PBS’s "The Carbon Hunters" – Hunting the Elusive Facts

Marc Schapiro’s Frontline World program, “The Carbon Hunters”, which aired May 11 on PBS, purports to investigate the effects of the global carbon market on tropical forests and local communities, specifically targeting the Guaraqueçaba forest reserves in the Atlantic forest of southern Brazil and the Juma project in Amazonas state.

Schapiro argues that U.S. corporate investment in forest carbon credits has displaced and impoverished local communities. But the key premises of several parts of the program are deeply flawed. Here's where he went wrong:

1. Carbon market for forest carbon credits doesn't actually exist

First, the alleged carbon-related conflict in the Guaraquecaba forest reserves is not based on any actual or proposed carbon trading program. No carbon market currently exists in which “carbon credits” from this project can be traded, and there is no indication in existing or proposed climate polices that they ever could be. The only compliance carbon market in the world, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, does not allow trading of forest carbon. Brazil’s National Climate Change Plan and the law that established its national emissions reductions target last January would not recognize or support the Guaraqueçaba project, because its purpose is to reduce national level deforestation, which is occurring in the Amazon, not the Atlantic Forest. GM, Chevron and AEP invested in this project in the mistaken hope of learning how forest carbon offsets of greenhouse gas emissions might work, and possibly for the purpose of influencing energy and climate policy. The American Clean Energy and Security Act approved by the House of Representatives contains provisions that would potentially allow credit for reducing national emissions from deforestation by large emitters such as Brazil, but not for individual projects such as Guaraqueçaba. The major cause of deforestation is large-scale cattle ranching and soybean farming, not the small land-holders depicted in the story. This is hardly a current, or fair, picture of what carbon credit for reducing deforestation might look like, should it ever exist, as many serious conservationists, indigenous peoples and this author hope.

2. "People versus parks" conflict not new

The second major misrepresentation in the story takes the decades-old people versus parks conflict and tries to cast it as the new and sudden result of carbon trading. What Schapiro depicts as the consequence of the carbon market turning trees into commodities is, in fact, the result of a flawed conservation strategy that goes far beyond, and long pre-dates, the Guaraqueçaba reserves or any thought of carbon crediting.

Trees have been traded as timber for thousands of years and industrial logging continues to be one of the principle threats to indigenous and forest peoples and their forests worldwide.

The conflicts that Schapiro shows are typical of nature reserves throughout Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. Only about 7% of this extremely species-rich biome remains of what once covered an area twice the size of Texas. Traditional conservationists maintain that pristine, people-free nature reserves are the only way to protect those last remnants, and consequently have promoted the creation of reserves and the exclusion of local communities wherever intact forest remains. This has resulted in chronic conflicts between environmentalists and indigenous groups and local communities throughout the biome. The decades-long dispute between the Pataxó indigenous people and federal environmental agencies over the Monte Pascoal National Park in Bahia is a notorious case; the Ilha Comprida Environmentally Protected Area, Juréia-Itatins Ecological Station and Alta Ribeira State Park in São Paulo, and the Serra Geral forests of northern Rio Grande do Sul, are sites of a few of the community-versus-conservation conflicts that characterize the region.

3. Reporting often one-sided and inaccurate

The tone and framing of this story are strongly reminiscent of the rhetoric of those environmental organizations that oppose carbon markets and emissions trading on ideological grounds. In their view the market is the problem, so how can it be a solution? The thinly-veiled ideological agenda is exacerbated by the fact that the director does not identify the Landless Movement (MST) activist who guides him in the Guaraqueçaba reserve, although MST’s explicitly anti-capitalist agenda clearly is relevant to a story about corporate financing for conservation.

The further segments of the story continue the one-sided, often grossly inaccurate, reporting.

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