Guayana is a heavily forested country in South America, and according to reports, it’s becoming “the world’s newest petro-state.” Oil companies appear to be touting false solutions to climate impacts there, claiming that their exploitative activities in Guyana are “net zero,” but experts are raising alarm about this.
Souparna Lahiri from the Global Forest Coalition was quoted in Climate Home News:
The problem is that within the country, you are allowing the emissions to continue or even to rise, and then you are trying to balance that out internally by saying that we have this forest.
The article states:
Official United Nations carbon accounting rules, drawn up nearly 20 years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), allow Guyana to claim net-zero status because they do not specify which types of forest governments can take credit for preserving – and also because the emissions from oil are counted in the country where it is used and burned, not where it is produced.
Experts said governments are taking advantage of having barely-touched forests on their land that suck up CO2, and argued that fossil fuel-rich nations like Guyana should bear part of the moral responsibility for the emissions of their polluting products.
To read more from Climate Home News, click here.
Read more of GFC’s work on forest offsets here.
Photo: Dinesh Chandrapal
