2007). Especially baseline manipulation has been seen
as problematic. By exaggerating the threat, a company can “conjure” huge estimated emissions
that would have been produced without it, which allows almost limitless creation of carbon
credits and increases both emissions and the company’s profits (Bachram, 2004, p. 8).
Despite the hard work of the US negotiators to include the market-based mechanisms in Kyoto
protocol, the US never ratified the protocol. The EU took the lead in the carbon markets in
2005 by setting up the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) that produces
credits through cap and trade. CDM and JI grew between 2008 and 2012 with the help of the
link with EU ETS, as over half of the global demand for them came from the EU (World Bank,
2012b). The growth offered a ground for a carbon trading industry and carbon brokers,
exchange platforms, auditors, and project developers to grow. The transaction value of carbon
credits grew from US$1 billion in 2004 to US$176 billion in 2011 (Bryant, 2019, p. 7).
However, value of the credits collapsed in 2012 and thousands of projects were left with
unclaimed credits (The Economist, 2019). In 2015, in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement the
negotiators decided to create a new market mechanism, that would be built on the lessons learnt
(UNFCCC, n.d.-b). The Agreement made market-based solutions a key mechanism in global
emission reduction (Bryant, 2019, p. 1). As the negotiations continued, the conversations of
what to do with the remaining credits worked a part in sinking the 2019 COP 25 in Madrid, as
some countries would have liked the credits be transferred to new Paris trading scheme and
others argued that this would flood it with credits that no longer correspond to emission
reduction (The Economist, 2019).
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On the side of the turbulent international agreements, voluntary carbon markets have increased
in popularity. They were valued around $320 million USD in 2019 and the market is growing
and being drawn by demand from companies’ net-zero and CR commitments despite the
impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic (Ecosystem Marketplace, 2020; Environmental Finance,
2020; Hamrick & Gallant, 2017). Projects producing carbon credits can be of many kinds: tree
plantations theoretically working as carbon sinks, renewable energy projects, improvements to
existing energy sector, and so on (Bachram, 2004, p. 8). Projects that store and eliminate
greenhouse gases (GHG) from landfills are considered the most effective and easiest to
measure while the additionality in forest planting and protection is often more difficult to prove
(Bailis et al., 2016; Finnwatch, 2021). Still, forest projects are popular. In the voluntary markets
alone they sold credits for $66 million USD in 2016 (Hamrick & Gallant, 2017) and together
with renewable energy projects were considered to account for around 40 percent of the whole
market in 2019 (Finnwatch, 2021, p. 8). The forest-based projects vary from planting
monoculture tree farms that often will be cut in the future, to protecting older forests and
national parks. What lays behind the forest-based offset projects is the need to remove carbon
from the atmosphere: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2018) has
argued that 10 million km2 of forests should be added by 2050. Partly because of the
hypothetical baseline-approach, but also due to the fact that the trees storing the carbon and the
consumer buying the carbon credit are not directly linked, carbon credits can be described as
non-physical, but rather discursive, virtual or even performative commodities (Cavanagh &
Benjaminsen, 2014; Fairhead et al., 2012). Their production entails particular ways of framing
the climate problem and proposing the interventions necessary for their fixation, that can be
executed with the project in hand, represented with highly professionalized technical carbon
accounting methods that show an ability to prevent, avoid or capture emissions.
Approximately one third of the projects in the voluntary market are a part of the UN’s REDD+
(Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) programme (Carton, 2016).
REDD+, finalized in 2015 under United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC), focuses on forest-based emission reduction and was created as an answer to the
problem of land use changes, namely deforestation and forest degradation, that were shown to
account for 12-29% of global GHG emissions (Fearnside, 2000; Van Der Werf, 2009). Rather
than afforestation and reforestation, REDD+ offers forest management options for developing
countries and encourages them to reduce emissions and enhance carbon capture (UNFCCC,
n.d.-a). REDD+ credits are results based, which means that the projects producing them must
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be able to show additionality before they can sell anything. Thus, a substantial investment is
often needed to start a project. REDD+ is funded through different mechanisms, both public
and private, market and non-market based (FAO, 2018; UNEP, 2017). Currently, majority of
the money comes from multilateral and bilateral donors, but the goal is to increase the share of
the market-based funding (Fletcher et al., 2016).
REDD+ has received critique from several directions. Many countries of the global South, have
questioned using carbon markets to finance REDD+ due to their malfunctioning and the
inability of the carbon credits to correspond to actual emission reductions (Carbon Market
Watch, 2013). The demand for offsets has been low and the projects seem to lack specific and
coherent biodiversity goals, which has led to questioning the long-term sustainability of
REDD+ (Foster et al., 2017; Ken et al., 2020; Panfil & Harvey, 2016). REDD+ has been seen
distracting attention and failing to address the original causes of livelihood loss and forest
degradation (McAfee, 2016). The price of the REDD+ credits also does not cover the
implementation cost of the projects (Luttrell et al., 2018) nor offer financial incentive to refrain
from cutting the forest (Sandker et al., 2010) or to develop energy and carbon saving
technologies (Bosello et al., 2015). It has been claimed that REDD+ benefits the participants
of the European carbon markets more that the regions where the projects are implemented (ibid.
p. 107). The programme has also been accused for neo-colonial practices such as paternalism
and causing loss of indigenous rights, lands and cultures (UNPFII, 2013), for causing
disadvantage or dispossession to rural communities (Osborne, 2015) and for blaming
indigenous peoples for deforestation without a credible base for doing so (Mamo et al., 2020).
Rather than enclosing forests with REDD+, formalising indigenous rights has widely been seen
as an effective way to reduce deforestation: “Deforestation rates are lower in indigenous and
tribal territories where governments have formally recognized collective land rights; and
improving the tenure security of these is a cost-effective way to reduce carbon emissions”
(FAO & FILAC, 2021, p. 39).
The contestation of efficiency of the carbon markets is not limited to REDD+. For example,
carbon markets do not cause differences in emissions between energy sectors of countries that
use market mechanisms and those that do not (Aho, 2020). It has been evaluated, that
companies might be overcompensated for their losses caused by the carbon markets, which
cancels even the small incentive the markets offer for development of emission reduction in
companies (ibid.). Also, simply the too cheap price of the credits has been seen as a problem.
Examining both emission trading and carbon taxes, OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-
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operation and Development) reported that the price of carbon is not high enough to produce
emission reductions and with current growth it would take until 2095 for them to do so (OECD,
2018). The so-called double counting remains a part of the unresolved problem especially with
the targets set with the Paris agreement. Double counting refers to a situation where two entities
count deducted emissions as their own. As an example, an offset project could sell credits to a
buyer that would claim reduced emissions and carbon neutrality, while the same credits are
already counted in the project’s host country’s target. This could lead to greater emissions and
higher costs and undermine the system (Schneider et al., 2019). Still, in addition to the Paris
Agreement, the carbon markets form the ground for many emission reduction agreements (e.g.
CORSIA, Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation) despite their
bad track record. Since their establishment more than 20 years ago, global emissions have been
growing, not decreasing. In an interview with La Nuova Ecologia, researcher Larry Lohmann
(2020) notes: ”Carbon markets are not designed to reduce emissions. Their function, in the
Paris Agreement and elsewhere, is to extend the life of the fossil fuel economy and, indirectly,
an exploitative and unequal system of extractivism and nature degradation.”
1.3. Carbon offsets from Cambodia to Finland
This thesis focuses on a Finnish Compensate foundation, operating on voluntary carbon
markets, selling carbon credits to those who want to make their carbon footprint smaller. The
case-study looks into one of the projects Compansate buys carbon credits from, a forest
conservation project in Cardamom Mountains, Koh Kong province Cambodia, the Southern
Cardamom REDD+ Project (SCRP) (see Figure 1). This thesis describes the representations
necessary for the production of carbon credits and connects their production in the Cardamoms
to their sales in Finland, introducing connections and differences especially from the angle of
climate action and the ways of demanding for it from different groups of people.
Cardamom Mountains (ជួរភ្ន ំក្រវាញ, Chuor Phnom Krâvanh) in southwest Cambodia are one of
the largest and most diverse forest in mainland South East Asia, supporting half of Cambodia’s
known resident bird, reptile and amphibian species, and most of large mammal species (Coad
et al., 2019). Historically, the mountains have been hard to access and sparsely populated but
have also acted as the arena for political struggle. During the Cambodian civil war in the 1960’s
and 70’s the forests were heavily mined and thousands of Mon Khmer Pear people were driven
from their homes by the Khmer Rouge (the communist party of Cambodia), that hid in the
forests after the war, starting from 1979 (Coad et al., 2019; Grogan et al., 2009). Rich with
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natural resources, Cardamoms have been seen as an opportunity for economic development in
the form of agriculture, forestry, hydropower and carbon markets (e.g. Killeen, 2012).
Main owner of the SCRP is Cambodian Ministry of Environment (MoE) that partners with an
international non-governmental organization, Wildlife Alliance, and an American conservation
company, Wildlife Works, to conserve the southern parts of the Mountains. International
cooperation is not unusual in REDD+ and it has been seen that in general very few local
organizations are involved in implementation of REDD+ initiatives (Luttrell et al., 2018). The
SCRP, started in 2015, is marketed to protect 497,000 hectares of tropical rainforest and
prevent more than 3,000,000 tons of carbon emissions annually (Wildlife Alliance, n.d.). The
SCRP is accredited with Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) and Climate, Community &
Biodiversity (CCB) standard, both administered by Verra that develops and manages standards
for carbon markets. The SCRP is not the only conservation project in the Cardamoms and
different international conservation organizations have a lot of power and impact on life in the
area. For example, Käkönen and Thuon (2019, pp. 1198–1199) point out that “[t]he
international conservation organisations have been tightly woven into the governance of these
protected areas, which form exclusive zones exemplifying fortress-type conservation with
community-based elements targeting those within and near the protected areas”. While
Figure 1. Map of the SCRP (a screenshot from Project Description by Wildlife Works, 2018, p. 18).
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conflicting preferences have appeared between the organizations and the locals, extreme
measures or large conflicts have not risen to publicity from the SCRP.
One of the buyers of the credits from the SCRP is the Finnish Compensate foundation, headed
by a Finnish-Icelandic businessman, a former parliamentarian (Green League) and a TV-
persona Antero Vartia. Compensate’s idea is to include a possibility to offset to everyday
purchasing processes, but it also markets its service to businesses. The foundation has had
difficulties in explaining and justifying its operation rationale, which reflects, for example, in
a legal case around it. If the payments Compensate gets are considered gratuitous, it needs a
permit for fundraising but the foundation itself argues that they are not – the payments go
directly into buying carbon credits (e.g. Haapanen, 2019b; Teittinen, 2020). According to the
Finnish gambling administration, as the money paid and the product/service bought do not
directly meet, the payments are gratuitous (Teittinen, 2020). Compensate’s case and public
discussion around it have inspired an ongoing change in legislation: In 2020 Finnish Ministry
of Interior started the process of changing the fundraising law to rule out the voluntary offset
services, so that they can operate without a fundraising permit, which as a principle would
recognize carbon credits as commodities. The legal process and the reporting around it can be
seen as reflecting the difficulty of turning ecosystem services into commodities, as both the
legal framework and the consumers appear to have difficulties of recognizing them as such.
Becoming more and more important element in climate change mitigation efforts on different
policy levels, being at the centre of a legal process and at the core of the work of an interesting
foundation headed by a charismatic celebrity, offsets have become an important topic of public
discussion in Finland. In June 2021 Finnwatch, a civic organisation focused on global corporate
responsibility, published a report on the responsibility of Finnish offset providers arguing, that
there is still much to improve (Finnwatch, 2021). The report notes that especially the lack of
official regulation causes a situation where almost any action can be claimed to be offsetting
and thus a company can call their products “carbon neutral” very easily (ibid. p. 12). Based on
the report and my own assessment made during this research, Compensate can be called one
of the most progressive actors in its field. This claim is based on their critical and careful
attitude towards the market and openness regarding their product and prices. Compensate
appears to be committed into developing carbon markets towards a more responsible direction,
and has suggested, for instance, that since majority of offset projects overestimate their climate
benefits and the claim for carbon neutrality is difficult to assess, it might be better to move
towards alternative claims, such as “support host countries in reaching their commitments
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under the Paris Agreement” or “finance climate change mitigation projects” (Compensate,
2021, pp. 39–40). This suggestion, while gaining more momentum (Carbon Market Watch,
2021), is not yet mainstream. Carbon offsets are one of the key strategies in international
climate change mitigation efforts, (e.g. European Commission, 2019; OECD, 2011, 2017;
World Bank, 2012a) and the net-zero strategies of different organizations, companies, cities,
and municipalities (e.g. City of Helsinki, 2018; ICAO, n.d.), and as a part of the larger process
of valuing and trading ecosystem services, at the core of so called green economy (Bäckstrand
& Lövbrand, 2006; Hickel & Kallis, 2020; McAfee, 2016).
Green economy has been claimed to solve climate change while also creating positive
development and increasing global well-being (OECD, 2011; UNEP, 2018; World Bank,
2012a). Like green economy, carbon offsets are often described as a win-win, or even a win-
win-win solution: good for biodiversity, climate change mitigation, and socioeconomic
development (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014; Delabre et al., 2020; Mousseau & Biggs,
2014). Pursuing “triple-win” should, however, be seen through critical lens, since for example,
there is evidence that acquiring land to establish forestry plantations for climate change
mitigation compromises local ecologies and indigenous and poor peoples’ livelihoods without
sufficiently including them into the decision making (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014; Fischer
& Hajdu, 2018; Leach & Scoones, 2015; Malkamäki et al., 2018; Milne & Adams, 2012;
Mousseau & Biggs, 2014; Takacs, 2014). Studies also show that new forests’ ability to store
carbon has been overestimated (Hong et al., 2020), tree plantations cause loss of biodiversity
and store less carbon than forests that they often replace (Heilmayr et al., 2020) and carbon
markets have not decreased the emissions of the biggest emitter, the energy sector (Aho, 2020).
Additionally, carbon offsets can create misleading claims about emissions reductions, and their
accumulation potential mainly benefits few privileged groups rather than local communities
they target (Bosello et al., 2015; Fletcher et al., 2016; Watt, 2021).
This research contributes to the critical literature around carbon markets by exploring the
framing of the problems necessary for the offset projects and the interventions they execute to
fix these problems. The thesis builds around the following question. What kinds of
representations are needed to create both supply and demand to a non-physical commodity,
such as the carbon credit, and how these representations impact climate action and especially
the question of demanded change? Through a qualitative analysis of a case-study, the thesis
will show how voluntary carbon markets offer a possibility for consumers of the global North
to continue their high carbon lifestyles with a small payment, while large-scale changes in lives
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and livelihoods are demanded from people of the global South to accommodate the possibility.
The approach of the carbon markets at both ends – production and consumption of the carbon
credits – focuses on individuals or groups and side-lines the structures that can be seen seriously
impacting the rising emissions or tropical deforestation, such as accumulating wealth of the
richest of the world, or the structures of consumption in the global North (Oxfam, 2020;
Wedeux & Schulmeister-Oldenhove, 2021; Wiedmann et al., 2020).
2. Theoretical framework
This thesis approaches carbon offsets with the framework of political ecology, a study of
environmental issues through their relations with political, economic and social factors, and
the power within those relations with some help of, for example, marketing research and
behavioural economics. In this chapter, after first giving a few introductory words to political
ecology and its relevance to this thesis, I discuss ecomodernism and the idea of decoupling
emissions from economic growth – both important in understanding the concept of green
growth – and their critique. Then I move to the commodification of ecosystem services
necessary in the production of carbon credits. Finally, I briefly talk about the discussion behind
the community-based approaches in privatized conservation work, which links to the
justifications of the ways the conservation areas in are governed.
2.1. Political ecology of the carbon markets
Political ecology arose as a response to apolitical way of viewing ecological questions, a
difference that is visible, for example, on identifying broad system rather blaming proximate
local forces for ecological changes (Perreault et al., 2015; Robbins, 2012). Debates in political
ecology have focused, for example, on access to and control over resources and on how
knowledge-making processes shape modes of governing the resources while foreclosing on
others (e.g. Paulson et al., 2003; Vandergeest & Roth, 2016).
In relation to carbon markets, researchers in political ecology have previously analysed, for
example, how project requirements impact the forests’ biodiversity and carbon storage
potential and contradict socioeconomic uses and cultural understandings of forests (Osborne,
2015), gendered impacts of offset projects (Gay-Antaki, 2016) and what types of conflicts can
arise from the implementations of REDD+ projects (Hein, 2019). The heart of the analysis can
quite often be seen in how production processes of carbon credits shape the social and material
realities in the project areas, from which the production emerges.
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Vandergeest and Roth (2016), who focus on political ecology in South East Asia, describe it
as a broad field, that has put attention on topics such as how rural people manage the ecologies
that they live at, how political and economic processes shape land, resources and access to
them, and environmental narratives that often either blame marginalized people for natural
destruction, or romanticize them as the saviours of nature. These common topics of political
ecology arose in this research as well. For example, carbon markets can be seen as contributing
the expansion of protected areas in the Cardamom Mountains, which affects the lives and
livelihoods of the locals. Small scale forest use is prevented by framing the local communities
as the ones to be blamed for tropical deforestation so they can be kept away from using the
forest by armed rangers and military police, strategies that do not in the same scale impact, for
example, the Cambodian government and its larger scale projects, or plans for them, in the
area. These processes are introduced in more detail in chapter 4.
This research also looks for the implications outside of the most immediate production of the
carbon credits and examines how carbon markets shape realities and identities in the end of the
consumers. The political ecology approach allows to see the connections between the two
seemingly different worlds of Finnish offset sales, that mainly focuses on trying to nudge the
consumers into acting and consuming in a more sustainable way, and Cambodian forest
conservation, that can have large scale effects on the lives and livelihoods of the locals. As put
by Robbins (2012, p. 13), political ecology is “a field of critical research predicated on the
assumption that any tug on the strands of the global web of human-environment linkages
reverberates throughout the system as a whole”. Finally, classics of development studies and
political ecology, such Escobar (1995), offer tools for examining these connections in a critical
manner.
2.2. Behind the carbon markets – decoupling and ecomodernism
Carbon markets and green economy are rooted in neoclassical economics: an idea that putting
a price on ecosystem services will prevent overuse and pollution (e.g. Bakker, 2005, 2010;
Bryant, 2019; Lyons & Westoby, 2014; Mansfield, 2008; McAfee, 1999). “The logic starts
with the premise that climate change is a case of ‘market failure’ that can be addressed by
putting a price on carbon, which ‘internalises’ the costs of carbon pollution as an ‘externality’”
(Bryant, 2019, p. 9). The goal of green economy is to decouple environmental destruction from
economic growth with processes such as the carbon markets (e.g. Schandl et al., 2016).
12
Idea of decoupling is supported, for example, by ecological modernization, or ecomodernism,
a discourse that can be seen behind the ideas of green economy and green growth. Different
versions of the ecomodernist discourse put different weighs on, for example, the importance
neoliberal markets and national regulation, but come together in trusting the idea of decoupling.
In ecomodernism, or especially its version, market environmentalism, one of the basic ideas is
that if environmental goods are treated as economic goods, they can be more efficiently
allocated and markets can become the solution rather than the cause of the environmental
problems (Bakker, 2005). This type of thinking can clearly be identified behind the justification
of the carbon markets.
Roots of ecomodernism lay on a thought that on the contrary to the argument by the Club of
Rome (Meadows et al., 1972), there are no limits to growth – at least not ones that the humanity
cannot overcome. In An Ecomodernist Manifesto, a group of researchers and activists discuss
processes that, according to them, are already ongoing to show that “the total human impact on
the environment, including land-use change, overexploitation, and pollution, can peak and
decline this century” and argue that “re-greening” of the planet can start while the living
standard keeps rising (Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015, pp. 14–15). The processes indicating these
possibilities are, for example, meat consumption that has, according to the writers, peaked in
many wealthy nations, where consumption has shifted towards less land intensive protein
sources (ibid. p. 14). While alternative protein sources are indeed developing fast (e.g. Witte
et al., 2021), it has been left unnoticed by the authors that the meat consumption per capita
more than doubled between 1961 and 2014 and is highest in wealthy countries such as the US,
Hong Kong and Australia (Ritchie & Roser, 2017). “Peak meat”, has been predicted to be
reached in Europe and North America in 2035, if the support from regulation and technology
are optimal (Witte et al., 2021). Nevertheless, the ecomodernists argue that the limits to human
knowledge are the only limits to growth and the environmentalist discourse of humans having
reached the limits of the planetary resources is just “Flogging the Malthusian Dead Horse”1
(Sagoff, 2017, p. 2).
Ecomodernism and the aim for decoupling have perhaps become the tightest part of everyday
politics in some of the countries of the Northern Europe. Lidskog and Elander (2012) analyse
environmental governance in Sweden, the “forerunner in environmental policy and one of the
1 Malthus (1936) predicted that if population continues to grow geometrically, while food production can only
grow linearly, the humankind will eventually run out of resources. While his theory has been proven wrong
multiple times, it has also been argued that while with the help of developing technology the Earth appears to be
able to sustain a growing population, it is not as likely be able to sustain the ever-growing greed (Kallis, 2019).
13
most ecologically modernized countries in the world”. According to them, Sweden has adopted
ecomodernist understanding of society, but a balanced policy practice between economic
growth, social welfare and environmental values has not been reached, and while decisions that
compromise the country’s environmental ambitions are often made, Sweden has yet to
introduce an environmental policy that challenges the growth logic. When the two contradict,
the “issues are framed in a way that economic and environmental sustainability are harmonized,
at least rhetorically” (ibid. 421). Instead of achieving any true decoupling from environmental
harm, Sweden has achieved a decoupling of domestic responsibility from emissions caused in
other countries: “Economic growth continues to result in increased environmental emissions,
but in the Swedish case not so much within its borders but in those countries which sell products
to Sweden” (ibid. p. 423). Outsourcing the environmental burden to global South can be argued
to be in line with ecomodernist discourse, as per Bäckstrand and Lövbrand (2006, p. 53) the
“technocratic greening of industrial production has been silent on the experiences of
developing countries in equity and poverty issues. The predominant focus is on fixable and
cost-effective environmental problem-solving rather than social justice.”
Many see combining infinite economic growth and ecologically sustainable society as
impossible, as chances for absolute and rapid enough decoupling of emissions from economic
growth have been noted to be slim or even non-existent (e.g. Hickel & Kallis, 2020; Jackson,
2016; Kallis, 2011; Kallis et al., 2018; Parrique et al., 2019). Scepticism towards absolute
decoupling is visible, for example, in degrowth, eco-socialist and eco-anarchist discussions and
the thinkers have presented a plea for a more radical systemic change, that would aim to detach
the society from systemic growth (e.g. Wiedmann et al., 2020).
The idea of decoupling also has been criticized from the angle of seeing climate change as an
externality of the markets. Environmental harm has been argued to be an integral part of the
process where natural destruction and capitalism coproduce each other. For example, Bryant
(2019, pp. 25–32) discusses “climate-changing capitalism”, meaning coproduction of climate
change and capitalism in two ways: First, rather than seeing climate change as an external
problem to the markets, it is produced by capitalism and second, capitalism itself is modified
by climatic conditions that are of its own making. Jason Moore discusses capitalism’s central
position in the world and the human forms of organization, such as power or work, as a part of
nature rather than separate from it (e.g. Moore, 2015; Patel & Moore, 2018). Rather than the
concept of “Anthropocene”, which separates humans from the rest of the web of life and tells
a story of humanity destroying the nature, Moore (2015, 2017a, 2017b) discusses
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“Capitalocene”, the age of endlessly accumulating capital and capitalist world-ecology built
around a distinct divide between Nature and Society. The binary is not only present in the
mainstream economic thought, but even in the forms of resistance, for example, in green
thought in the narrative of capitalism that emerged out of nature, extracted wealth from it and
is now facing the consequences (Moore, 2015). World-ecological conversation attempts to
challenge this binary and Moore argues that all beings and systems are a part of “web of life”,
an evolving totality, in which capitalism and nature coproduce each other. World-ecological
conversation shows that climate crisis (as well as, for example, poverty and social
marginalization) are not externalities of capitalism, but capitalism needs them to exist (Moore,
2015, 2017a). As other reproductive aspects of the system, the carbon capturing abilities of
nature are also presupposed, and the combined dependence but indifference to these abilities
locks climate change and capitalist production together (Benton, 1989; Bryant, 2019).
Critical views towards the idea of combining economic growth and ecological sustainability
can be considered as rather marginal, as the current growth paradigm sees economic growth as
vital for wellbeing (Kallis et al., 2018). Green growth and ecological modernization represent
the predominant solution to climate change (Bäckstrand & Lövbrand, 2006; Hickel & Kallis,
2020) especially among large international organizations (e.g. European Commission, 2019;
OECD, 2011, 2017; World Bank, 2012a), and play a large role in Paris Agreement and the
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (Hickel, 2017, 2019; Sandberg et al., 2019).
2.3. Commodifying the ecosystem services
Aspects of reality are not “resources” or “commodities” by nature. Leach and Scoones (2015,
pp. 5–6) note how carbon, while part of a carbon cycle and equipped with biological and
physiological properties, is also a part of trees that have diverse cultural and economic
meanings, and has an ability to become a commodity on its own. The carbon commodity and
the projects producing it have wider range of political-economic effects, for example, source
of foreign exchange for poorer countries, or a business opportunity for brokers, traders,
consultants or private companies (ibid.), but the larger effects are rarely visible to the consumer.
Marx’s (1867/1955) concept of commodity fetishism refers to the distorted relationship that an
individual has with the production and consumption of goods – consumption often necessitates
that the conditions of production are faded. Cavanagh and Benjaminsen (2014) point out that
since the CO₂ emitted and the trees protected are not directly in contact, the link must be
constantly proven to the consumers through performance – images, measurement, certification
and accounting technologies – to assure them that what they are purchasing is something that
15
exists. This leads to fetishization of nature which is used to mask the relationship between the
commodity and conditions it’s been produced under (ibid.).
It has also been pointed out that since ecosystem services are enjoyed by everyone – no one
can be denied the benefit of the forests’ ability to store carbon – the regular price mechanism
involving scarcity does not fully function (Reynolds, 2012). Carbon credits as a non-physical
commodity depend on representations of environments and situations. Previous research
around the markets has found the production of carbon credits with forestry projects to be
heavily leaning on the representations of the positive sides and successes of conservation
organization (Büscher, 2014), obscuring the possible issues and violence to the technical
writing of the project documentation (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014) with “thin, partial and
pseudo-mathematical” calculative methods (Bracking, 2012, p. 271) and simplifications of
complex local realities (Milne & Adams, 2012).
In this thesis, the processes of commodifying and making governable is in large parts looked
though Tanya Murray Li’s (2007a, 2007b) concept of “will to improve”, that describes an often
genuine determination to do good, exposing the practices that enable experts to diagnose
problems and plan interventions. While Li’s research focuses on development interventions in
Indonesia, strategies to prove the project necessary and successful are essentially the same in a
market-based conservation project in Cambodia. The analysis is especially valuable for this
research, as it puts attention on the justifications the project developers present to themselves
and the ways they want to see the interventions they execute. In this thesis, the analysis around
these justification is also supported, for example, by Robert Watt’s (2021) analysis on carbon
market practitioners and by Lamb et al. (2020) who examine the discourses and reasonings
around inadequate climate action.
The will to improve translates into projects through two processes: problematization and
“rendering technical” (Li, 2007a). Problematization refers to identifying something in need of
repair (or something that can be conceptualized as such). After a successful problematization,
the problem is institutionalized, meaning that its legitimacy is presupposed and the
interventions to fix it are no longer in need of further justification. Rendering technical refers
to a set of processes, where the domain to be governed through the project is represented as
intelligible field, with boundaries and characteristics and aspects that can be mobilized through
known techniques (ibid.). Rendering technical, or rendering non-political, as Li (2007a)
describes using the thoughts of James Ferguson (1994), removes the surrounding uncertainties
16
to create a clearly orderable resource, that can then be used in a needed way. Will to improve
thus becomes what Li (2007b, p. 264) also calls a “will to govern – the attempt to direct conduct
and intervene in social processes to produce desired outcomes and avert undesired ones”. The
project developers, while likely genuinely willing to do good and improve the situation in the
area, end up defining what the locals need in accordance to what they can do about it.
The willingness to do good, to improve and to develop has historically not been enough to
create good outcomes and has even often resulted in the opposite (e.g. Illich, 1968). Arturo
Escobar (1995) explains that in the discourse of development, western way of thinking has
overrun the alternative knowledge systems in the global South, which now allows controlling
and maintaining western hegemony. According to him and many other post-development
scholars, “['d]evelopment' is colonialism in disguise” (Escobar et al., 2019). Post-development
thinkers show how despite good intentions, projects and interventions meant to improve, can
work as tools of neo-colonial suppression and control.
The commodification process in the Cardamom-Compensate chain is not limited to Cambodia.
As the commodified ecosystem services are discursive, virtual or performative (Cavanagh &
Benjaminsen, 2014; Fairhead et al., 2012), convincing the consumers about their
trustworthiness and selling them has not been completely unproblematic for Compensate. In
addition to explaining what offsets are, how they work and why they are important, the
foundation’s marketing strategy bases on trying to persuade or nudge (Thaler & Sunstein,
2008) consumers to act in a more sustainable way. The strategy, that includes aspects such as
creating sense of hope, community and peer pressure and making the virtual commodities feel
proximate and tangible, is analysed in this research with the help of sustainable marketing
literature (e.g. White et al., 2019a, 2019b; White & Habib, 2018). The analysis helps to
understand the difference in the ways of demanding change, and the level of demanded change
itself. While a variety of strategies is used to persuade Finnish consumers to act sustainably
and “clean up after themselves” (Vartia, 2019), a very different set of strategies, less persuasive
and more unavoidable, is used in Cambodia to create this possibility.
2.4. Privatised or communalised?
Roots of the approach that emphasize the importance of privatisation and commodification
regarding the ecosystem services can be seen in Garret Hardin’s (1968) theory “tragedy of the
commons”, which takes root in three assumptions that form the ground for neoclassical
theories: “1. People have rational preferences among outcomes, 2. Individuals maximize utility
17
and firms maximize profits, 3. People act independently on the basis of full and relevant
information” (Weintraub, 2007). These assumptions lead Hardin to argue that if a resource can
be freely accessed and used, people will try to maximize their gain from it, which will evidently
lead to ruining or draining the resource dry. Thus, natural resources must be privatized and
protected so the tragedy of the commons can be avoided.
Hardin’s theory is often answered with Elinor Ostrom’s views on the commons. Ostrom (1990)
describes commons as systems that are so large that it is difficult and/or costly to exclude others
from benefiting from using them. In this sense, it can be seen that the whole idea of commons
is bound to disappear as technologies for control develop – if areas and resources of any size
can be subjected to surveillance through technology, nothing will be too large to exclude others
from. This approach is already visible in some conservation areas, that are watched over with
drones designed for military surveillance, and prevented from common use (Cavanagh et al.,
2015). Ostrom’s (e.g. 1990, 2000; Ostrom et al., 1999) most famous contribution to the
commons debate is showing that groups of people can take care of commons without conflict
or overusing the resources, while large privately-owned resources tend to cause overuse and
biodiversity degradation – a result quite opposite to Hardin’s tragedy of the commons.
According to Ostrom, caring for commons should be organised on a face-to-face basis, from
the ground up and in respect towards local cultural norms (ibid.).
In relation to carbon offsets Ostrom (2009) opposes single, global scale policies such as CDM
and REDD and proposes a polycentric approach that would encourage experiments and
increase benefits and individual commitment. Ostrom’s theory is supported, for example, by
Reynolds (2012, p. 542), who argues that in forest-based carbon sequestration projects
“community-based projects on lower-quality sites often successfully generate and sell offsets,
while private for-profit initiatives appear susceptible to collapse”. Formally recognizing
indigenous and traditional governance and collective land rights has quite widely been seen as
an efficient way of reducing deforestation (e.g. FAO & FILAC, 2021; Osborne, 2015; Perkins,
2019; Vandergeest & Roth, 2016).
Community-based approach is implemented to some extent in most private, for profit offset
projects, which can be seen reflecting Ostrom’s ideas. Free, prior and informed consent is
mandatory for any kind of relevant accreditation. However, it has been analysed that the focus
on building the project from ground-up, and even reaching the consent can be rather superficial,
one-way communication, where locals are told what is going to happen and even if their
18
opinions and wishes are asked, they can easily be ignored (Takacs, 2014). Osborne (2015), for
example, argues that carbon offsetting schemes tend to centralize the forest governance to the
project implementers and brokers and necessitate legible rights, boundaries and technical
measurement, calculation and monitoring, which undermines the social and ecological benefits
of the locals. She argues that “the process of commodifying carbon, which requires institutional
and technological manipulations, has weakened the social and ecological controls communities
use to manage common property, thereby compromising the success of collective action
captured in the work of Ostrom and other institutional political economists” (ibid. p. 74).
Ostrom’s approach calls for acceptance of bigger variety of institutional arrangements but is in
essence not that different from neoclassical thought and could even be seen as complementing
it. Suggesting that forest management is trusted on groups of people is privatization as well,
just in a different scale, as the ownership is collective rather than placed on the hands of a single
person or company, and more traditional institutional arrangements are ignored. Rural
communities around the world often govern land based on customary, traditional, or indigenous
systems of common property, where ownership is administered according to the unwritten
customs (Dell’Angelo et al., 2017; Elahi & Stilwell, 2013). This “informality” does not go
together with neoclassical approach and the so called “global land rush” has been happening at
the expense of these types of systems (Dell’Angelo et al., 2017). Today competition on land is
growing faster and more complex than ever and offset projects are competing for land with
food and biofuel production, and other environmentally-driven projects (Fairhead et al., 2012;
Zoomers, 2010). It has also been noted that “green grabbing”, a process where land is acquired,
for example, for ecotourism and conservation, should be seen as separate from large-scale land
acquisitions for commercial agricultural purposes (Dell’Angelo et al., 2017, p. 3). As Ostrom’s
theory has not provided solutions to these kinds of issues, some have seen it lacking of justice,
society or economy angles and thus offering only little, if no help for social transformation:
“The emphasis on internal threats to the commons without a similarly extensive analysis of
external threats to the commons further leaves Ostrom’s commons lacking in practical
significance for anyone who is not a participant in an enclave with characteristics of a
commons” (Obeng‐Odoom, 2016, p. 381). This type of focus on internal threats complemented
with ignorance towards external, or wider, systemic threats, is also visible in the SCRP and
will be discussed further in chapter 4.5.
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3. Methodology
This research is based on a case study around Cardamom-Compensate carbon offset production
chain. The data consists mainly of communications of organizations involved, project
documentation and interviews with relevant people, and is analysed with qualitative methods.
3.1. Data collection
For this research, I analysed websites and communications of the organizations involved in the
production chain, went through the project documentation on the SCRP, conducted 10
interviews with relevant people and to support my findings, collected media data from Finnish
and Cambodian newspapers. The data was collected mainly during summer and autumn of
2020 and information especially on websites might have changed since. Compensate’s website
in particular has been in the state of constant change and the foundation has published new
projects, reports and statements during the time of this research.
Description of the SCRP was taken from Wildlife Alliance’s, Wildlife Works’, Everland’s,
Verra’s and Compensate’s websites. Compensate’s website was also analysed as a whole, as
well as their newsletters between 11.9.2019 and 15.10.2020 and videos on their YouTube
channel. This was done to create balance and to better understand the sellers of the carbon
credits, as the largest body of data was provided by project documentation, that focuses on the
production: Project description (Wildlife Works, 2018), Validation report (Brown & Haxtema,
2018a), Monitoring report (Williams, 2018) and Verification report (Brown & Haxtema,
2018b) describe in more than 700 pages how the SCRP is operating on the ground and why
certain interventions are chosen.
The interviews were conducted in Zoom or Skype in 2020-2021 with people some directly and
some indirectly involved in the Compensate, SCRP or the Cardamoms (interviews listed in
Table 1). The interviews were conducted from Helsinki, while 3 of the informants were based
in Cambodia, 5 in the US and 2 in Finland during the time of the interview. The interviews
were semi-structured and 40 to 80 minutes long. One informant asked for the questions to be
provided beforehand and was cautious about the research. Thus, more details and structure
were provided in one interview than the others. The questions changed based on the person,
but revolved around the informant’s thoughts on carbon markets, market-based mechanisms in
forest conservation and climate change mitigation, and the informants’ relation to SCRP (initial
interview structures in Appendix 1). The last interview was conducted later than the rest and
20
thus misunderstandings and interpretations from previous data gathering were discussed in that
one more than in others. Informants were chosen based on the project documentation, prior
knowledge, a search for ecotourism providers in the area and finally on recommendations from
other informants, which resulted in a partial snowball sampling method.
Table 1. List of interviews.
No. Date
(dd/mm/yy)
Position of the informant
1. 25/08/20 Cambodian environmental activist, currently works with ecotourism
in the Cardamoms, no direct connection to the SCRP.
2. 27/08/20 Used to work at Wildlife Alliance with the SCRP in expert position.
No longer involved with SCRP.
3. 31/08/20 Manager position, Wildlife Alliance.
4. 21/09/20 External advisor for the SCRP’s REDD+ process. Expert position in
another Cambodian REDD+ project.
5. 22/09/20 Manager position, Compensate.
6. 23/09/20 Manager position, Everland marketing.
7. 12/10/20 Expert position, Compensate.
8. 12/10/20 Manager position, Wildlife Works.
9. 23/10/20 Manager position, Everland marketing.
10. 18/01/21 Manager position, Wildlife Works
Media data was collected from Cambodian English-language newspapers Phnom Penh Post
and Khmer Times with keywords “Carbon offset” “Wildlife Alliance” + “Cardamom” and
“REDD+” and Finnish media houses Helsingin Sanomat and Yle (The Finnish Public Service
Media Company) with keywords “päästökompensaatio” (emission offset), “Compensate” and
“REDD+”. Keywords were searched with each media’s own search function and
Google’s within a site function (that allows to search inside a domain). All relevant articles
from 2015 onwards were included up until the date of the collection, 19.9.2020. Articles’
relevance (if keyword was the topic of the article and not just mentioned as a part of another
topic) was assessed individually. Only concerning Wildlife Alliance keyword manipulation
was conducted, as the organization’s job openings and other projects are also featured in
Cambodian media and would have flooded the data. Thus, in Wildlife Alliance’s case only
articles that also mentioned Cardamom were chosen. The collection method resulted in 60
original articles from Cambodia and 39 from Finland (articles listed in Appendix 2). When
cited directly, the Finnish data has been translated to English by the author.
21
3.2. Research challenges and ethics
Writing of this thesis started approximately at the same time as Covid-19 gained its pandemic
status. As such, it was clear from the beginning, that I would not be able to visit the Cardamoms,
and the research was planned with this limitation in mind. To understand the Cambodian
context, I depend on second-hand sources, such as interviews and newspaper articles, but also
websites, social media and blogs. Unfortunately, I do not speak Khmer and rely on English
sources. Additionally, Reporters Without Borders ranks Cambodia to 144 out of 180 in World
Press Freedom index (RSF, n.d.). All major media houses in Cambodia are currently directly
linked to the prime minister Hun Sen and journalists who report on topics that are not to
regime’s liking can be imprisoned (ibid.). As the Cambodian Ministry of Environment acts as
the main proponent of the SCRP, it can be expected that possible problems caused by and
related to the project are not necessarily reported by the Cambodian press. As gaining a
trustworthy understanding of the situation in Cardamoms in the current media climate, without
visiting the area and without understanding the local language is challenging, my main point is
not to show how the SCRP affects the local lives in Cambodia, but how it can be used to
describe the overall logic of the carbon offsets as a climate change mitigation tool.
The interviews form an important part of this research. In addition to interviews conducted,
unanswered interview requests were sent to auditing bodies, writers and local experts
mentioned in the project documentation, and ecotourism providers working with Wildlife
Alliance. Even though interviews with auditors and writers of the project documentation were
not conducted, information about auditing procedures is well available online and especially
the interviews 4, 8 and 10, gave a lot to this part of the analysis. Because the informants were
chosen based on their position in relation either to the SCRP, to Compensate, or to both, I did
not have much control over the demographics and from the 10 people interviewed, 9 were men.
6 of the final informants were American men, which appears to be the most descriptive
demographic of the managerial or other key positions around the SCRP. All the informants
except one work in managerial or other high expert positions and are spokespersons of their
organizations and negative impacts for individual informants are unlikely. Still names and
exact positions are faded out to avoid any possible negative consequences. Anonymity was
also specifically requested by informant 1, who as a Cambodian activist is in the most
vulnerable position of the informants (see Amnesty International, 2020).
During the interviews I found out that there is a strong sense of sensitivity around carbon
markets, which I had not expected in such extent. Some of the informants discussed the critical
22
treatment their business gets in research and in media as unfair and emphasized how careful
they must be about what is written about their organizations, which might have impacted their
answers. There is even a possibility that the informants told me what they thought I might want
to hear, which might explain why I got some contradicting answers regarding, for example, the
money flow and role of different organizations in the process of production. I have dedicated
some space in this thesis for analysing the sensitiveness around the topic and its possible
origins. One of the informants also argued that the present-day carbon markets are criticized
on the basis of mistakes made as long as twenty years ago, but the markets have developed
since and those aspects are not necessarily relevant anymore. To avoid unfair treatment towards
the present-day carbon markets, I have made an effort to focus on information from the past
decade, preferably past five years. Events and literature from further past are, however, also
described, as they have an impact on how carbon markets have developed (often by answering
the said critique) and the way how people see them today.
Linked to the sensitivity is the critical nature of this research. The aim of the thesis is not to
grade, value or denigrate the SCRP, Compensate, or any of the other the organizations
involved. However, as I along with other things also bring up aspects in the Cardamom-
Compensate chain that appear problematic, there is a possibility that some might interpret this
thesis showing some organizations in a negative light. I hope that rather than been seen as an
attack, my thesis can offer some tools for further improvement and impactful, just and
sustainable climate action.
Additionally, it should be mentioned that while I do use the Cardamom-Compensate chain to
describe the voluntary carbon markets and their logic in more general, it is only one example
of a carbon credit production chain. This research should be read as a case study of spatially
and temporally restricted circumstances and even though the findings are looked at in a wider
context, they do not necessarily represent a more universal situation.
3.3. Case study approach
This thesis looks into a production chain of carbon credits and describes the representations
needed for supply and demand of carbon credits and the impacts of said representations. Rather
than focusing on technical carbon calculations, the focus is put on the demanded change – what
needs to change to counter the global climate crisis and what kind of change is asked for and
from whom by the voluntary carbon markets. To analyse the impacts and representations of
the production chain, a first step is to understand and describe the chain itself.
23
Explanatory case study is used as a basis for finding large structures and to describe the
phenomena and is well suited in answering “how” and “why” questions (Yin, 2014, pp. 10–
11). Main idea of explanatory case study in this thesis is to answer the question “how is a
carbon credit produced?”, which is be answered mainly in chapter 4.2. I originally expected
tracking of the carbon credits’ production to be simple, just gaining an understanding of
different actors and their tasks during the process. However, it turned out that the process is
not necessarily fully clear even to those who are part of it, as is explained in chapter 4.3.
According to Yin (2014), explorative case study looks for analytical and empirical observations
and possibilities from the data rather than just causal or normative explanations. The goal of
the explorative case study method in this thesis is to find out what are the possible impacts of
the representations needed in the carbon credit production. I used the Atlas.ti qualitative
research and data analysis software to aid in the data categorization and organization and
explored the data from ground-up and noting patterns, concepts and insights that arise and the
way they link to each other. In addition to Yin’s (ibid.) description, the exploration process
moved along the lines of qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2000, 2004) and consisted of
several read-throughs, examining which themes and words appear together, outlining
categories and searching with several keywords and finding if different themes, representation
and justifications appeared in different types of data. During this process, the research widened
from simply describing how the carbon credits are produced into, for example, looking at the
wider context around the Cardamom-Compensate chain and to exploring what might have been
left out of the project’s official descriptions and what implications the left-out information
might have. This analysis was conducted with the help of Li’s (2007a, 2007b) concept of
rendering technical, which describes how to justify certain interventions, experts executing
them only describe problems they can suitably intervene with. The approach creates a cycle
where a project targets something and can show success and improvement in the area, but larger
context and roots of the presented problem can be left ignored (Büscher, 2014; Li, 2007a).
In addition to describing the justification process for the interventions in the Cardamoms, this
thesis delves into the ways of asking change from individuals and groups. To function, the
voluntary carbon markets require change in the projects’ locations, where some aspects of the
local lives are changed or forcibly denied, to demonstrate forest conservation. Other point of
change is in the end of the sales of the carbon credits, where the consumers must be persuaded
to voluntarily pay to offset their emissions and to act sustainably. The consumers’ end is
analysed with the help of sustainable marketing literature, especially a report by White and
24
Habib (2018) and later writings by White et al. (2019a, 2019b), that collect together almost 400
publications in the area of sustainable marketing.
The data gathering and the explorative case study method also revealed the heated discussion
around carbon markets and a certain reluctance around accepting critique. The way the carbon
markets are supported despite the long-run criticism is explored through Li’s (2007a, 2007b)
concept of will to improve, Roberts Watt’s (2021) findings around carbon market practitioners
and analysis on fantasy and desire directed at the markets, and Lamb et al.’s (2020) discussions
on the ways of justifying inadequate climate change mitigation efforts.
Finally, to support my other findings, a representation analysis focusing on media appearance
(Kiousis, 2004) was used on media data. Articles under each keyword were arranged by the
year of their publication to see how themes around the topic of this thesis have appeared in the
Finnish and Cambodian media, and then read carefully. As field work was not possible,
analysing the public discussion helped to confirm assumptions gained from other parts of the
data collection and to fill in the gaps that would otherwise remain. The media analysis sets the
case of Cardamom-Compensate to a wider context that is not only based on writings of western
academia and experts in the carbon markets arena. While the voices of the media are also few,
they hold a gatekeeper role and can thus be seen as relevant.
4. Analysis and findings: Complexities of carbon
commodification
In this chapter I present my findings of the Cardamom-Compensate case. The focus is on
describing how offsets are made into a marketable commodity, and in the complexities of that
process. I start the description from the consumers’ end and first discuss how Compensate
markets and creates a need for carbon credits. Then I move to explain what it is exactly, that
they market, and describe the journey of the carbon credit including the accreditation processes.
As a continuum, chapter 4.3 explains the difficulties of gaining a detailed understanding of the
process in the middle of vague information and contradicting answers.
After the first three chapters, I move to examine Cambodia and the Cardamoms more closely.
Chapter 4.4. focuses on the construction of the baseline, that needs to be seen as threatening as
possible, so the project can show that their intervention is causing additional benefits. The
baseline is built by using representations of the aspects of reality in and around the Cardamoms,
25
that the SCRP can easily intervene with and they determine what type of change the project is
trying to achieve. In chapter 4.5. I focus on themes that appear to have been left out of the
official project documentation and definitions of the needed interventions. I also present my
interpretations on why this might be necessary, even though at least most of the informants I
talked with seemed to have much wider understanding of the threats to the area, than what the
project documentation states. Chapter 4.6. focuses on the impacts of the selective
problematisation and analyses if it changes the final target and the effects of the project.
Finally, chapter 4.7 presents the wider context of carbon markets and REDD+ in Cambodia
and its connection to the heated discussion around offsets and the passionate and careful
responses I got in my interviews. This connects back to the Finnish discussion and the way
carbon markets are seen and discussed in that context, and the difficulties the Compensate has
had in convincing the public about the legitimacy of its product.
4.1. “Here is how we’ll stop climate change” – Selling carbon credits in
Finland
This chapter introduces the Compensate’s end of the production chain. The foundation was
launched with high ambitions in April 2019 and it has received a good amount of media
attention since the beginning. The CEO gave a keynote in the launching event with an
ambitious title, “Here is how we’ll stop climate change” (Vartia, 2019). The speech revolved
around the point that if we all just “cleaned after ourselves” – which would be made easy by
Compensate – the climate crisis would be solved. Later on, most of the media attention has
been focusing on the legal case regarding if the foundation’s product should be considered
gratuitous or not, which has no doubt made its operations more difficult, but kept it at the centre
of media attention.
Interest towards Compensate has likely increased the news coverage on carbon offsets get in
Finnish media and the number of articles around the topic has increased in the past two years.
Out of the 38 Finnish articles analysed, only five dealt with larger context of the global carbon
markets (Elonen, 2019; Elonen & Niiranen, 2019; Hartikainen, 2020; Kanninen, 2015;
Palosuo, 2015) while most articles link offsets to the context of (individual) climate action.
They bring up regular people that offset their emissions, live “low-carbon” lifestyles and want
to impact people around them. This links to bigger ambition that Compensate and carbon
markets have – if the true price of our actions (e.g. the natural destruction caused by our
consumption) is made visible, it can make people think twice about their choices. However, it
26
also goes to show that the Finnish public attention regarding carbon offsets is focused on
consumers rather than larger impacts. Focus like this is likely beneficial for Compensate, as its
business idea targets people who want to decrease their individual carbon footprint with
individual climate action rather than by aiming to change larger societal structures.
While climate change is mostly recognized as a looming disaster caused by humans, action
towards it has not risen to the level of the risk. It appears, that the disaster and quilt filled talk
does not spark action: for example, Palm et al. (2020, p. 827) note that recommendations for
behavioural changes decrease individuals’ belief in climate scientist and willingness to take
action, to reduce personal emissions, or to vote pro-climate candidates. It appears, that
education and fact-based tips – or “nagging and guilt-tripping” (Yoder, 2020) – do not
encourage environmentally friendly action. If the goal is to make sustainability a norm across
societies, as Vartia’s speech implies, the narrative of giving up consumption and the comfort
of modern life is not tempting enough (Gorge et al., 2014; Sandberg, 2018). As Japan’s
environment minister Shinjiro Koizumi put it, the fight against climate change should be made
"sexy" and "fun" (Koizumi quoted on M. Green, 2019).
Compensate acts accordingly to marketing research around sustainable consumption. White et
al. (2019a, 2019b) note that people often announce that they want to buy sustainable products
and are prepared to spend more money on them, but in reality don’t end up doing this very
often. It appears that this willingness is at the centre of Compensate’s (and voluntary carbon
markets’) mission and the way of making it translate into reality is at the core of their marketing
strategy. To overcome the action-intention gap between willingness to act sustainably and then
not doing it, White et al. (ibid.) propose strategies circling around social influencing, domino
effect, creation of habits and emotional and rational appeal, or as they put in the SHIFT-report,
“Social influence, Habit formation, the Individual self, Feelings and cognition, and
Tangibility” (White & Habib, 2018). Compensate’s strategy to increase individual consumers’
environmentally friendly action can be analysed as constructing around these elements.
Currently, Compensate offers a monthly subscription for offsetting one’s carbon footprint.
Subscribing can be done easily through an app (examples from app in figures 3 and 4), that
also works as a carbon footprint calculator. I tried the service to return to my carbon footprint
of 2019 (from chapter 1.1) and found that with Compensate, I could offset my roughly 4000kg
CO₂e footprint with €9 a month. For the whole year that makes €108, meaning about $130, as
a comparison to Gold Standard’s service, where I could have done it for $60 to $80. So, while
27
Compensate is about twice as expensive as the Gold Standard, which at least the Finnish media
holds in great value regarding trustworthiness (e.g. Hartikainen, 2020; Pinola, 2018a; Riikonen,
2019), it is still cheap enough so that the price does not scare the buyer away. Additionally,
after calculating one’s carbon footprint, the app gives suggestions on what area of one’s life to
change to make the footprint smaller. In the end, the app works as a game, where the user
makes changes in their daily routines, tracks them in the app and gets to compensate with lower
and lower price, earn badges and compare their score to the average score of their own country,
other countries and the world. Perhaps this is what Mr. Koizumi meant with sexy and fun.
Regarding a question of “tangibility” in the SHIFT-framework, White and Habib (2018, pp.
49–51) note that the reward of environmentally friendly actions can seem far-off in the future
and psychologically distant, while the action itself can be costly in the present. Compensate’s
app with its pictures and ways of visualizing and explaining climate impact corresponds to their
recommendation of “concrete communications”, for example, by highlighting the specific steps
the consumer can take and using vivid imagery and graphs (ibid. p. 51). In a sense it can also
be seen as concretizing the otherwise abstract commodity by making it at least seemingly
digital and creating an immediate “prize” for the consumer. Additionally, discussing proximal
impacts of the consumers sustainable action is more effective, than putting attention on those
that are far in the future, or physically distant (White et al., 2019b, p. 31; White & Habib, 2018,
p. 49). This might explain why Compensate does not put that much effort into communicating
about the impacts of the forest protection in Cambodia or other project locations. Rather than
using a lot of images of local people or sympathetic animals – which at least many charity
Figure 3. Compensate’s app’s opening page (left)
and recommendation based on user’s “climate
status” (right).
Figure 4. App’s explanation of necessary climate
action (left) and interactive introduction of
Compensate’s project portfolio (right).
28
organizations appear to find effective – they focus on the way the individual can think about
themselves after they have offset and on presenting clear numbers, quantifying large scale
impact. Cardamoms and how the SCRP impacts them is only in focus on the page that
introduces the project (Compensate, n.d.-b) otherwise Compensate’s communications focus on
things that might feel familiar to a western consumer, rather than awaken sympathies in them.
Compensate’s goal is to get individual consumers to offset their emissions regularly as a habit.
Deriving from behavioural economics, nudge theory suggests that minor alterations to
everyday structures can steer people into the direction of making better decision and forming
better habits (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). An easy way to create a habit is to make something a
default. Pichert & Katsikopoulos (2008), for example, found that when green electricity was
set as a default, most people chose it as long as the price difference was moderate. Subscribing
to a service requires effort, but after subscribing one will be charged regularly and
automatically. However, the subscription service as it is does not perfectly correspond to the
idea of habit formation, which was an elemental part of Compensate’s original strategy to make
offsetting a part of everyday purchasing process. Making offsetting a default in every-day life
depends on Compensate’s partnerships, companies that cooperate with the foundation and set
the possibility to offset as a default inside their purchasing process. This process, however, has
been hindered by the legal case with the Finnish gambling administration.
Social influencing consists of norms, identities, observability and desirability (White et al.,
2019b). Social norms refer to practices that are expected, approved or appropriate in a certain
context. Compensate communicated around its launch how it wants to make offsetting a norm
– something that everyone does, something that is expected. A good example of this is a
metaphor that Vartia uses, for example, in his launch speech (2019) and some newspaper
articles (Onninen, 2019): offsetting is cleaning up after yourself. Vartia connects offsetting to
picking up the trash one has dropped or cleaning spilled milk. Mild guilt is present in this
metaphor and White et al. (2019a, 2019b) note that when used subtly, quilt can be a powerful
tool in aiming for behavioural change. When too excessive however, negative feelings are often
off-putting (ibid.). Compensate is more focused on hope, encouraging messages and positive
feelings. Their way of communicating emphasizes togetherness from Vartia’s “Here is how
we’ll stop climate change” (emphasis by the author) to often used “#WeCompensate -family”
on social media, newsletter and website. While climate change is being taken seriously and
talked about as a crisis, the communications focus on hope and solving the problem together:
29
Watching global news right now can make the climate crisis seem like an impossible challenge. But we
have to remember that hope only lives in action. We are all more motivated than ever to drive change,
we have all the necessary knowledge and tools available. It’s time to spread that hope, push ourselves
just a little bit more and build this community effort. Let’s make 2020 the year – the decade – that we
truly stepped up our game. As a part of the #WeCompensate-family, you’ve already begun your journey.
– Compensate newsletter, January 2020.
White et al. (2019b, p. 29) note that positive emotions, such as joy or pride work as drivers for
sustainable action in stronger way than negative ones, such as quilt and fear. Additionally,
emphasis on action can lead to hope and decrease fear and anger, which can as a continuum
lead to increased support for positive climate policies in all political / ideological groups
(Feldman & Hart, 2018). A hope for this type of a domino effect was raised, for example, by
Compensate’s employee, informant 5, who hoped that Compensate could have a part in
changing the world in a larger scale as it offers people something they can easily do and does
not leave them feeling as powerless. He speculated that a simple way of offsetting can ideally
be seen in leading into, for example, more climate-oriented voting behaviour.
White et al. (2019b) refer to a concept of descriptive norms, information about what other
people are doing, that can be strong predictors of consumption behaviour. People’s tendency
to participate in sustainable behaviour increases when they receive messages that their peers
are doing it too (e.g. Bollinger & Gillingham, 2012; Kormos et al., 2014). Creating this type of
peer pressure through descriptive norm is not one of Compensate’s most visible strategies, but
they occasionally describe “normal people” and their relation to the idea of compensating on
their website and newsletter. More effort, however, is put on introducing companies that have
joined Compensate. Partnerships are presented on the front page of the website and new
company members of the “#WeCompensate -family” are featured in the newsletter. According
to White et al. (2019a) descriptive norm’s influence is often underestimated: “Harnessing the
power of social influence is one of the most effective ways to elicit pro-environmental
behaviours in consumption.” To create a hoped norm of offsetting, presenting relatable stories
directly to consumers thus might be a necessary marketing strategy.
Descriptive norms can be communicated publicly: consumers are more likely to make
sustainable choices in public contexts, when they can be observed and evaluated and see others
making similar choices (T. Green & Peloza, 2014). Compensate’s vision for future includes
the descriptive norm of making offsetting a public action. Vartia (2019) suggested in his launch
event speech that people who have paid to offset the emissions of their flights would be let into
30
the plane first. Announcement such as “Now boarding the eco-friendly class” could be seen as
increasing social desirability. In his speech, Vartia (ibid.) hopes that in the future he could see
Compenste’s logo on different products that have had their emissions offset, symbolizing
responsibility of its carrier. People who have shown public commitment this way, might feel
praised for their good action, but also mildly pressured to show consistency. According to Van
der Werff et al. (2014) people like to appear self-consistent, thus environmentally friendly
actions lead to similar decisions especially when they are public or when people are reminded
of them. In addition to positive, action-focused communication, the aim to act consistently adds
to informant 5’s hope of Compensate’s role in changing the world: When people act in a
sustainable way, they have a sense of hope and want to continue said behaviour, but also to act
in a consistent and rational way and enforce the rationality of their previous choice, thus, for
example, voting behaviour that supports stricter climate policies becomes more rational.
People’s aim for self-consistency leads to a point that viewing oneself a part of pro-
environmental group increases the likelihood of an individual making sustainable choices (Van
der Werff et al., 2014; White et al., 2019b). This also works the opposite way and people who
lean right on the political spectrum are less open to adopt eco-friendly behaviours (White et
al., 2019a). This has been seen as a true juxtaposition in Finland, where especially after the
parliamentary elections of 2019, the media has been analysed to present the populist narrative
of attitudes to climate being either “realistic” or “hysterical”, where all climate action is
presented as radical, ideological, leftist, and so on (Suominen, 2021; Vuorelma, 2019). In a
way, carbon markets cater to this problem and the whole idea of sustainable consumption can
be seen as enlarging the idea of environmentally positive action and playing a part in turning
environmentalism from a radical niche to mainstream. If one has a possibility to do
environmentally positive actions through markets, the whole idea of climate action might start
to feel more familiar, as one does not necessarily have to side oneself with more radical or
rebellious groups. By consuming ethically and offsetting, it is possible to side oneself with
moderate and rational, but still environmentally conscious group of people. It can, however,
still be seen, that emphasizing the individual choices as climate action makes the way humanity
is facing a large, gnawingly physical problem, into a question of identity.
It can also be argued that moderate market environmentalists are with small symbolic actions
obtaining a moral Get Out of Jail Free card. White et al. (2019b, p. 27) call this negative spill
over a licensing effect, “wherein individuals who have engaged in a sustainable action at one
time point will later be less likely to engage in another sustainable or positive behaviour”.
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Kristofferson et al., (2014) note that small, public, token-like actions rarely lead to more action
in private. It has been argued that paying for clear consciousness allows people and companies
to keep on polluting, discourages personal accountability and “contributes to a form of global
economic discrimination, both at a personal as well as a geopolitical level” (Dhanda &
Hartman, 2011, p. 121). The significance of individual behaviour change in relation to climate
change is also questionable, as those committing to greener everyday lifestyles often produce
higher than average emissions elsewhere (Higham et al., 2013; Symons & Karlsson, 2018).
According to White et al. (2019b), both inconsistent and consistent behaviour (sustainable
action increasing or decreasing the likelihood of future sustainable behaviour) can emerge in
the same context. They argue that effortfulness of the first sustainable action helps built
commitment more than something easy and token-like (White et al., 2019a), but also say that
“[a]ctions that encourage repetition, such as making sustainable actions easy and utilizing
prompts, incentives, and feedback, can strengthen positive habits” (White et al., 2019b, p. 26),
and that viewing sustainable actions “effortful, time-consuming, or difficult to carry out” raises
a barrier to do sustainable actions (ibid.). To conclude, continuity and consistency in
individuals’ environmentally friendly actions is something that can be hoped for but should not
be relied on, which takes some ground from Vartia’s (2019) “Here is how we’ll stop climate
change” -speech. It has been argued that rather than nudging individuals to voluntarily act
sustainably and offset their emissions, larger scale, industry-level corporate accountability
mechanisms, such as carbon tax are acutely needed to achieve change (e.g. Tyers, 2018).
Next, I move to what is it that Compensate is selling and how is it produced. How exactly does
one protect a forest in Cambodia and then sell it in Finland? What is needed to make a
commodity out of the trees’ ability to store carbon?
4.2. Journey of the carbon credit
Conservation projects produce carbon credits via the audit process. In other words, the
possibility to start selling credits starts when an outside entity ratifies a project and recognizes
its ability to prevent, avoid or capture emissions. Voluntary carbon markets have increased
their use of audit process over time and in 2016 already almost all projects were audited with
either Gold Standard, Plan Vivo or VCS (Foster et al., 2017; Hamrick & Gallant, 2017). The
audit is based on the project documentation and field visits. While the auditing company is
separate from the project, it is also separate from the actor providing the auditing criteria. The
SCRP was validated and first verified by a company called SCS Global Services, with VCS
32
and CCB criteria provided by Verra. VCS offers a criteria for production of carbon credits
called Verified Carbon Units (VCU), that represent a reduction or removal of one tonne of
CO₂e (Verra, n.d.). A project can simultaneously with VCS be certified with another, non-GHG
label, that typically represents community and biodiversity benefits, like CCB (ibid.), from
which the SCRP has been awarded with an additional gold level. To avoid unconscious bias,
the same auditing company cannot be used too many times, so the different vintages of credits
are often verified by different companies, but under the same standards.
In the auditing process the project is first validated, which refers to checking if the project
description complies with the VCS rules. After validation, the project can produce carbon
credits through verification, which must be done every time it wants to set out new credits and
works to check if what has been promised in the description is being executed. Essentially,
using VCS and CCB standards, both validation and verification become two-fold. What must
be proven is that the product exists, e.g. that carbon is captured, or emissions avoided; and that
the product is responsible, e.g. no people or wildlife or others have been harmed in the process.
Finally, the saleable credits coming out of verification are categorized by the year they were
verified. Unlike wine, carbon credit vintages don’t get better as they age – according to
interviews, buyers prefer new credits.
Audit’s importance reflects its cost, that can rise up to one third of the offset revenues and has
been seen as causing economies of scale, essentially making smaller projects financially non-
viable (Bellassen et al., 2015; Foster et al., 2017). The SCRP is a large REDD+ project, which
decreases the relative cost, but some of the informants still thought that the audit is expensive,
especially at the start of the project, when no revenue is coming in. Often a substantial prior
investment is needed to start a project. According to the informant 10, who works as a manager
in Wildlife Works, the company has built its business strategy around this investment and then
helping the projects through audit and credit sales. The high cost of the audit is said to assure
the credibility of the markets, but unfortunately the auditing schemes have been seen as rather
questionable, often creating only virtual emissions reduction through, for example, baseline
manipulation and performative science (e.g. Bracking, 2012; Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014;
Foster et al., 2017; Seyller et al., 2016). It has also been argued that the technical rules and
standards behind the audition “hide local contestation, sideline criticism and deny justice”
(Milne & Mahanty, 2019, p. 133). Foster et al. (2017, p. 140) encourage project developers and
auditors to aim for more conservative and realistic estimates to avoid creating carbon credits
that don’t correspond to emission reductions and thus negatively impact the credibility of the
33
markets. Some people interviewed for this research, especially informant 9 from Everland,
thought that the estimate in the case of SCRP is already very conservative and that the project
could produce more credits, if it more emphasized the threat that the area is facing. Coming
from a person that works for an organization making profit from sales of REDD+ credits, the
credibility of this claim is naturally difficult to assess, but there is also no reason to argue
against it. It can also be pointed out, that soil carbon is not included in the SCRP’s carbon pool
calculation (Williams, 2018, p. 42) even though it has an extensive impact on both carbon
capturing and release in tropical forests (Hong et al., 2020; Nottingham et al., 2020) and
including it could potentially increase the amount of carbon credits the project can issue.
Carbon credits are “results based”, which can be understood by comparing them to charity-
based conservation work, where money comes in and the work is done with it. In offset projects
the protection work must be done before credits can be issued or money earned. Verification,
i.e. the process that issues new credits, has to demonstrate “GHG emission reductions and
removals that have occurred as a result of the project during the verification period” (Brown &
Haxtema, 2018b, p. 2). This raises a question about permanence of the carbon capture and risk
of reversal: How does one prove that a forest that has “already been protected” will remain
standing also a reasonable time to the future? In VCS the projects get non-permanence risk
score. Risks are assessed in three categories: Internal (e.g. financial issues, the management
team is inexperienced), external (e.g. land tenure related disputes, lack of community
acceptance, unstable political situation) and natural (historical likelihood and significance of
events such as flooding, forest fires or pest outbreaks) (VCS, 2016). Project proponent
demonstrates mitigation activities that decrease scores in each category and the final score is
counted by summing all the sub-categories (ibid.). The score indicates how many credits the
project must place into a buffer pool, which works as an insurance, from which the credits
cannot be sold (ibid.). If the project fails the risk assessment, it cannot issue credits (ibid.).
The main owner of the SCRP is the Cambodian Ministry of Environment, that is not involved
in the daily practicalities of the project. Wildlife Alliance had already worked in the Cardamom
Mountains with similar forest biodiversity and community projects through private funding
(mainly founder’s family foundation) when they got the chance to become the main operator
of the REDD+ project. They work on the ground organizing operations such as community
development, biomass measuring and ranger patrolling. Wildlife Works, has invested in the
project and operates more with the project’s technical side. Carbon credits from the SCRP can
be bought through Everland marketing, a spin-off of Wildlife Works. Everland works for the
34
projects and creates contacts with potential buyers, such as Compensate that sells credits from
the SCRP as a part of a larger project portfolio. The idea of the portfolio is similar to a secure
investment portfolio, where dividing money between several entities offers security.
Compensate openly discusses the difficulty to trust the carbon markets, for example, by saying
that the international standards such as Gold Standard and VCS are not enough to prove the
trustworthiness of carbon credits and do not guarantee that one credit corresponds to the
promised 1 tonne of reduced CO₂e (Compensate, 2020c). Compensate tries to overcome the
problems with its own criteria and gives each evaluated project a score based on climate
integrity, wellbeing of local communities and biodiversity (Compensate, 2020a). The score
works to define if the project is accepted to the portfolio, but it also forms a so called
“overcompensation factor” that together with tight criteria attempts to overcome the most
common problems of offsets (too cheap price of the credits, difficulty of showing additionality
and the standards not actually proving much). Compensate notes, that around 90 percent of the
projects they have evaluated, fail that criteria (Compensate, 2021). Interestingly, in a webinar
around the report that revealed this fact in April 2021 Markku Kulmala, the chair of
Compensate’s advisory panel, mentioned that he would have failed even a larger percentage.
The critical attitude Compensate shows towards the carbon markets has worked in its benefit.
The report around the responsibility of the Finnish offset providers (Finnwatch, 2021) gives
Compensate credit for not trusting the international auditing system, for using their own, tighter
criteria and for openly communicating about it.
4.3. Uncertainties in the money flow
Credits issued by the SCRP are sold to different organizations that use them to offset their own
emissions or sell them forward. Compensate is a non-profit foundation that funds its own
operations (administration, etc.) by collecting a license fee from its partner companies through
Compensate Operations Ltd, owned 100 % by the foundation. When someone pays
Compensate to offset their emissions, the money is divided between the projects in
Compensate’s portfolio. In other words, the consumers cannot pick which project they want to
support and are unlikely to be able to investigate every project they are paying for through their
offsetting. This characteristic can be seen resembling the production chain of most physical
commodities in the global markets – for example, when a consumer buys a shirt, they are most
likely unable to track each strand of cotton to its origins. While unlikely to be the cause, the
outcome of the large portfolio is that the conditions of the production are more carefully hidden
from the consumers, than when buying credits from individual projects.
35
Everland negotiates the deals for carbon credits from the SCRP with buyers individually, so
the price of the credits varies, and large buyers are usually able to get better deals. Credits are
bought from Everland, that then forwards the money to the project, which is a part of Wildlife
Alliance’s finances. Some percentages of the money earned go to Wildlife Works and Everland
that as for-profit companies charge for their services. Another percentage is allocated for MoE,
that can use parts of it for ministry functions. The rest project can use for its expenses, such as
paying for the all daily operations like salaries, and, for example, verifications whenever new
credits need to be issued. All REDD+ projects also have a benefit sharing mechanism, which
determines how much, and under what terms the money goes to local communities. The
communities can use the money, for example, on education and health care.
The complete money flow in the whole chain is hidden from public, so, for example, the exact
percentages going to each party and the price of the credits are unknown. When asked about
transparency, employee of Wildlife Works, informant 10, said that the process is, in fact,
transparent, “it’s just not transparent to you”, which, he then explained, means that some things
can be hidden from the public, as this is a question of business, not charity. Compensate seems
to be willing to counter the more secretive nature of its business partners and has shared its
bank statements and project certificates online (documents accessible at Compensate, n.d.-a).
According to the project certificates, Compensate bought 22 433 VCUs form the SCRP in 2020
and the bank statements show €153 300,6 transferred to Everland during the same year. Thus,
it is reasonable to assume, that the price that Compensate is paying for the SCRP’s credits is
approximately €6,8, meaning about $8,25 USD, which is in line with the estimated price that
informant 10 was willing to give me, from about $6 to $9 USD per credit.
There is a possibility that the presentation of the money flow above is not completely accurate
since I was presented with some slightly contradicting views regarding it. A former employee
of Wildlife Alliance, informant 2, for example, told me that the MoE can use revenue from
different REDD+ projects to fund their other operations. A current employee, informant 3, on
the other hand said, that all the money goes to the project that then administers activities the
government would otherwise have to. Informant 4, who worked as an advisor for the SCRP,
denied this and sided with informant 2, explaining that the revenue the government makes is
exactly the reason they execute REDD+ projects in the first place. Wildlife Works’ position,
explained by two employees of the company, did not come across as clear either. Informant 8
said that the organization was first an advisor and has now become another project developer
and is doing it together with Wildlife Alliance, but informant 10 denied this and said that
36
Wildlife Works is a technical consultant and an investor. Perhaps the biggest point of
confusion, however, was Everland’s position. Informant 6, who works in manager position in
Everland, said that Everland is hired and paid by the project, which informant 7 from
Compensate first confirmed, but then said Everland is buying and then reselling the credits.
This was then denied by another employee of Everland, informant 9, who wondered where I
got that idea from and said that Everland simply creates connections between buyers and sellers
and is not itself buying or reselling anything. The question of where the money goes first
received three differing answers during the interviews, Everland, MoE and the project itself.
Neither of the interviewed Everland’s employees admitted that the money flows via their
company, but Compensate’s bank records seem to counter their claims.
“So we’re not a broker or a trader rather we work for and are paid by the projects and what we do is
we facilitate direct contacts between the clients and the projects and we’re not buying and selling carbon
credits, there is no mark-up. The money from the customer, goes directly to the project, and you could
think of us like the project’s in-house marketing team.” – Informant 6 on Everland’s role.
The partial reason behind the confusions and contradicting answers is likely in the fact that all
the projects operate slightly differently and are rarely very straight forward. Money flow and
benefit sharing mechanisms can be arranged in several ways and especially people working
with multiple projects deal with multiple differing arrangements. Also Foster et al. (2017, p.
124) notice in their research about VCS audited REDD+ projects, that project proponents and
developers, ”whether novice or experienced, lack complete information to quickly answer
common questions”. Even The International Criminal Police Organization has described
carbon offsets as “legal fiction that is poorly understood by many sellers, buyers and traders”
(Interpol, 2013, p. 11). According to the organization, this lack of understanding and the
“imaginary” nature of the commodity makes the market particularly vulnerable to fraud and
other illegal activity (ibid.). No evidence of such appeared during this research, but the
contradicting answers, evasiveness and non-transparency of the money flow indicate at least
that the markets are complicated and difficult to understand even for those working with them.
In Finland, the complexity is a visible part of the discussion around offsets and the uncertainties
of the market have been a popular topic in the media. Articles refer to offsetting business as
“wild” (Haapanen, 2019a; Hartikainen, 2020; Hukkanen & Kanerva, 2020) to emphasize the
point that it can be difficult for a consumer to know, if offsets they buy correspond to anything.
Many of the Finnish articles address this issue, aiming to explain the problems of offsets and
ways to avoid them and often end up in a conclusion that it’s difficult to know. When talking
37
about problems of offsetting, Finnish media focus mainly on the question if the carbon credits
bought correspond to emission reductions. The headlines ask “is claim for carbon neutrality
greenwashing or not?” (Pinola, 2018b), “can emissions be offset with money?” (Pinola, 2018a)
and “indulgence trade or climate activism?” (Riikonen, 2019). The articles show scepticism
towards the business idea and the angle they take is mostly in protecting the consumer from
buying untrustworthy products2.
The contradicting answer in my interviews, focus on uncertainties in public discussion and, for
example, Compensate’s legal case with the Finnish gambling administration, show the
difficulty in constructing a commodity out of ecosystem services. It has been seen that the
complexities of the offsetting system and the previously revealed misuses increase the mistrust
towards the market (Finnwatch, 2021). At least Finnish legal framework, media, civil society
organizations and the consumers find the idea of offsetting difficult to grasp and trust.
4.4. Representations of successes and threats
The SCRP operates in an area that many want their piece of. The ecosystems in the Cardamoms
are threatened by high demand for agricultural land, large infrastructure projects, mining,
logging and poaching (e.g. Al Jazeera, 2019; Killeen, 2012; Pasgaard, 2013). In all of the
SCPR’s communications, deforestation is presented as the main problem the project is
targeting. Deforestation of specifically the Cardamoms is shown to be a problem by stressing
the importance and uniqueness of the area. Cardamoms are often described as a “biodiversity
hotspot” (e.g. Brown & Haxtema, 2018a, p. 66, 2018b, p. 42; Compensate, n.d.-b; Everland,
n.d.; Wildlife Works, 2018, pp. 9, 13, 175), and the Mountains’ importance to endangered
species (especially large mammals) and local communities is emphasized.
People offsetting their carbon footprint and implementing the projects often operate with a
premise that that their projects can create well-being in a global scale while also mitigating
climate change and creating economic growth (e.g. Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2014). To
justify the project, its developers must showcase a threat to the area they are protecting to create
the baseline, but also show success to justify themselves as the right actor to fix things
(Büscher, 2014). Moore (2017a, p. 597) describes the mainstream of the current green thought
2 Though, the problems of the carbon markets have also occasionally been noted in wider sense as well, for
instance in 2017, when Yle reported about an offset project partially owned by Finnish development financier and
professional impact investor, Finnfund, that has forcefully driven people from their homes, treated them with
violence and confiscated their property in Uganda (Frilander, 2017). Finnfund denied all accusations, argued that
the project has brought positive development to the area (Finnfund, 2017).
38
as based on the clear distinction between nature and society, humans and the rest: “The
resulting story of ecological crisis is a kind of Tale of the Fall. Humans do bad things to Nature.
Nature becomes a fantasy of the wild, of pristine nature, awaiting our protection, fearing
destruction at our hands.” This tale is visible along the way of the carbon credit in the
Cardamom-Compensate chain. In this chapter I discuss how in the Cardamoms the nature is
described to be under a threat by (some of the) locals and in need of protection from
international conservation organizations, which then justifies the intervention. Strengthening
the justification, the rarity and endangeredness of the Mountains’ pristine nature is emphasized
in the project documentation and communications and the need of action from (good) humans
is a frequent talking point of the Cambodian media.
In the SCRP, showing success happens mostly through emphasizing victories and the expertise
of the organizations involved. Similar way of describing the threats, emphasizing the good
work done by Wildlife Alliance and quantifying the achievements is seen on SCRP’s project
documentation and all websites analysed for this research. Some of the websites texts are even
organized under headings of “The Problem” and “The Solution” (Everland, n.d.; Wildlife
Works, n.d.). In them, and in some of the interviews, the Cardamoms’ situation is described
with a certain narrative: previous situation is described as critical, but then luckily a solution is
found in good organizations and REDD+ money, and a disaster is avoided. After the narrative-
like description, comes a “scorecard”, where achievements are quantified in kilometres
patrolled, chainsaws confiscated, snares destroyed, and court cases filed against forest
criminals (Wildlife Works, n.d.), which shows success in quantifiable, technical and easy-to-
understand way. In addition to work of the organization, also the greatness of individuals is
emphasized: Suwanna Gauntlett, Founder and CEO of Wildlife Alliance is described by her
organization as follows: “Dedicating her life to protecting rainforests and wildlife in some of
the world’s most hostile and rugged environments, Suwanna Gauntlett has set the trend for a
new generation of direct action conservationists” (Wildlife Alliance, 2017).
In Compensate actions have been personified in the founder and CEO Antero Vartia. In the
media, Compensate’s launch was reported with headline “Antero Vartia is going to save the
world” (‘Antero Vartia aikoo pelastaa maailman’, Onninen, 2019). The foundation’s publicity
leans on Vartia’s persona and previous public visibility, but expertise is based on a scientific
advisory panel, that has together with the foundation created a set of criteria for evaluating
land-use based carbon capture projects and is constituted of mostly Finnish scientists in areas
of, for example, atmospheric and forest science (Compensate, 2020a, 2020b). The panel has
39
received some credit for increasing the foundation’s credibility in the physical environmental
questions, but critique over the fact that it has not had a member that is expert in areas such as
human rights (Finnwatch, 2021, p. 60). This is in line with the ecomodernist thinking, that has
been analysed to be focused on cost-effective environmental problem-solving rather than
human rights or social justice (Lidskog & Elander, 2012). It can be seen that in the case of
Cardamom-Compensate it is white Americans and Europeans who are raised to the roles of
experts, saviours and philanthropists, though it should be noted that at least Wildlife Alliance
also employs at least some Cambodian experts. Meanwhile, people and countries of the global
South are framed as in need of help or as causes of the problem.
Wildlife Alliance has effectively been able to perform its successes publicly, for example, in
relation to poaching. Commercial hunting, wildlife trade and snares are seen as a cause of many
species such as Javan Rhinoceros, Indochinese tiger and Indochinese leopard becoming extinct
or near-extinct in Cambodia (Coad et al., 2019). Wildlife Alliance discusses poaching and their
operations to curb it actively in their communications. Protecting endangered animals is
something the audiences can easily comprehend and appreciate, which makes communicating
about it fruitful. This is perhaps because it is something concrete and thus appealing to
consumers, as White and Habib (2018) explain in relation to tangibility. The activities related
to rescuing animals and arresting poachers are popular also in the Cambodian media (e.g.
Chakrya, 2020; Chork, 2014; Dara, 2018; David, 2020; Khmer Times, 2020). This reporting is
golden for the organization, as it emphasizes both their successes and the threats the area is
facing, contributing to the thought that the situation would be much worse without them. From
Compensate’s end, arresting poachers seems less significant, as the foundation sells carbon
capture rather than animal protection. Thus, cute, rescued animals, or especially the grotesque
carcasses found by the rangers, do not get such a big part in their communications.
In the SCRP’s project documentation, each problem and the specific interventions directed
towards it are listed and evaluated in tables, which corresponds to Li’s (2007a, 2007b) concept
of rendering technical – presenting problems with clear boundaries and characteristics and then
solutions that match to them. Describing and analysing threats and problems is intuitively
important in planning and justifying any intervention. In the case of offsets however, it
becomes even more vital because of the importance of the baseline, the estimated situation in
the area if the project did not exist, that describes the level of future deforestation without
intervention. Defining a baseline is tantamount to define the amount of credits the project can
produce, and it forms the ground for whole production of carbon credits. The baselines’
40
accuracy is estimated through a reference area, that is similar to the project area, but without
intervention. Projects can try to produce more credits by manipulating the reference area, for
example, by choosing an easy-to-access area near big road or a city, whereas the project area
itself could be difficult to access, for instance, up on mountains. No evidence of reference area
manipulation was found from the SCRP in this research and as mentioned, some informants
thought that the project has, on the contrary, underestimated its baseline.
The project documentation of the SCRP aims to show how the problems in the area can clearly
be answered with the project’s interventions. Deforestation is largely presented to be happening
because of human activity and as people are presented as the biggest problem, the project
naturally targets them. The ways to stop deforestation and biodiversity loss can roughly be
categorized into hard and soft ways: law enforcement and community development. Law
enforcement is what it sounds like: Wildlife Alliance has over hundred rangers in the area, and
it has built seven ranger stations over the years to catch illegal loggers and poachers, to
confiscate chainsaws and to remove snares from the forest. Law breakers receive punishments,
for example, jail time. Just enforcing the law is not enough. Something must be offered to
replace the harmful activities and to show that the project is beneficial to the local people. The
intervention type called community development consists of work such as teaching new
agricultural practices and supporting community-based ecotourism. Community fund helps
locals get education and healthcare that would otherwise be outside their financial limits.
Ecotourism brings money from international tourists to the area, but the project developers also
hoped that it could work to spread environmental awareness domestically:
“I think in time, you are going to build a domestic constituency for environmental conservation just by
keeping the forest standing and getting people in there through domestic ecotourism. 30 years from now,
whether REDD is still going on, I have no idea, but you are going to have a lot more support from
Cambodian voters, elite and leaders for why to preserve the Cardamoms.” – Informant 3.
The baseline and the emphasis on threats are interesting and even somewhat contradicting in
situations like the Cardamoms, as the project developers need to simultaneously perform
expertise and trustworthiness. Wildlife Alliance operated at the Cardamoms before the
beginning of the REDD+ project and the SCRP’s way of showing trustworthiness leans heavily
on Wildlife Alliance’s long experience in the area. At the beginning of the REDD+, the
narrative changed to say that the area is under a massive threat, almost at the verge of
destruction, which a sense this can be seen as undermining Wildlife Alliance’s previous work
and as slightly contradictory. Though, when I discussed this interpretation with the informants,
41
some heavily disagreed, while some admitted that the change in narrative is indeed stark,
almost comical.
4.5. Excluded from problematisation: broader politics of deforestation in
Koh Kong
Describing rendering technical, Li (2007a) refers to Ferguson (1994) in explaining that the
problem is diagnosed simultaneously as properly trained experts appear with a solution to it.
The dimensions rendered technical are also rendered non-political, as the said experts exclude
the fuller structure of political-economic relations from their analysis to better fit their solutions
to the problems (Li, 2007a, pp. 7 & 126). In the case of the SCRP this appears to mean that
some aspects, such as the political context in and around the conservation area, are left
unmentioned. Listing the main threats and drivers of deforestation, the project documentation
of the SCRP leaves out some aspects that came up in other parts of the data gathering and the
literature review. The finding is consistent with previous literature, for example, Milne and
Mahanty (2019, p. 133) note that REDD+ standards commit to an “audit culture”, that is
“apolitical and indifferent to local realities.” Isolation from political-economic surroundings
has even been seen necessary for the commodification of carbon (e.g. Leach & Scoones,
2015).
The Cardamoms are a place of many conflicting interests. To keep their position on the area,
conservation organizations must overlook or even indirectly support other types of projects,
such as dams. Atay, Tatay and Russei Chrum in the Cardamoms are CDM dams, meaning that
in addition to electricity, they also produce carbon credits. Unfortunately, they are also seen as
negatively impacting local livelihoods and vulnerable coastal ecosystems and their ability to
produce real emission reductions through additionality has been questioned (IR, 2013;
Käkönen & Thuon, 2019). Building of the dams caused general restlessness in the area, as
building infrastructure around them opened new channels deeper into the forests, which meant
new ways to access areas that had been inaccessible before, thus increasing activities such as
logging and poaching (ibid.). The forest clearance rights around the dams in were given to the
responsibility of two Cambodian companies with close ties to the political elite (Käkönen &
Thuon, 2019; Milne, 2015). Due to these large industrial projects, the year 2012 was
particularly eventful in the Cardamoms and the connection between the individual incidents in
the Mountains and the building of the CDM dams, is apparent, for instance, in Käkönen and
Thuon’s (2019) article. For example, rangers paid by American organization Conservation
42
International, were found taking bribes from illegal loggers, whose very work they were
supposed to prevent (Boyle & Titthara, 2012). In April, an environmental activist Chut Wutty
was shot dead in the mountains while he was showing the area to journalists.
Also in 2012, Cambodian government and Chinese-owned company Sinohydro started
planning a dam project in the Areng Valley, that is now inside the SCRP project area. The
valley is important to biodiversity and home to the indigenous Chong people and many
endangered species, though interestingly, the SCRP’s project documentation makes a point to
question the indigenous status of people living in the valley (Wildlife Works, 2018, pp. 16,
155). Cambodians and international activist community successfully defended the valley and
according to a Cambodian environmental organization Mother Nature Cambodia, the dam is
now a “mere distant threat”, as the government changed its mind about the dam being vital to
the country’s energy needs to saying that it would cause “massive environmental impacts” and
“inhibit potential revenue through ecotourism in the billions” (Prime Minister Hun Sen quoted
in Mother Nature Cambodia, n.d.-a).
Informant 1, a former Mother Nature activist, argued that foreign countries such as China and
Singapore have influence in the area that poses a threat to its natural resources. In addition to
the Areng dam project, he described a sand mining project near the Cardamom’s, that aimed to
transport sand to Singapore. In 2017 it was revealed that Singapore had imported sand for
US$700 million, while Cambodian government data had only recorded US$5 million, which
then revealed a large tax evasion scandal in Cambodia’s end (Mother Nature Cambodia, n.d.-
b; Seangly & Turton, 2017). As a result of Mother Nature’s campaigning, the sand exports to
Singapore were banned (The Straits Times, 2017). Together with the CDM dams (Käkönen &
Thuon, 2019) the sand mining negatively impacts mangrove trees and the fisheries at the
coastline of Gulf of Thailand (Mother Nature Cambodia, n.d.-b), the same area which is
supposedly enjoying the benefits of the SCRP: “The SCRP’s watershed is important for the
fisheries of the Gulf of Thailand as it provides fresh water to the largest contiguous mangrove
forest left in the Gulf, Peam Krasop Wildlife Sanctuary, which is a critical nursery for the
region’s fisheries” (Wildlife Works, 2018, p. 10). It appears, that without Mother Nature, the
impacts of the SCRP wouldn’t be as comprehensive, as they are now claimed to be.
Another thing the informant 1 found problematic was corruption. Corruption-like activities are
mentioned a few times in the Project description and Monitoring report, but only in the results
of the community workshops, as something that would worsen without the project and thus
43
contribute to illegal logging. Similarly, in relation to poaching, the local rangers mention the
relationships between the poachers and police as problematic (Dara, 2018). This can be seen
showing that locals as a larger group see corruption and the larger phenomena of patronage-
based relations as a problem. The situation in the Cardamoms has been seen as overshadowed
by the CPPs “personalized relationships and patronage exchanges” (Milne, 2015, p. 206),
where allocating resources, positions and business opportunities to elite close to the party is a
not an uncommon practice (Un & So, 2011). However, the Validation and Verification
documents only mention corruption when noting that no traces of taking bribes or other bad
behaviour was found from the project staff, not as something that might be a threat to the area.
REDD+ projects such as the SCRP while often large still only protect patches of forested land.
Cambodia is losing its forest cover dangerously fast, but this is partly masked by the
UNFCCC’s technical definition of forests, which excludes important ecological and socio-
economic qualities and allows Cambodia to concept monoculture tree farms such as rubber
plantations as forests (Scheidel & Work, 2018). Despite Cambodia’s eagerness to participate
in REDD+, the government has also become known for granting land concessions to domestic
tycoons and multi-national corporations, for example, for pulp, paper, rubber and sugar
production (e.g. Dasgupta, 2015; Käkönen & Thuon, 2019; Keeton-Olsen, 2020; Milne, 2015;
Nophea et al., 2001; Scheidel & Work, 2018). It has also been argued that together with large
corporations, international conservation organizations serve to reinforce current governmental
institutions, CPP and its members’ personal gain and regime strengthening (Milne, 2015).
As different actors operate in Koh Kong and in the Cardamom area, interests seem to
sometimes collide. For example, campaigning against the Areng Valley dam Mother Nature’s
strategies involved vocal critique towards government, civil disobedience and bringing tourists
to the valley to increase awareness and to bring revenue to the locals.
“In 2015 we blocked the road for 6 months because Chinese company and government tried to come
inside and built the dam. After 6 months the governor of the province came and arrested 11 people and
founder of Mother Nature. They went to Koh Kong police station. -- After fighting to stop the hydropower
dam for 2 or 3 years, the government had no choice, and that’s why they organized ecotourism into the
valley but not with Mother Nature, but with Wildlife Alliance. We were still happy about that, because
the nature in the Areng is not under threat anymore.” – Informant 1.
Essentially, Mother Nature’s work has been of use to the goals of the SCRP and Wildlife
Alliance. However, the relationship between the two is not simple, and informant 1 mentioned
that Wildlife Alliance has told locals to not to work with Mother Nature:
44
“Their policy doesn’t allow them to work with Mother Nature or other NGOs. I don’t know why. We got
the information about this from the local people. -- I’m not unhappy when they organize ecotourism in
the area. But they try to control the area so that we cannot do anything. -- They are working with the
government and have a lot of power. -- We have the same environmental goal, so why are they fighting
against us?” – Informant 1 on Wildlife Alliance.
When presented with a claim that Wildlife Alliance limits its partners’ cooperation with other
organizations, informant 2, a former employee of the organization, declined the existence of
such policy:
“That’s not true…. Though… there has been some conflict with some NGOs. Cambodian organization
called Mother Nature that was integral in preventing the development of the Areng dam, has become too
vocal critic of the government for NGOs to… Wildlife Alliance operates by partnering with the
government. Mother Nature has gone down the line, which is probably needed in Cambodia, being
essentially an extremely direct vocal critic of the government, to the extent that they were strongly aligned
with the now dissolved opposition party3. And for an NGO like Wildlife Alliance, or any big or even a
small conservation NGO, they cannot be seen politically aligned either with ruling party or the
opposition, and Mother Nature was too aligned.” – Informant 2.
The comment about Wildlife Alliance not being aligned with either ruling or opposing party
seems strange in the light of the fact that the SCRP is essentially owned by the Cambodian
government and thus of the ruling party, Cambodian People's Party (CPP). Therefore, some
cooperation and alignment is necessary for the execution of the project, especially since the
CPP is known for its rather dominant and authoritarian touch, where environmental questions
do not make an exception (e.g. Milne, 2015). Mother Nature continues to operate near the
SCRP, for example, in the Koh Kong Island, under the threat of commercial logging. The
Cambodian government continues to oppose Mother Nature with force and arrests of young
environmental activists have been criticised, for example, by Amnesty International (2020).
Disregarding the influence of foreign nations, patronage relations or clear corruption, and the
overall action of the CCP and the domestic elite in the project’s official documentation and
communications is interpreted in different ways. One of the informants argued, that it is
because the documents were prepared such a long time ago and these things were not problems
then, which seems surprising, as the project documents are all dated to 2018 and as was
discussed earlier, many of these issues escalated in the area already in 2012. Ignorance or
3 Cambodia’s main opposition party, CNRP, was dissolved in 2017 and its 118 members all received a five-year
political ban (e.g. Lefevre & Thul, 2017). The ruling was criticized by rights groups, who said it leaves the prime
minister unopposed, makes the elections meaningless and pushes Cambodia to a de facto one-party state (ibid.).
Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander, has been a prime minister of Cambodia since 14 January 1985.
45
unprofessionalism from Wildlife Alliance’s part is also unlikely to be the culprit – the NGO
seems to recognize the problems and even work to counter them, for example, by lobbying
outside of the REDD+ project.
“Chinese investment. Mines. Plantations. Wanting to convert forest to palm oil or whatever. Yea, that’s
the biggest things. Mining concessions. And now there is a road proposal that would cut right in the
middle. High power voltage line going right through the middle. -- There is always proposals and we’re
fighting against them and oftentimes win. Majority of times we win. But there is always nibbling at the
edges.” – Informant 3 on biggest threats to the Cardamoms.
Similar understanding towards the larger structures and the political situation in Cambodia
arose in the interviews with Compensate’s employees:
Of course, when you see Cambodian map, the country has lost like 50 % of its forest cover in 20 years
and that’s a lot. And this is mostly driven by the government’s logging concessions. That’s the main
driver. Even conservation areas, like some national parks and wildlife conservation areas, can still be
part of logging concessions. – Informant 7.
On the basis of information available for this research, it is likely that the CCP does not want
to frame their own actions or foreign influence, especially the relationship with China, as
problems for political reasons. Even though Cambodia appears to gain a lot of benefit from
Chinese projects going on in the country, for example, in the form of economic activity, the
endeavours are usually not just single projects, but “constitutive components of multipurpose
bilateral affairs containing a wide variety of more or less bundled aid, investment, trade and
diplomatic deals” (Käkönen, 2020, pp. 98–99). This complex nature of the bilateral affairs
causes effects, that usually benefit China more than its partner countries (ibid). Due to its ties
to CCP especially in the SCRP, Wildlife Alliance is balancing on a narrow ridge to make an
actual impact to protect the nature, without breaking the cooperation. The organization cannot,
for example, publicly note the effectiveness of Mother Nature’s strategies, because that would
endanger their cooperation with the government and with that, the execution of the whole
project and the bargaining power they now have. Additionally, possible problems and threats
in the area are left unmentioned, because solutions matching those problems would not fit into
the cooperation and political environment surrounding the project.
Alongside the political reasons to ignore the aspects of reality and drivers of deforestation in
the Cardamoms, another explanation might lay in the baseline approach of the carbon markets.
While “selling success” (Büscher, 2014), the conservation organizations operating in carbon
markets must equally, if not more intensely, sell the problem. Without the threat to the protected
46
area, no baseline can be determined. Thus, it is theoretically logical for the conservation
organizations not only to emphasize or even exaggerate the threat, but also not to operate too
eagerly to completely erase its source. As the production of the credits is based on the existence
of a threat, the baseline approach offers no incentive for the project developers to work to root
out the actual drivers of deforestation. If the source of the threat disappears the project
developers might start to have a hard time showing the importance of their presence in the area.
4.6. Moving target
A project that can recognize, understand, and intervene with the whole political reality around
a topic is probably a rare one. In the interconnected world, everything links to everything, so
while a holistic approach is vital, it is also difficult to achieve. Li’s (2007a) theory about
rendering technical can be used to analyse the SCRP’s project documentation, that largely
leaves out the political context in Cambodia and Koh Kong province. Commonly the biggest
threats mentioned to the Cardamoms in the project documentation and official communication
are illegal logging, clearing forest for agricultural land, and poaching, all done by people living
in the area (locals or “in-migrants”). In the SCRP, focus is put on capacities of the locals rather
than the wider structures and practices, which then makes planned development into what
Ferguson calls “anti-politics machine”, that reposes questions of land, resources, jobs and so
on as merely technical problems that can be faced with expert knowledge and intervention
(Ferguson, 1994, p. 270; Li, 2007a, p. 7). In the case of SCRP, rendering technical and side-
lining parts of the surrounding context can be seen as shifting the project’s target.
Blaming of the locals and their practices for forest destruction has been seen as almost universal
among offset projects (Leach & Scoones, 2015, pp. 7–8). Vandergeest and Roth (2016) note
that already for many years and several researchers of political ecology in South East Asia have
questioned the tendency of outside observers to blame the forest residents and agriculture for
deforestation, as in reality most of the forest clearing has been done to benefit the export market
and the forest residents in many cases have been able to manage forests in sustainable fashion.
Delabre et al. (2020) explain that in forest governance interventions target the locals, for
example, on logging, but illegal loggers are rarely the source of the problem and arresting them
might not have that big an impact. Behind the individuals there is often what has been described
as “murky political economy” featured with corruption, lack of transparency and clientelist and
patronage networks where businesses driving deforestation are owned by the state officials or
by individuals in position to influence their decisions (ibid. p. 3).
47
In the SCRP project documentation and communication, local people represent the importance
and uniqueness of the area (indigenous groups), cause of deforestation and biodiversity loss
(ignorant and illegal actors) and the solutions (rangers, ecotourism entrepreneurs). In general,
they are represented as a potential threat to the forest that if empowered and educated to take
the right direction, can also become a part of its salvation, but until that must be stopped by
force. The core of intervention is the ranger force:
“The project also leads a unique and effective boots-on-the-ground law enforcement model that focuses
on training, supervising, equipping and mentoring law enforcement rangers. The effective field-level
partnership between staff from the project, the Ministry of Environment, and the Military Police is a
unique ingredient of the project’s success.” – description of the SCRP on Everland’s (n.d.) website.
When discussing law enforcement in public communications, the loggers and poachers that the
rangers target are not described in detail, most likely to avoid going into the topic of why they
are in the situation where they have to break the law in the first place. Wildlife Alliance
employee, informant 3, mentioned that their activities usually relate to larger structures of
illegal logging and land grabbing led by a wealthier individual or organization, and the
individuals that the rangers encounter are just a symptom, not the source of the problem.
However, he still saw targeting them as the core of the SCRP’s work:
“They are just poor people, but this is them just… Just pathetic figures that will make it harder to people
to enforce the law and they are sympathetic figures, poor, very poor people who just want to eat. -- We
have to be ready to be the bad guys sometimes, to the sympathetic people in the forest who are interacting
with the law enforcement team. The core of our work is the law enforcement and it’s difficult to raise
money for them. It’s ultimately the poor people in the forest, who are deprived of livelihood because of
our law enforcement, so people are reluctant to be associated with those activities. Whereas with REDD,
it focuses on our results.” – Informant 3 on opportunities of market-based funding.
Targeting “poor people” who “just want to eat” with armed rangers and military police indeed
sounds like an endeavour that might face difficulties in fundraising operations. In REDD+,
focus can be seen to be more divided than, for example, in projects that rely more on donations.
As mentioned before, Compensate sells its portfolio as a readymade set, which makes it
difficult to the consumer to assess the individual projects and the nature of their interventions.
To legitimize the use of armed force, it appears to be enough to just categorize the locals into
“good guys”, “bad guys” and those “in need of help”. This is not uncommon. Vandergeest and
Roth (2016, p. 82) note that environmental narratives often blame marginalized people for
environmental degradation, or on the other hand, romanticize them as saviours. It is relatively
48
easy to see that these categories constantly overlap and are more complex, and the project
developers working with the SCRP are not trying to hide it. For example, they often discuss
the rangers as previous “bad guys” (loggers or poachers) who were helped (given a job) and
are now “good guys” (rangers) and vital in saving the forest. Milne and Adams (2012), who
explore REDD+ and Payments for Environmental Services in the Cardamoms, note that despite
the understanding that people have many identities, roles and approaches to the forest the
communities are often treated as homogenous mass, thus social inequalities, complex
relationships around resources and diverse livelihoods among them are ignored in the projects.
Human drivers of deforestation are emphasized to justify the problematization and the
intervention and the blame is pushed on local communities. However, especially in the
interviews, the informants connected the actions of the individuals to larger societal structures.
For example, locals are said to clear the forest by logging or “slash and burn agriculture” and
according to the project documentation and the interviews, they do this due to poverty and land
rights issues. Land rights issues include land speculation. Some clear land and claim to be
living there only to get rights to it and sell it to speculators later. Forest clearing creates paths
deeper into the forest for further land clearing, and disturbs wildlife, which in turn links to
poaching, which is also done by locals, who need money or employment. In the project
documentation or official communications the reasons why the locals are in the situation where
they need to resort in illegal logging or poaching is however, usually not dealt with in any
detail, and the focus in on stopping the individuals from clearing the forest.
The way of describing certain actions is important in the process of problematization. If the
forest clearing done by the locals was described in the project documentation as a vital
livelihood activity of people who have no other options, intervention of arresting them with
armed rangers would be difficult to justify. Instead, the wordings used are such as “illegal
logging” and “slash and burn agriculture”. For example, the term “slash and burn agriculture”
can be seen institutionalizing the problem by describing it in a way that it sounds critical and
threatening, but it also connects to a longer historical process of problematizing the actions of
the locals in South East Asia. A local activist, informant 1, used the words “rotation farming”
to describe the same process and thought that it was something the locals should not do
anymore. His choice of words could be seen as implying that he saw it as a rather normal, just
perhaps an outdated practice. Another term is swidden agriculture, but essentially, all terms
refer to clearing the land usually by fire and leaving it to regenerate for some years before
farming on it again. Some indigenous organizations use the term “shifting cultivation” and
49
argue it to be a traditional indigenous practice, that if practiced freely and by traditional
methods, should not be seen as a driver of deforestation at all (e.g. Mamo et al., 2020, p. 8). To
be ecologically viable, shifting cultivation needs “enough land for long (10–20 years)
restorative fallow, and expectations of crop yield and the attendant standards of living are not
too high” (Lal, 2005, p. 488). Thus, if the areas of shifting cultivation are limited, for example,
by conservation, it begins to put more pressure on the environment and thus framing it as a
problem is not necessarily untrue. However, again the root of the problem is ignored so that
the practice itself can be seen as guilty. Negative attitudes and attempts to curb “slash and burn
agriculture” are rooted in historical attitudes in South East Asia, but have also been amplified
by the views of large international organization, such as the FAO (Vandergeest & Roth, 2016,
p. 86).
In addition to militarized resource enclosing, also softer ways of intervention in the SCRP offer
some contradictions. Looking at the whole chain from Compensate’s end, shows a process that
has emission reduction and climate action as its main goal. Ecotourism in the Cardamoms is
slightly contradictory to this. The SCRP markets the Cardamoms to tourists, who bring money
to the area. Especially foreign tourists are appreciated, as they typically use more local services
such as motorbikes and boats, whereas local tourists arrive with their own vehicles and in
general spend less money. Already in more than ten years ago, The Phnom Penh Post (Murray,
2009) reported about tourists contributing heavily to country’s emissions. Tourism industry in
Cambodia has been continuously growing and has been forecasted to continue on that path
(Vannak, 2020), though how the industry will recover from the Covid-19 pandemic is yet to be
seen. The SCRP’s way of emphasizing ecotourism as a method of intervention shows that
conservation and climate action can contradict each other. If one pays to offset the emissions
of the flights of their holiday trip and part of the money is used to market a Cambodian national
park to international tourists, calculating the actual impact becomes more complicated than just
measuring the average carbon capturing biomass. Ecotourism as an intervention strategy can
be interpreted to mean that the SCRP should not necessarily primarily be seen as a climate
change mitigation project, but more as a project of local forest governance. Similarly to CDM
dams in the area (Käkönen & Thuon, 2019), the goal of the project activities can be seen
elsewhere and carbon credits are a (fortunate and profitable) side product that are born out of
an accreditation scheme of documentation, representation, quantification and simplification.
As a conclusion, it can be said that the interventions in the Cardamom respond to the described
threat of individual people and communities going rogue and destroying the forests and allow
50
the project to intervene with the lives of the locals, but do not give the locals tools to fight
against larger national and international forces that harm the area. Military police and logging
bans have been used in Cambodia before to curb “anarchic logging” of small scale loggers to
free space for logging concessions given to larger companies (Milne, 2015, p. 207).
Militarization of forest conservation has also been seen as a larger trend going on globally and
in part being facilitated by REDD+ (Cavanagh et al., 2015). The strategy of the SCRP and
REDD+ in general corresponds mostly to the idea of tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968),
which reasons that to avoid destruction, people must be prevented from using the commons.
The SCRP emphasizes the work done with local communities and the power given to them
through community workshops in the project documentation, which can be seen as aiming for
more “Ostromian” (e.g. Ostrom, 1990) approach of community-based work. Though it is clear
that some aspects that worry the locals have been ignored by the project and it is difficult to
see the SCRP as a bottom-up style endeavour. As has been mentioned, rather than targeting
and arresting locals with top-down interventions, recognizing collective land rights and
traditional forms of governing land has been seen as better functioning, more cost-effective
and more just way of reducing deforestation and carbon emissions (e.g. FAO & FILAC, 2021;
Osborne, 2015; Perkins, 2019; Vandergeest & Roth, 2016). It could even be deducted, that the
SCRP might be less about conservation and more about keeping the natural resources under
tight governance and in store for future use. This can be seen as a natural continuum of, the
conservation area pre-existing the REDD+ project, that has facilitated the building of the CDM
dams and the loggings caused by them: “The ability of the state to grant extraction concessions
within the conservation zone proves its superior public authority compared to international co-
governing entities” (Käkönen & Thuon, 2019, p. 1199).
The focus on the locals and their practices, helping them as ecotourism entrepreneurs or in
chasing down the forest criminals, can be seen as quite non-transformative especially if we
want to see the SCRP primarily as a climate change mitigation project: “Carbon mitigation
efforts often focus on the world’s poorest people, dealing with topics such as food and energy
security, and increased emissions potential from projected population, income and
consumption growth. However, more policies are needed that target people at the opposite end
of the social ladder – the super-rich.” (Otto et al., 2019, p. 82). While the countries of the global
North cause more emissions, it has also been found that the tropical deforestation is accelerated
by the consumption in the richer countries (Hoang & Kanemoto, 2021; Wedeux &
Schulmeister-Oldenhove, 2021). Examining the Cardamom-Compensate chain, it appears that
51
the people in the Cardamoms have no option but to consent to changes in their lives, so that a
possibility to not change anything, or change as little as possible, can be offered to the people
buying the carbon credits.
4.7. Facing the critique – heated discussions around offsets
As has become clear, the SCRP does not operate in a vacuum. The context of REDD+ in
Cambodia and globally has affected not only the ways the project operates and communicates,
but likely also the ways the informants answered my questions. Thus, at this point it is good to
spend some time to gain understanding of the overall context of REDD+ in Cambodia, where
the whole idea is of carbon offsets is clearly much more familiar, than what it is in Finland.
This shows especially well, when comparing to the media data of the two countries. In Finland
the topic is dealt through bigger, more explanatory pieces and even larger, investigative
reportages (e.g. Haapanen, 2019a; Riikonen, 2019; Sandell, 2020), whereas in Cambodian
media produces day-to-day news discussing concrete topics, such as price and saleability of
the carbon credits and how offset projects impact the lives of the locals (e.g. Amaro & Seangly,
2018; Chevillard, 2016; DW, 2019; Koemsoeun, 2019; Kunthear, 2018; Reddick, 2015). Two
REDD+ projects in particular have affected the Cambodian public discussion around offsets.
From 2014 onwards, a project with VCS and CCB standards in Oddar Meanchey has received
rather negative publicity, as it, despite the respected accreditation, failed to stop deforestation
and to sell carbon credits. According to Cambodian press, what was meant to be the country’s
first forest-based carbon credit trading scheme turned into an illegal logging ground and a place
of border disputes (Kuch & Zsombor, 2014; Phorn & Zsombor, 2014). The project produced
48,000 carbon credits even though forest cover decreased in average from 88 per cent in 2008
to 46 per cent in 2017, and most dramatically in Andong Bor site from 90 to 0 percent (Song,
2019). Due to lack of aid from government and the project’s inability to generate carbon based
revenues even the locals who originally wished to protect the forests turned to logging, as their
conservation efforts seemed hopeless (Ken et al., 2020; Kuch & Zsombor, 2014). The
development was accelerated by Cambodian military, that operated in the area and was already
cutting trees in the community areas and causing other land rights disputes undermining the
project (e.g. Frewer, 2018; Kuch & Zsombor, 2014; Phorn & Zsombor, 2014). The project’s
efforts for local awareness and its benefit sharing mechanisms have been seen as limited which
has resulted in locals consenting to a project and investing their time and money on it without
actual guarantees of return (Takacs, 2014, p. 112).
52
In 2017 an international environmental NGO, Fern, published a report on international aviation
and carbon offsetting, describing the difficulties related to offsets and REDD+, using Oddar
Meanchey as an example (Kill, 2017). As a result, an aviation company Virgin Atlantic stopped
buying credits from the project (e.g. Amaro, 2018). Fern’s report raised the Oddar Meanchey
project to international attention. Organizations touched by the critique, Terra Global Capital,
VCS, and Wildlife Works, released public statements criticizing the report and accusing it, for
example, for being ideologically motivated, lacking of credible evidence and including false
information (the letters available in REDD-Monitor, 2018). The letters included heated
statements, such as “Shame on you Fern and others who seek to limit opportunities for
communities that desperately need financial resources to protect forests and make a decent
living without offering any viable alternatives” (ibid.). Wildlife Works’ answer to Fern’s report
begins with a rather personal statement: “We feel it is important for context that we point out
that Jutta Kill is a self-proclaimed enemy of REDD+ who has a history of being a hired gun
for anti-REDD foundations who seek to discredit our work” (ibid.). Terra Global Capital
defended the problems of Oddar Meanchey by noting that the issue was not in creating offsets,
but in the fact that the value of the carbon credits was too small to make sales (ibid.). A
researcher who had over several years carried part of his PhD work in Oddar Meanchey
answered the statements noting that the critique towards Fern was “disingenuous” and that
similar results had also been published in academic journals (Frewer, 2018). He also notes that
at the point of verification by VCS and CCB there was no evidence of livelihood activities
being conducted, but the project still received a gold rating for its outstanding social benefits
(ibid.).
While Oddar Meanchey project received public critique, another Cambodian REDD+ project,
Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary, enjoyed quite an opposite nature of publicity: “The Walt
Disney Company has purchased $2.6 million in carbon credits in the forests of Mondulkuri
province marking the largest carbon credit sale to date in Cambodia and breathing life into a
carbon trading program many had written off as all but dead” (Seangly & Kotoski, 2016). In
public discussion, the Disney deal is praised for being “favorable to Cambodia” price-vice, a
“new turning point for environmental conservation” (Charles, 2016), and for creating good
conditions for more partnerships with private sector (Kotoski, 2016).
While the SCRP itself has mostly remained out of publicity Wildlife Works was a part of the
heated discussion around Fern report, and the SCRP received technical assistance from the
employees of the Keo Seima project. Not surprisingly, many informants mentioned the Keo
53
Seima by name and discussed its success and ties to the SCRP. None mentioned Oddar
Meanchey, but when asked why Wildlife Works had participated in the public discussion
around it, informant 10 said that they had absolutely no connection to the project but felt a need
to defend the auditing systems. Informant 6 from Everland on the other hand, spent a good
amount of time talking about how some REDD+ projects in Cambodia have received
unnecessary critique based on false information. He did not mention names, but argued that
recently a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist had participated in the discussion in a shameful way
and was a perpetrator of “reckless journalism”, which I assume referred to a Pro Publica article
by Pulitzer winning Lisa Song, An (Even More) Inconvenient Truth: Why Carbon Credits For
Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing (2019), that dealt with several offset projects,
Oddar Meanchey included. It is reasonable to assume, that the Oddar Meanchey project’s
negative international publicity raised by the Fern’s report played a part in the carefulness and
defensive attitudes some of the informants interviewed for this thesis had around their
participation.
As has been discussed, will to improve (Li, 2007a) works to justify projects and interventions
in the fields of conservation and development. It also plays a part in explaining why projects
that have faced heavy resistance and critique haven’t been stopped (ibid.). Carbon credits and
their production are quite commonly seen through a critique towards commodification
ecosystem services and the harmful side effects of this process (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen,
2014; Fairhead et al., 2012; Osborne, 2015; Stephan, 2012), but strong negative side-effects,
such as violence or forced dispossession did not arise in this research. Interestingly, however,
it appears that the resistance and critique faced by other projects leaks to the side of the SCRP
forming a part of the discourse of the carbon markets within the people operating in this project
that has faced near to no public critique. While large problems haven’t come into publicity
from the SCRP, and my questions did not refer to the problems I had found on other projects,
careful and even defensive attitude towards critique and strong emphasis on “doing good” was
visible in some of the interviews conducted for this thesis. For example, informant 6 from
Everland opened the interview by asking if I was going to be critical and then before I could
ask any questions, gave a long speech about how REDD+ projects cannot fail and people
claiming such are misinformed and possess some sort of an agenda.
”So here you have a critic, sitting in… where ever they are sitting, in an office somewhere, and the people
that are risking their lives to protect the forest and to protect the wildlife and to bring benefits to world’s
54
poorest people, and then you have these misinformed people who are throwing rocks at these people who
are trying to do something good.” – Informant 6.
Informant 6 along with some others I talked with during this research fit into the description of
“The fantasy of carbon offsetting”, by Watt (2021), who interviewed 65 carbon market
practitioners and encountered similar discourses as I did regarding the reluctance to accept the
existence of failures and blaming critics for being irresponsible and misguided. Watt describes
how those around the carbon markets trust the system to work largely because they really want
it to work. This leads to them putting more trust on the auditing schemes than what they
necessarily deserve, and ignoring the problematic projects as “part of the past” or as work of
some bad intentioned outsiders, “carbon cowboys” (ibid. p. 14), a term that also arose in this
research in interview with informant 8 from Wildlife Works. Watt (ibid.) explains how failed
projects and the work of said cowboys, that has included, for example, land grabbing, are
explained by the practitioners as not being REDD+ projects at all, and people who think them
as such, are deemed misguided and irresponsible. This pattern was repeated in this research as
well, at least by the informants 6, 8 and 10, who saw critics of offsetting and REDD+ as ill-
advised bullies who are trying to prevent the good-intentioned people from doing good things.
This research revealed no reasons to doubt the good intentions of the people working around
the Cardamom-Compensate chain. Fischer and Hajdu (2018, p. 329), for example, note that
failures and problems related to offset projects are not necessarily the result of “hidden agendas
or motives for profit”, but the project developers possess a genuine determination to do good.
However, it has already for long been argued that good intentions are not enough to deliver
good results and can, in fact, often cause more harm (e.g. Illich, 1968). People behind the
actions must still keep explaining them to themselves and others in the best way possible,
because often their profession, livelihood or even sense of self depends on the idea that their
actions, projects and interventions are helping others (ibid).
What appears to be at the centre of the conflict is essentially the idea of putting monetary value
on forests or nature in general, and the arguments of it being ineffective, immoral, or at least
somehow suspicious. While some see the commercialization as expanding destructive carbon
capitalism to new frontiers, some think of it as the necessary and the only way to give nature a
fighting chance against other things humans value.
“So that’s one of the philosophical issues when people say, ‘well gee, you know what, it’s just morally
wrong to put commercial value on a forest through a carbon credit’. And, you know, on one hand I don’t
necessarily disagree. We shouldn’t have to do that. But the fact is that we do have to do that, and the
55
reason is that there’s many organizations who do place value on forests, but they place a value on forests
that are burned or cut down.” – Informant 6.
“Market-based conservation is necessary, and we believe that attaching market forces to conservation
is the only way to do it at the scale needed. It’s the only way to do it at the scale required to meet the
Paris Agreement goals or even try to meet those goals. I would answer that I’m not sure if it’s a sufficient
option, but I am sure that it’s the best option.” – Informant 8.
Drawing on Li’s will to improve (2007a) Fischer and Hajdu (2018) show how as a side effect
of the project developers’ determination to do good, local, context specific concerns can be
side-lined to prioritise climate change mitigation. This is done by emphasizing the urgency of
climate action, apolitical framing of sustainability and devaluation of local knowledge, which
leads the project developers to believe that they are working to create a win-win situation (ibid).
As has been discussed, reducing sustainability into technical calculations and, for example, a
quantity of carbon capturing biomass, and ignoring concerns of the locals next to the expertise
of western specialists is visible in the SCRP’s project documentation. Urgency of the climate
action comes across in the interviews. People working with carbon markets appear to see
themselves as racing against time to “save the world” by using the only way they see viable,
but still face criticism and attempts to stop them from trying.
“It’s like somebody’s house is on fire and you’re trying to put the fire out but then you have all these
people that are criticizing you because you spilled a little bit of water on the way or they don’t like the
size of your bucket or they don’t like what you are wearing to put the fire out.” – Informant 6.
Interviews with strongest defensive tone were the ones with the middle part of the production
chain, Everland and Wildlife Works. Most informants from Wildlife Alliance and Compensate
recognized that there might be problems in REDD+ projects, in conservation and carbon
markets in general and some were even suggesting improvements to their own organizations’
ways of operating. It can also be interpreted that these organizations have fewer negative
experiences with public conflicts around the topic and thus don’t feel the similar need to be
defensive. Informant 6 also implied that NGOs don’t care about critique because they know
the good work they are doing and just keep on focusing on that despite the people who are
“throwing rocks” at them. Interestingly, the problems that the informants from Everland and
Wildlife Works argued to be non-existent and even impossible to occur, are openly discussed
by Compensate and a part of their strategy of appearing as a responsible actor in their field.
Strong reactions are, however, also visible at Compensate’s end. The legal case with Finnish
gambling administration was met with a strong critique from the foundation’s part. In the
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media, the CEO Antero Vartia appearing as the foundation’s spokesman, calls the case, for
example, “unreasonable” and doubts its legality altogether (e.g. Teittinen, 2020). On Twitter
he argues that the gambling administrations has not heard a single expert and that they “don’t
even know how carbon offsetting works” (Vartia, 2020). As the legal case hinders Compensate
from operating in a way it originally had planned and, in a sense, came out of nowhere (no
previous indication of a possible case had been presented), defensiveness is not surprising. The
strongest feelings seem to have settled over the time of the process, as when Vartia was
formally charged with fundraising offense in June 2021, he only commented that “even though
the change in the legislation is already in process, it is good that the situation becomes clear”
(Mantsinen & STT, 2021).
It can be said that in Finland the argument is different in intensity and the gambling
administration appears to see the idea of selling the forests ability to store carbon mistrustful
and possibly harmful to consumers or open for fraud. Stronger discussions such as one between
Fern the carbon offsetting industry, or more general or normative natured debates on if its right
or wrong to put commercial value on nature, have not been widely present in Finnish
mainstream media in the context of offsetting at least in the past five years. The suspicion
towards the carbon markets focuses mainly on consumers and if they can trust the product.
5. Discussion: Non-transformative carbon markets
The Cardamom-Compensate carbon credits production chain is a complex one. To see the
connections between the production and consumption of carbon credits, it is useful to pay
special attention to some repeating themes and discussions present in all the levels of the chain.
The first recurring theme is the focus on individuals. In the Cambodian forests and among the
consumers in Finland, the focus in on the people, who are bound into the system where their
lives and livelihoods harm the environment, accelerate the climate change, or at least are
presented to do so. The interventions that are offered target the people and their ways of living
– both in Finland and in Cambodia – rather than the structures behind them that lock them into
this situation. Lamb et al. (2020) use the word “non-transformative” to describe solutions that
are overly optimistic about the markets or, for instance, put all trust on voluntary action of
individuals. They note that solutions like these tend to “avoid all options that are most
threatening to existing power structures and practices” (ibid. p. 4). The definition of success in
these solutions is narrow and more than transformative efforts, they provide cover for ongoing
unsustainable action (ibid.).
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Second, the non-transformative interventions fit into the neo-colonial discourse of knowledge
production, where problems and suitable solutions in a certain area are defined from above,
which then affects those involved in different ways. Individuals at both ends of the Cardamom-
Compensate chain are offered options that target merely the symptoms rather than roots of the
problem. However, the level of optionality varies between the two countries. For a western
consumer the solution offered by carbon markets is one that allows them not to change their
way of life, but to create this solution, lives and livelihoods must change in the Cardamoms.
The third overarching theme present in all the levels of the chain is the heated discussion
regarding the suitable way of action. On the ground, Wildlife Alliance and Mother Nature work
towards the goal of protecting the nature, but take a different stand on the nature of action, one
trying to assimilate to the existing system and the other taking a more radical stand and aiming
to challenge those in power and to change the structures. Similar conversation is going on
between international NGOs such as Fern and advocates of the carbon market, who seem to
have exceptionally difficult time finding a peaceful conclusion. Again, the confrontation
appears in negotiation for national and international climate policies where advocates for green
growth place themselves opposing the climate activist groups and seem to ignore academic
research that finds green growth inadequate. Political documents and reports of, for example,
OECD (e.g. 2011, 2017), World Bank (2012a) and European Union (European Commission,
2019) discuss green growth, and carbon markets form the grounds for Paris Agreement, despite
many scholars problematizing the commodification of ecosystems services and the theoretical
decoupling of growth from environmental degradation. For example, Parrique et al. (2019, p.
3) argue that “not only is there no empirical evidence supporting the existence of a decoupling
of economic growth from environmental pressures on anywhere near the scale needed to deal
with environmental breakdown, but also, and perhaps more importantly, such decoupling
appears unlikely to happen in the future.”
5.1. Climate action as a commodity
From the need to ignore large parts of political and social surroundings in Cambodia, to the
mistrust of Finnish legal framework, media and consumers towards the carbon credits, many
aspects of the Cardamom-Compensate chain demonstrate the difficulties of commodifying
ecosystem services and making them into something the consumer feels important to buy. As
Marx (1867/1955) explains in relation to commodity fetishism, some aspects of the production
must be faded for the product to come into existence. With carbon offsets, as some aspects are
faded, others must be overemphasized or as Cavanagh and Benjaminsen (2014) say, performed,
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through images, measurement, certification and accounting technologies, but perhaps even
more visibly, through representations of successes and threats (e.g. Büscher, 2014).
This thesis has shown how the whole Cardamom-Compensate chain and the carbon markets in
general operate in a way that requires rendering technical, or rendering non-political (Ferguson,
1994; Li, 2007a, 2007b). Deforestation in the Cardamoms, but also climate change, are framed
as a clearly bound problems, that are then rendered technical, into something that can be
answered with expertise and strategies at hand. Lohmann (2011, p. 112) argues that to
internalize the environmental externalities, the environmental harm “must be simplified,
reformatted, made abstract, quantifiable, and transferrable in a process that obscures many of
their characteristics while introducing fresh problems”. When ecosystem services are turned
into commodities, they are also turned into something measurable, which separates them from
their original context and potentially complex but vital information is ignored (ibid.). Käkönen
et al. (2014) also discuss how global discourses on climate change work to make the problem
governable, rendering a politicized issue into manageable through technical expertise and
management. They look into policy narratives framing climate change in Cambodia and note,
for example, that most responses to climate change are framed in technical terms, drawn from
expert knowledge, tools and technologies. As a result, climate change mitigation is seen
through carbon offsets, even though the projects producing them often downplay other
ecosystem values and livelihoods, and climate change is used as a tool to justify interventions
and to downplay controversies caused by large projects (ibid. p. 360). These simplifications
create a fantasy of functioning climate action (Watt, 2021), which makes the carbon credits a
desirable product to consumers, who want to acquire a clear conscience with a low price.
Turning nature’s work into value with as low cost as possible is central to capitalism (e.g.
Moore, 2015, 2017a). Bryant (2019, pp. 27–29), referring to, for example, Mies (1986) and
Moore (2015), explains that in “climate changing capitalism”, labour can only be productive
when it exploits non-wage labour, namely production of life and subsistence, meaning that
accumulation of capital leans on devaluation of reproductive labour, capitalisation and
appropriation. In the age of infinite growth but limited resources capitalism is finding new
frontiers to create growth. In the case of the forest-based carbon offsets, new frontiers are
something that are freely supplied by nature, something that has also been argued to be an
unnatural place for creation of capital (e.g. George, 1905). In the light of this understanding
and especially if it is additionally noted that carbon markets are not effective in reducing
emissions (e.g. Aho, 2020; Lohmann, 2020), the process of producing carbon credits appears
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like spreading capitalism to extract value from new forms of reproduction rather than acting to
mitigate climate change.
As people are nudged to offset their personal emissions, the commodification of ecosystem
services also becomes commodification of climate action. Much like other forms of resistance
of “late capitalism” (Jameson, 1991), climate action is also becoming a part of consumer
culture in many levels as can be seen from vegan influencers of social media to Marie Kondo’s
Kon Mari – what she calls a decluttering approach, but what really is just commodifying the
idea of owning less – and indeed to carbon offsets, that and make climate action approachable
to those who would rather increase than decrease their consumption. Discussing the thoughts
of a sociologist Jean Baudrillard, Cherrier and Murray (2004, p. 511) write: “What begins as a
sign of defiance soon becomes a part of consumer culture rather than a criticism of it”. They
refer to Baudrillard’s concept of “mode of signification” (Baudrillard, 1981, p. 5) contrasting
Marxian “mode of production” arguing that in a postmodern society consumption “replaces
production as the central mode of social behavior” (Cherrier & Murray, 2004, p. 512). Humans
grow to be caught up in a world of commodity signs and media spectacles, where “real” is
difficult to get a hold of and people themselves are a part of the commodity markets, where
their value is determined by the signs they are able to convey (ibid. pp. 517–520).
In relation to carbon markets Baudrillard’s ideas can be seen in two ways. First, they imply that
people, especially people of the global North, are in essence reduced to only consumers, whose
only way of being active citizens or to impact their surroundings is through consuming (“ethical
consumption”, or decreasing personal carbon footprint by offsetting, “cleaning after oneself”).
With carbon offsets, people are able to convey signs of ethical, environmentally friendly and
even “good”. Cavanagh and Benjaminsen (2014, p. 55) argue that the “triple win” spectacle,
the idea that offsets are good for climate change mitigation, biodiversity and communities
living around the project areas, is integral to offset projects “as it provides consumers with a
form of ‘ethical’ use value, and greatly enhances the capacity of carbon market brokers to
accumulate exchange value by attracting ‘green’ investors”. Second, as consumption is such
an integral part of the way our society is constructed and how people interact with each other,
changing to consuming less is not only the question of buying less things, but giving up signals
or even pieces of one’s own personality. So, as giving up excessive consumption is difficult,
carbon markets fit into the way of providing people an active role through consuming,
essentially giving them an option to “shop their ways out of the climate crisis” (Andrews, 2020)
and even use this as a part of their persona by communicating it to others. Though,
60
simultaneously carbon markets also value all forms of consumption in a similar but perhaps
unjust way – emission caused from life sustaining consumption are offset with equal price to
emissions caused from consuming luxury goods and services (Käkönen et al., 2014, p. 358).
It has been hoped and argued that sustainable actions that are easy to carry out can lead to more
similar actions and even to climate oriented voting behaviour (e.g. Feldman & Hart, 2018; Van
der Werff et al., 2014; White et al., 2019b). Thus, by offering people ways to act for climate
though consumption – something their lives are already tightly intertwined with – offsetting
services can be seen as offering a first and easy step for masses that might later form the public
opinion on stronger climate action and thus accelerate societal change. However, as noted
earlier in chapter 4.1, people don’t necessary act consistently in their sustainability related
choices and the effect can also be opposite (e.g. Dhanda & Hartman, 2011; Kristofferson et al.,
2014; White et al., 2019b). Even though there might be some hope for subtle change going on
under the surface of the ever growing emissions, consumption and disagreements about suitable
climate action, not much points to a direction that it is happening fast enough or can be trusted
to be happening at all. Perhaps more than offering true hope for change, the commodification
of climate action simply explains why showcasing sustainable lifestyles and “ecological” ways
of consumption have become popular. People committing themselves to “climate friendly
consumption” get a feeling of belonging to a socially constructed community of likeminded,
sustainably oriented, responsible global citizens, that is tied together not by face-to-face
interaction, but by an idea (see imagined communities, Anderson, 1983).
In addition to feeling of belonging, carbon markets offer the feeling of safety and stability.
Watt (2021, p. 15) argues that carbon markets have been able to keep their popularity despite
criticism because they offer “illusory promises” of eco-friendly capitalism and way of getting
rid of one’s “carbon sins”. In other words, consumers and the carbon market practitioners really
want to trust the promises of the carbon markets, because if they do, they are better morally
justified to continue their high-carbon lifestyles with only a small cost and no real change.
In conclusion, through a process of simplification, offsets do not only offer individual
consumers new ways to consume and build identities, but also work to spread capitalism into
new frontiers now that extracting value from the old ones is not enough to keep the growth
growing. Lohmann (2011, p. 96) also argues, that “‘internalization’ of the global warming
‘externality’ makes new forms of accumulation possible, and in the process helps to create a
revamped, sustainable ‘capitalism 2.0’ (or 3.0, 4.0 or 5.0)”. They also give the big emitters an
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escape route, where they do not have to make expensive, difficult or even business-threatening
changes (as can be seen, for example, from CORSIA that aims to stop the emissions of
international aviation from growing by offsetting, not by reducing flying) and keep up the
fantasy that no large-scale changes are needed in the name of climate action.
5.2. Saving the world – agency and justice
The basic idea behind the carbon markets can be seen as very similar to the idea of many other
products and their production chains, where the primary production happens somewhere in the
global South and most profit is made somewhere in the global North: Producing is cheaper in
the South. Similarly, the mitigation efforts in the North tend to be costly, so financially it makes
sense to outsource the mitigation obligation to developing countries (Leach & Scoones, 2015).
The outsourcing of climate change mitigation to the global South is supported with the double
or triple-win discourse, an alleged result of decreasing global emissions and support of
sustainable development in developing countries (Carton, 2020; Cavanagh et al., 2015).
As the mitigation efforts move from North to South, so does the demand for change. Together
with the level of change the ways of enforcing the it also varies. As described in chapter 4.1,
for a Finnish – or supposedly any western – consumer there is an effort of making climate
action easily approachable, “sexy and fun”, so that the individuals would commit to it at least
from time to time. The strategy involves gentle nudges and persuasion through different
mechanisms especially dealing with the image of the consumers’ sense of individual self. The
hope is, that this subtle change would at some point bring about larger societal change. This
strategy connects well to the ideas of ecomodernism and green growth, as it avoids stronger
command and control tactics and gives people supposed freedom, central, for example, in the
Ecomodernist manifesto (Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015). Though perhaps the choice is slightly
perverse in the sense that it is between ruining the environment and ruining the environment
and then giving some money to someone who is supposedly fixing the damage.
The situation is different in Cambodia, where, at least if one happens to live in an area suitable
for REDD+, no such careful individual persuasion is used, but the locals must consent to the
project as a group and then hope it will also be beneficial for them. The community workshops
have a say in the projects’ execution and REDD+ projects require cooperation with the local
communities through “free, prior and informed consent” but genuinely achieving it is difficult
in the context of different languages and REDD+ jargon: “Too often ‘participation’ means local
people attend trainings where communication goes one way. Local people find out what is
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being planned, and either may consent or not: REDD+ is done to them.” (Takacs, 2014, pp.
114–115). In this research it appears that locals’ concerns about larger structural issues can
easily be ignored, while the projects’ interventions focus only on symptoms. It is also difficult
to believe that the community could, for example, prevent the project from happening, as the
community consulting appears to only start when it is already clear that some type of a project
will be brought to the area. Additionally, the community workshops do not necessarily include
locals from all demographic groups, so it is possible that views of, for example, women, youth,
or minorities are ignored (Milne & Adams, 2012). The community benefits also do not
necessarily reach all locals in the area equally. As described by a local activist and ecotourism
provider in chapter 4.5, while Wildlife Alliance does provide entrepreneurial support for some
of the locals, they also make others’ business activities in the area more difficult. Even if the
community has power to impact the ways the project operates, the level of optionality is very
different than, for example, in Finland, where the consumer does not need to make any changes
in their high-carbon lifestyle, but is subtly persuaded to offset the distant damage they do.
A certain set of framings and justifications are needed to create global markets, where some
benefit more than, or on the expense of others. This type of divide between North and South
and the representations that are used to justify it resonates with Edward Said’s (1979) analysis
on orientalism. According to Said the image of the Orient replaced the image of the eastern
civilizations with a mystified and romanticized, but ultimately lesser picture of peoples. This
also included the Occident – the West – being redrawn as more advanced than the Orient (ibid.).
Said’s work on orientalism draws from Foucault’s (1969/1982) idea of discourses, a point that
words we use to describe things also have an impact and create the reality around us, and the
hegemonic discourse has power to define what is possible to think or say about things related
to it. According to Said (1979), an orientalist discourse allows global North to take control over
the global South in physical and in discursive manner and its origins lay in justifying colonial
interventions. While today the control is perhaps far more subtle, similar discourse is in place
in many interactions between North and South, and carbon markets don’t seem to be making
an exception.
Production of knowledge in the Cardamom-Compensate case fits into the orientalist discourse.
While the locals are consulted at least to fulfil the requirements of the auditing and the rangers
are presented as the heroes of the forests (which in the wider context of development aid and
conservation industry could be seen as an exceptional way of showing the agency of the locals),
the western experts are still the ones that make the decisions, define the right kind of knowledge
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and take the centre stage of protecting the forests, helping the locals and “saving the world”.
Arturo Escobar (1995) explains how through the discourse of development western way of
thinking has crushed alternative knowledge systems, taking the possibility of self-definition
and the chance to decide for oneself away from people of the global South. According to him,
development is a cultural concept, a method for controlling global South and a way to maintain
western hegemony. Poverty and hunger are also important parts of development discourse,
created over the years – not physically, but as political issues subject to ideologies, images and
political goals. Referring to Escobar and other post-development scholars, Kallis et al. (2018)
note, that it is essentially the growth paradigm that has made the contemporary global South
separate from “developed” world: starting from Truman’s 1949 inaugural speech and leaning
onto a numeric values of national income, some countries were defined as developed and some
as underdeveloped and the definition has since been used to justify interventions. In the case
of SCRP the project is justified through framing the locals as in need of help, and the project
developers as those with knowledge, skills, and power to help. The SCRP avoids overt
victimization of the target groups (see, for example, Dogra, 2012) and the focus is more on
forests and their wildlife, rather than on the peoples’ lives. However, the project rationale rests
in more implicit ways on the assumption that the local communities have been and still are
incapable of taking care of their forests (and themselves). This representation is necessary to
justify the intervention, as the baseline must be seen as a threat to the forest so that the
production of the credits can start and be as effective as possible.
The Cardamom-Compensate chain represents the marginalized and poor people of the global
South as the accelerators of destruction, while key drivers of logging and the forces of
capitalism that cause deforestation in the form of large-scale industrial projects (economic land
concessions, dams, roads, electricity lines) are omitted from the picture. Same thing happens
to the processes of dispossession and marginalization that often force those now blamed for
forest destructive practices to rely on illegal logging and poaching to survive. Meanwhile,
carbon emissions of the richest 1 per cent are more than double of what the poorest half of
humanity causes (Oxfam, 2020) and consumption in EU is one of the largest causes of tropical
deforestation (Wedeux & Schulmeister-Oldenhove, 2021). Thus, many argue that to create
affective climate policies, they should target the rich rather than the poor (Otto et al., 2019;
Wiedmann et al., 2020). It has been argued that in addition to technological advancements,
reducing consumption of the affluent is vital in avoiding collapse of Earth’s life-sustaining
functions (Wiedmann et al., 2020, p. 1). Currently in mainstream climate policies, offsets
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included, the focus is different. As Moore (2017a, p. 599) puts it, “It’s a trick as old as
modernity – the rich and powerful create problems for all of us, then tell us we’re all to blame.”
Sharing the responsibility for climate action equally sees everyone equally responsible and
groups very different types of emitters into the same category. For example, Bryant (2019, p.
148) notes that “carbon markets use formally equal market transactions to address a
substantively unequal climate problem”. Focusing mainly on Kyoto mechanisms and EU ETS,
Lohmann (2008) argues that carbon markets obscure central issues of climate justice and make
it difficult to act on them. On many possible definitions of climate justice, he notes that “it is
often assumed that it is all about re-energizing or reforming development and investment in the
global South to steer it in a low-carbon direction, harnessing the potential of carefully
constructed green markets, or making capital flow from North to South, instead of from South
to North, as part of a global warming mitigation package” (ibid. p. 364). On the surface, carbon
markets of course state that they make the richer countries and people of the North to pay for
their high emissions and make the money to flow to the global South to even out the economic
disadvantages and to protect the remaining nature in our planet without compromising the
economic growth of these countries that still have nature left. However, as the vital auditing
schemes take a large part of the money and the offset projects are often executed by western
dominated expert organizations that pay other similar organization for their expertise and
consultation, and the change in lifestyles is demanded from the people of the South rather than
from those of the North, it can be seen that the carbon markets have mainly made it easier and
cheaper to achieve calculatory net-zero without changing high-emission practices, and created
a new way to make profit in the global North. The benefit reaching the South can be seen as
questionable, as it at least in the case of Cambodia supports the authoritarian government, does
not question the patronage-based deals that benefit the elite groups, and is not necessarily
beneficial the country’s nature or people. In the end, the people in the Cardamoms and other
similar places must subject to military police and rangers patrolling their home areas, changes
in lives and livelihoods and in worst cases, violence and dispossession (Cavanagh et al., 2015;
Fairhead et al., 2012; Leach & Scoones, 2015; Mousseau & Teare, 2019; Song, 2019) to
accommodate voluntary compensation of unchanged lifestyles elsewhere.
5.3. Contested views on ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kind of climate action
There are many arguments towards what sort of climate action is “good” or “bad”. A conflict
that arises almost at every level of the Cardamom-Compensate chain can be described as
between trying to act for climate change mitigation in the current system and trying to change
65
the system in the name of climate action. The first discourse leans on the ideas of green growth
and ecomodernism (e.g. Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015) and sees offset as essential in keeping our
society and well-being going while also acting for climate. The second discourse can be seen
rooted in the discussions on climate justice, that addresses, for example, the disproportionate
burden of the climate crisis on the poor and marginalized and takes a more human rights -based
approach on climate change mitigation (Jafry et al., 2018). This approach, in the context of
offsets, tends to point out that the carbon markets treat different groups of people unequally
and lack the capacity to bring any actual change (e.g. Lohmann, 2008).
In the discussion about the right kind of climate action, the ecomodernist discourse holds the
hegemonic position. Climate activists that demand for a larger systemic change or more
binding decision on climate change mitigation are treated with strong suspicion and sometimes
even violence. In Cambodia the government has become known for arresting and mistreating
environmental activist (Amnesty International, 2020) and in Finland, the attitudes towards
activists that radically demand more profound changes, is also reserved. For example, the
Finnish Extinction Rebellion was listed under the title of “Action and crimes related to violent
extra-parliamentary far left” in the Finnish Ministry of Interior’s report on violent extremism
(Sisäministeriö, 2020, pp. 29–30). Despite listing the group under this, rather ominous title, the
report notes that the activists had organized only a few small non-violent street blocks by the
time of the writing (ibid.). A larger (but still non-violent) block in October 2020, where police
tried to break the demonstration by spraying the activists with gas, lead to more public critique
towards the activists and calls for more moderate demands for climate action especially in the
comment sections of the yellow press4 and on social media. Conversations like this shows, that
while at least in Finland the belief that something should be done about climate change is rather
widely shared – four out of five Finns agree that climate change mitigation efforts should
happen sooner rather than later (Ympäristöministeriö, 2019) – a common agreement on suitable
action is still far from being reached. The task is made more difficult by the polarized climate
discussion, that frames activists as crazy and almost each proposed way of action as hysteria,
quickly making them into questions of identity5 (Suominen, 2021; Vuorelma, 2019). Carbon
4 From the comment section of Ilta-Sanomat article (Viljakainen, 2020): Joricee: “Is this helping? At least they
get visibility. Usually will turn against itself.” KuisNytKävikään: “Shouldn’t movements like this be abolished
because of ideological extremisms?” miisa: “Big men, go and plant some trees. I have no sympathy. Some have
their lives on the line, and you are just goofing around!” 5 For example, Finnish National Coalition Party’s campaign before the parliamentary elections of 2019, that read
either as “cars belong to the roads”, or as “cars belong to you”, that was seen as commenting the proposed changes
in, for example, taxes related to private vehicles and gas (e.g. Saavalainen & Hämäläinen, 2019). Or, the campaign
66
markets, can easily take their place between the two discourses – idea that something should
be done, but reluctance to change or to do anything too radical – as they offer the consumers
an opportunity for action without a strong demand for change and even create new business
opportunities fitting into the current economic system.
Compensate’s legal case with the Finnish gambling administration is a conflict that is not so
clearly part of the contestation between green growth and climate justice, but more of a
contestation inside the discourse of green growth. The legal case and the media attention show
suspicion towards modifying the existing system into accepting the new type of a commodity.
As mentioned, Compensate’s opposers in Finland are less worried about the efficiency and side
effects of the claimed climate action and more about the consumer and their rights. While
Finland moves into more ecologically modernized direction, contestations such as this one are
likely to appear, but also to be resolved quickly. During the time of this research, in 2020 and
2021, the most critical discussion in the media has quieted and the government has moved to
change the fundraising law in favour of offset services. This could be seen as an example of
Finland’s willingness to create a more ecologically modernized system. While this type of
legislation appears to be moving fast, many activists and activist groups, such as Extinction
Rebellion, communicate that laws that would actually demand and press change are moving
too slow or not happening at all. Midst of the heated discussion, both activist and carbon market
advocates act in a way that communicates that the cause is so important that the end must justify
the means. The activists are willing to give up their own sense of security and even break the
law, while the carbon market supporters either accept or ignore the problems and inefficiencies
of the carbon business and its ways of operating.
In the ongoing argument about suitable form of climate action, it is easy to see some frustration
towards the carbon markets and their failure to deliver any results. For example, Kathleen
McAfee (2016, p. 333) argues that “[t]wo decades of all-but-futile climate negotiations have
shown that global warming cannot be managed by means of technocratic expertise nor dealt
with separately from the politics of inequality and the paradox of economic growth.” Lamb et
al. (2020, p. 1) examine discourses of climate delay that “accept the existence of climate
by peat producers in Finland, that aimed to proclaim peat as a source of renewable energy in the spring of 2021
in response to aiming to ban its energy use to reduce emissions (e.g. Latva-Teikari, 2021) – a conversation that
has been polarized already long before the most recent events (Lilleberg, 2015). Or, the column by head of Finland
Chamber of Commerce on the editorial pages of the largest Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, where he
argues that excessive talk about climate action makes the idea appalling to the middle class and hinders the whole
process of decoupling only because of the identity building project of some (Romakkaniemi, 2021).
67
change, but justify inaction or inadequate efforts”. They characterize discourses of delay in
four categories that “‘redirect responsibility’, ‘push non-transformative solutions’, ‘emphasize
the downsides’ of climate policy, or ‘surrender’ to climate change” (ibid. p. 2), noting that in
these discourses, the attention is put on negative social effects of climate policies and on doubt
of plausibility of mitigation. Voluntary offsets sold to individuals could be seen as a part of
two these discourses. They redirect responsibility by centring the individual consumer and the
people of the global South and push non-transformative solutions in belief in that current
economic and technological institutions can solve the problem with high-tech development and
offering incentive for environmentally healthy businesses. Carbon markets as a whole
(including both voluntary markets and mechanisms integrated into policy level) do not differ
much from this picture. Even though they were originally meant to impact the emissions of
carbon heavy industries and the capitalist countries of the global North, they were built in a
way that their impact in emission reduction has been minimal to non-existent (e.g. Lohmann,
2020). Meanwhile, they have managed to become a valuable business, creating more value,
more purchasing power and more possibilities to consume (Environmental Finance, 2020;
Hamrick & Gallant, 2017; Shapiro, 2020).
Many climate activists and scientists in areas of, for example, ecological economics or critical
social sciences emphasize the structural nature of action needed to mitigate climate change,
and criticize capitalism and the focus put on individual consumption (e.g. Gills & Morgan,
2020, pp. 3–4). Meanwhile, as seen, for example, from the colourful arguments by informant
6 presented in chapter 4.7, supporters of the carbon markets seem to feel that focus of the
critique is too much on the downsides, in spilling a little bit of water when the house is on fire.
What can be seen in the heart of the argument concerning carbon offsets as climate action is if
they should be seen as a strategy that gets too much critique over its downsides, or as a non-
transformative solution that redirects the responsibility from larger global policy decision to
individual consumers and poorer countries and hopes that markets and technology will
eventually solve the problem. Discussing economics and climate crisis, Gills and Morgan
(2020, p. 11) point out that the “habit of delay and deferral of action seems set to continue,
despite increasingly alarming scientific reports and widespread recognition of the urgency of
radical action to reduce emissions and arrest ecological destruction”. They call for
abandonment of mainstream economic thought and a construction of a viable radical alternative
drawing from thoughts such as degrowth, postgrowth, social ecological economics and
ecofeminism (ibid. pp. 11-12). Eco-feminists and many indigenous scholars, for example, call
68
for collective governance systems, equity and decolonization to be central in building political
institutions to reduce carbon emissions (e.g. Perkins, 2019). A plea like this can be seen almost
as the opposite for militarized conservation enclosures governed from above, that appear to be
common in market-based conservation so central to green growth.
McAfee (2016) as many other researchers, points towards alternative approaches such as Buen
Vivir coming from the South and degrowth from the North, to counter the growth-centred
discourse of green economy. Buen Vivir or Vivir Bien, a term that originates from the context
of Latin America, describes alternatives to development, focusing on good life in a broad sense,
in harmony with community that is not only constructed of other humans, but also Nature (e.g.
Gudynas, 2011, 2014, 2019). Degrowth on the other hand builds around a thought that it is
possible to transition and live well under a system that has smaller resource throughput (Kallis
et al., 2018, p. 292). Higher GDP levels in wealthier countries stop making a difference to
wellbeing at a certain point, but even mid-income countries with lower level resource use do
currently not live sustainably while satisfying social wellbeing standards (ibid. p. 298). Kallis
et al. (ibid.) point out that rather than increasing wealth, it is equality that seems to bring people
happiness, which suggests that redistribution and sharing might form better roads to good life
than infinite pursue for growth. Redistribution and sharing are imperative in the idea of
degrowth economy, as it is visioned to be constructing, for example, from fewer working hours,
basic income, spending or socializing debt interest, green taxes and growth in relational rather
than in material goods (Hickel & Kallis, 2020; Kallis et al., 2018).
6. Conclusion
This thesis has described the journey of carbon credits from a REDD+ conservation project in
the Cardamom Mountains in Cambodia to be sold by the Compensate foundation in Finland.
Carbon offset projects produce credits through accreditation, that works to ensure that the
project is producing additional benefits in contrast to a baseline. To build the baseline, the
forested areas must be defined as important and unique in terms of carbon stocks, biodiversity,
and sometimes even cultural value, and most importantly, under a threat. The threat must be
something that can be intervened with by conservation organizations, thus broader political-
economic relations and forces must be left aside from the problematization and the focus is
instead on targeting and controlling small-scale loggers and poaches. To make the product
more saleable, it is also important for the projects to demonstrate responsibility and community
benefits, and thus not all locals can be defined as the problem. Some are defined as in “need of
69
help”, so the project can target them and demonstrate the triple-win discourse, a benefit to
climate change mitigation, biodiversity and local communities. The representations work to
make the conservation area governable and justify interventions, but as they are unable to
include the wider context, they also leave important drivers of deforestation unaddressed.
The SCRP does not sell the credits it produces directly. The money flow is not completely
transparent and even the people in high positions along the chain appear to have different
understanding on how things are arranged. The unclear arrangements make the chain look less
trustworthy and even open for misuse, but such uncertainties are not visible to the consumers,
who in general, at least based on articles in Finnish media, are not even very familiar with the
carbon markets. In Compensate’s end more effort is put on transparency, but the consumer is
still unlikely to be able to comprehensively understand all the projects they support through the
foundation. The consumer’s focus is more on themselves and the identity they are acquiring,
than on the way the carbon credits have been produced. To sell the non-physical carbon credits,
the need for them must be created through representations of importance of individual climate
action and responsibility. Compensate’s sales strategy builds around the idea that if we all just
cleaned up after ourselves, the climate change would be a problem of the past. After buying
Compensate’s product, the consumer gets a sense of being part of a group of responsible,
environmentally conscious (but not too radical) global citizens, who take responsibility of their
actions and see hope in the future. Compensate’s marketing strategy, as carbon markets in a
more wider sense, is in the end based on the hope that they work and are able to bring good
outcomes (e.g. Watt, 2021) and perhaps even larger behavioural changes. The legal case around
Compensate, the media attention given to the markets, and the critical attention from civil
society and academia reflect the difficulties in commodifying carbon capture and ecosystem
services in general and show that the strong hope for success is not necessarily enough to
convince all parties of the ability of the carbon markets in mitigating climate change.
The Cardamom-Compensate chain links to the global climate change mitigation efforts as a
part carbon markets that are at the centre of green economy and therefore the climate action as
it is defined by many countries and international organizations and industries. What arises at
both, seemingly different, ends of the chain, is the focus on individuals and side-lining the
discussions on wider structures. The approach of the carbon markets demands large changes in
lives and lifestyles from the people of the global South, as their areas of living are subjected
under militarized conservation operations, where small scale forest use is prohibited, but large
scale industrial projects can still happen. Consumers of the global North are persuaded to buy
70
carbon credits produced under these circumstances to make their high-carbon lifestyles
calculatory net-zero. The carbon markets demand no real change from the consumer at least as
long as offsetting is voluntary. Even mandatory offsetting could be seen as questionable, if the
projects producing the carbon credits keep operating under the same standards they now do,
where finding a trustworthy project that truly produces emission reductions or removals, is
difficult (e.g. Compensate, 2021; Finnwatch, 2021). It can be said that the claims of carbon
neutrality through carbon offsetting should be met with caution by consumers, companies, and
other organizations. Rather than trying to claim calculatory net-zero, the carbon credit
producers and sellers could consider taking Compensate’s (2021) advice and make less
illusory, alternative claims of positive action in regards to climate change mitigation or
biodiversity conservation.
In the light of my case study, it seems that the voluntary carbon markets offer possibilities for
identity building, performing corporate responsibility and even for new capital creation in the
global North while subjecting people of the global South under tighter and tighter control of
authoritarian governments and conservation organizations. On a more positive note, the
offsetting through voluntary carbon markets could simultaneously make the idea of climate
action familiar and safe to the middle class and thus help shifting attitudes into a direction
where some action is better than none. However, as they do not demand real change from
companies or people of the global North, they can also be seen as creating false hope that the
climate crisis can be solved without any large-scale societal changes.
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8. Appendices
Appendix 1
Original interview structures. Questions were also added and modified during the interviews,
as the aim was to keep them relaxed and conversation-like and thus the questions only give an
overall about what was discussed.
Interview 1
Date: 25.8.2020
Length: 42 min
Position of the informant: Cambodian environmental activist who currently works with
ecotourism in the Cardamoms. No direct connection to the SCRP.
1. Can you tell me about yourself?
2. Can you tell me about Mother Nature’s work?
3. How is the situation in Areng Valley today?
4. How has the Covid-19 situation affected the people in the area? How about your work
in ecotourism?
5. Do you know about Wildlife Alliance’s project? Can you tell me how it has impacted
the area? How are people liking their work?
6. Why did the government want to work with American organization rather than a
Cambodian one?
7. What are you doing now that no tourists can’t come in?
Interview 2
Date: 27.8.2020
Length: 46 min
Position of the informant: Used to work at Wildlife Alliance with the SCRP in expert
position. No longer involved with SCRP.
1. Could you describe the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project?
2. What are the biggest threats to the project area?
3. Can you tell me about Areng Valley?
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4. How do you think the pandemic has affected the livelihoods of the people in the area?
(Community based eco-tourism).
5. What are the steps for a successful REDD+ project?
6. Can you tell me about the project’s funding?
7. Can you tell me more about REDD+ and its impacts in Cambodia?
8. Has something changed on the ground? What needed to be shown to previous funders
and now to REDD?
9. The project documentation talks about emission reduction rather than emission
removal. Can you describe the difference?
10. In your opinion, how is a carbon credit produced?
11. Are carbon markets a sufficient option for funding climate change mitigation?
12. What do you think would happen if the project ended?
13. Do developing countries’ own emission targets change the REDD+ situation?
14. Does the project have any problems or need to improve?
15. Are the locals denied of cooperating with other NGO’s?
16. Why is the project developer an American rather Cambodian organization?
Interview 3
Date: 31.8.2020
Length: 37 min
Position of the informant: Manager position, Wildlife Alliance.
1. Could you describe the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project?
2. Has moving to REDD+ changed how Wildlife Alliance operates in the Cardamoms?
3. How do you think the pandemic has affected the livelihoods of the people in the area?
(Community based eco-tourism).
4. What are the biggest threats to the project area?
5. What are the steps for a successful REDD+ project?
6. What happens when people are arrested for illegal logging or poaching?
7. Can you tell me more about REDD+ and its impacts in Cambodia?
8. In your opinion, how is a carbon credit produced?
9. Are carbon markets a sufficient option for funding conservation?
10. What do you think would happen if the project ended?
11. Does the project have any problems or need to improve?
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Interview 4
Date: 21.9.2020
Length: 56 min
Position of the informant: External advisor for the SCRP’s REDD+ process. Expert position
in another Cambodian REDD+ project.
1. Can you describe your connection to Southern Cardamom REDD+ project?
2. Attitude towards REDD+ in Cambodia?
3. Where does the money go in the SCRP?
4. What are the differences between REDD+ projects and conservation projects funded
by donations?
5. In your opinion, how is a carbon credit produced? What is important in that process?
6. Are carbon markets a sufficient option for funding conservation? How about climate
change prevention?
7. Do you think that REDD+ in Cambodia will change with nationally defined
contributions (NDC’s)?
Interview 5
Date: 22.9.2020
Length: 68 min
Position of the informant: Manager position, Compensate.
1. Can you tell me about your work at Compensate?
2. Why is offsetting the solution?
3. Is offsetting a good way of funding forest conservation?
4. Would you answer change if I asked if offsetting was a good way of funding climate
change mitigation?
5. Can you explain how carbon credits are produced?
6. Where does the money go in this process? Who benefits and how the responsibility of
the value chain can be evaluated?
7. What makes people offset their emissions?
8. Compensate talks a lot about individuals’ personal accountability. Is this the best way
to mitigate climate change, or do you see it as just a step towards the right direction?
9. What are Compensate’s long term goals?
93
10. Is this working fast enough?
11. What do you think is the most efficient way of avoiding or capturing emissions?
12. How will the NDCs impact Compensate’s portfolio, as it has many projects in the global
South?
13. How did Cardamom become a part of Compensate’s portfolio? Can you tell more about
that process?
Interview 6
Date: 23.9.2020
Length: 48 min
Position of the informant: Manager position, Everland marketing.
1. Could you describe the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project and Everland’s work in
it?
2. What makes a successful REDD+ project? What about what possible problems can they
encounter?
3. What is important in marketing a REDD+ project?
4. Does marketing a REDD+ project differ from marketing a conservation project that
relies on donations?
5. In your opinion, how is a carbon credit produced?
6. How does the money flow from the consumer to the project?
7. Are carbon markets a sufficient option for funding conservation? How about Climate
Change mitigation?
Interview 7
Date: 12.10.2020
Length: 57 min
Position of the informant: Expert position, Compensate.
1. Can you tell me what you do at Compensate?
2. Can you tell me about the advisory panel and their role?
3. How does a project become a part of Compensate’s portfolio?
4. Can you tell me about the Southern Cardamom REDD+ project?
5. How does the money flow from the consumer to the project?
94
6. How many points does Cardamom have in Compensate’s scoring system?
7. Do projects such as Cardamom meet any problems? What kind?
8. In your opinion, how is a carbon credit produced?
9. Are carbon markets a sufficient option for funding conservation? How about climate
change mitigation?
10. Why do people compensate?
Interview 8
Date: 12.10.2020
Length: 65 min
Position of the informant: Manager position, Wildlife Works.
1. Can you describe Wildlife Works’ part in the Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project?
2. How and why does a donation-funded project turn into a REDD+ project and what
changes in that process (if anything)?
3. How are carbon credits produced? (Or what makes forest conservation into a
marketable product?)
4. What are carbon credits in the context of forest conservation? A promise of forest
protection for X number of years, a proof of protection that has already happened, or
perhaps something else?
5. What happens in VCS and CCB auditing processes?
6. What kind of challenges do REDD+ projects face in different stages of their life?
7. What makes a successful REDD+ project (in general and specifically in Cardamom)?
8. When someone buys carbon credits, where does the money go?
9. Do the REDD+ projects have restrictions for their money use?
10. Are carbon markets a sufficient option for funding conservation? How about climate
change mitigation?
Interview 9
Date: 23.10.2020
Length: 55 min
Position of the informant: Manager position, Everland marketing.
1. What does Everland do?
95
2. What does it mean that you mean you have exclusive rights to sell the credits from
Cardamom?
3. How are carbon credits produced? Or what makes forest conservation into a marketable
product?
4. Can you explain the certification process for VCS and CCB?
5. How do projects get money before they produce credits?
6. What happens if the project can’t reduce deforestation?
7. How does the money flow from the consumer to the project?
8. What is offset projects’ position in climate change mitigation efforts?
Interview 10
Date: 18.1.2021
Length: 65 min
Position of the informant: Manager position, Wildlife Works
1. How much is a carbon credit form the Cardamoms? Why? Is this public knowledge?
Where could this information be found normally? What impacts the price?
2. What does Everland do?
3. Does the SCRP have its own accounts, or is its budget part of someone else’s? Is the
budget or any numbers from it available somewhere and if not why?
4. How much did the accreditation cost for the SCRP? How was it paid?
5. Can you tell me how big percentages of the revenue go to each party?
6. Is there a chance of misuse as the money flow is not transparent to public?
7. Verra provides the criteria and SCS Global Services conducts the auditing? Are they
completely separate entities? Which is the one that charges for auditing?
8. Do you think government’s land concessions or, for example, large infrastructure
projects are a big threat to the area? Why are they left out of the project documentation?
9. As Wildlife Works and Wildlife Alliance are both project developers, how is the work
divided between the two?
10. What do “global best practices” mean? (e.g. “The project uses global best practices of
forest protection and community development to safeguard the forest and prevent more
than 3,000,000 tons of carbon emissions annually”)
11. Do you want to talk about why you were unsure about participating in this interview?
96
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