• Thursday, June 23, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Carbon markets have been widely promoted as the only way to generate enough money to enable industries and countries to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions, which are largely responsible for global warming. The only problem is that nearly 20 years after their conception, they have failed to work, and have also been subject to fraud and other financial crimes.

Interpol, the world's leading policing agency, has warned that carbon market schemes are easily taken advantage of by organised crime. Earlier this year, carbon credits worth 38 million dollars went missing in the European Union's carbon market after funds were transferred by computer hackers from the Czech Republic to Poland, Estonia and Liechtenstein before disappearing. That was the fourth time funds had been stolen or mislaid.

'A lawyer formerly involved in carbon trading told me that if markets are still trading carbon 10 or 15 years from now, then the global environment will be in very big trouble,' Steve Suppan, senior policy analyst at the U.S.-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), told Tierramerica.

'Carbon markets are open to fraud, misrepresentation and deceptive promotion,' Suppan said in an interview at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiating sessions held in Bonn Jun. 6-17.

These markets have had huge support from governments and they still do not work to effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions, said Suppan, whose organisation works on trade, agriculture and environmental issues. Climate change is the result of emissions of global warming gases, mainly carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

The two main ways to address the problem - known as mitigation - are to reduce those carbon emissions at source or to capture and store ('sequester') carbon in plants, trees and soils. The latter means reducing deforestation, increasing reforestation, and utilising sustainable agriculture and grazing practices to either keep carbon stored or encourage its capture.

Markets are widely believed to be the only way to mobilise enough private capital to reduce emissions, but this is simply not true, says Jutta Kill of SinksWatch, a UK-based NGO that tracks and scrutinises carbon sequestration projects.

'There is an assumption we can't get the necessary money for mitigation any other way,' Kill said at an event here. 'And there is another assumption that money is the answer.'

In the early 1990s, when the Kyoto Protocol was being debated at UNFCCC negotiations, no one wanted markets as part of a climate agreement except the United States, says Payal Parekh, a Swiss-based climate scientist and energy expert.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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