An administrative decision on carbon removals, adopted in the dead of night with no community input, is raising alarm with experts attending the COP 27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
In an early and worrying outcome of the two-week conference, the 22-member supervisory body for the carbon trading regime under the Paris agreement adopted a set of “dodgy recommendations” that fail to anticipate negative social and environmental impacts or factor in the rights of Indigenous people, states a post in ECO, the daily COP newsletter produced by Climate Action Network-International.
Article 6 is a short, complicated, and crucial segment of the Paris accord that took years to finalize after the main agreement was adopted in 2015. Article 6.4 sets up the supervisory body to oversee international carbon credits and offsets under the agreement.
But when the supervisory group turned its attention to carbon removals—the various options under development for sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it in rock, oceans, or underground aquifers—things didn’t go well.
Critics warn of a dystopian “free-for-all” and a “huge leap backwards”, where each country could exercise its “national prerogative” on whether to ensure robust social and environmental safeguards.
ECO points to technical gaps in the Article 6.4 decision: it allows carbon credits for “processes to remove GHGs” rather than holding out for actual emission reductions, and treats relatively short-lived products like furniture as a durable way to store embodied carbon.
As well, “including ‘oceans’ as a possible sink with no further limitations opens the door to dangerous and far-reaching options such as ocean fertilization,” ECO writes. “While some niche practices that restore damaged ocean ecosystems (seagrass, salt marshes, mangroves) could play a useful role in removing GHGs through anthropogenic actions, the proposed language is too broad and goes much beyond those activities.”
With oceans’ ability to absorb carbon dioxide already “rapidly reduced” by “human-induced changes in ocean chemistry,” ECO asks, “do we really need more large-scale experiments?”
The decision was made with expert observers corralled into a separate room, and plans for prior dialogue dropped due to time constraints. “Adopting a rushed decision in the middle of the night is decidedly not good practice and not surprisingly has led to a bad outcome,” ECO comments.
