| Sourced From Times Online |
A PIONEERING climate change project in Africa run by Robin Birley, the socialite, has been accused by the European commission, its main donor, of making unsubstantiated claims about its environmental impact.
The project has received more than £1m in public grants and money from celebrities in the music and film business. They include Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones and Brad Pitt, the actor.
The project attempts to offset an individual’s carbon footprint by paying poor farmers in Mozambique to plant trees, which absorb CO2, and to protect existing forests.
The commission’s criticism comes amid increased concern about the worth of these fashionable but largely unregulated carbon offset schemes. Critics say it is almost impossible to guarantee that the trees will survive the length of time needed to offset any significant carbon emissions.
Birley, the stepbrother of Zac Goldsmith, the environmentalist, set up the N’hambita Community Carbon project five years ago in partnership with Edinburgh University.
His company, Envirotrade, manages it and sells “carbon credits” to the public, while the university monitors the emission levels and the deforestation rates.
The project, based on the edge of the Gorongosa national park, had promised to bring “enormous and positive social, economic and environmental change to the developing world”.
However, The Sunday Times has obtained a highly critical report from the European commission that says “the quality of the technical work … [is] far below what could reasonably be expected of a pilot project managed by a university”.
Written last May, just before the five-year funding period came to an end, the report noted that the project “continued to make positive claims about its impact that could not be substantiated”.
The commission also warned that the money flowing into the Gorongosa area had attracted hundreds of poor farmers who were now cutting down trees, contrary to the project’s intention.
An official source said: “We also asked for disclosure about carbon trades in the interest of transparency. None of this information was forthcoming. [Envirotrade] are selling products that are not delivering what was promised and the public needs to know.”
The commission, which has so far donated Euros 1.13m (£1.07m) to the project, does not suggest there has been any dishonesty. However, it felt that the scientific concerns raised with the project since May 2006 remained unaddressed. Consequently, in October 2007 it suspended payment of the last instalment of the grant, worth Euros 453,000. Both the company and Edinburgh University say they will respond to all the criticism in a report they are writing for the commission.
In a statement, Birley said that all the money raised so far from selling carbon credits — £750,000 — has gone back into the project and he has also invested his own money.
He added that the project’s “well intentioned shortcomings” were to be expected with such a challenging idea and Envirotrade had been transparent with all its clients.
However, one of the commission’s main concerns was about the way carbon credits are being sold when it is difficult to verify the amount of emissions actually saved.
Despite this, Envirotrade has sold a further £100,000 worth of carbon credits since it received the report.
A Sunday Times reporter approached the company posing as a businessman who wanted to offset his family’s carbon footprint for Christmas by investing £20,000 in the N’hambita project. The reporter was put in touch with Philip Powell, a South African and the company’s project manager.
He boasted that the project had already made massive carbon emission savings of 380,000 tons, but did not mention how public funding had been frozen because the commission felt that after five years the project had limited scientific evidence to verify this claim.
Powell also spoke of a relationship with Hollywood’s powerful Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which represents Brad Pitt. He said Pitt had invested through CAA, who in turn paid the project £150,000 to become carbon neutral.
However, Powell, 44, who now lives in Wetherby, Yorkshire, was less forthcoming about his past work for the apartheid regime.
In 1998, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which examined apartheid era abuses, found that Powell, a former security branch officer, had been involved in “a conspiracy to commit gross violations of human rights.”
According to the TRC, Powell trained and secretly armed an Inkatha paramilitary unit involved in destabilising South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994. Powell confirms he is the same man but denies being part of any death squad or having ever incited any of his trainees to kill.
In 2000, he left South Africa for the UK, amid calls from the ANC that he should be prosecuted for treason. Two years later, he formed Envirotrade with Birley, who is the majority shareholder.
During the first three years of the N’hambita project, Birley was also running Annabel’s, the uppercrust London nightspot founded by his father in 1963. The club is named after Birley’s mother, who went on to marry billionaire entrepreneur Sir James Goldsmith.
In 2006, Birley, 50, left the club after admitting to his sister that he had paid a private detective to spy on her lover. Since his father’s death in 2007, Birley has been fighting a legal battle with his sister over the estimated £100m estate.
In a statement to The Sunday Times, Professor John Grace of Edinburgh University’s Geosciences department said: “We are working hard on improving the project all the time. The studies have been done. Of course we will provide all the required information in our final report, which we are working on now.”
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The Nhambita Community Carbon project in central region of Mozambique is an innovative “trade not aid” solution to poverty and unsustainable use of natural resources. Over one thousand subsistence farmers who practiced “slash and burn” agriculture are working to transform their farming techniques using agroforestry and by management of the surviving forests. They use money from carbon offsetting to subsidise opportunity costs while they make the change to sustainable food production and to rebuild infrastructure such as schools and health posts in their community.
The communities activities in producing offsets for sale are not a “licence to pollute for wealthy individuals or companies but rather a way of bringing investment into poor communities in a way that does not foster dependence. African subsistence farmers have little or not way of accessing global markets market their agricultural produce – through this programme they are able to trade a commodity that brings long term benefit to them.
The project received a grant from the EU to develop a working methodology so that it could be replicated in other communities in former conflict areas in Africa. The experience gained is being used in two other regions of Mozambique at present with plans underway to take it to the DRC, Angola and Sudan.
The project has never received any money from Brad Pitt. While it is true that Creative Artists Agency offset their carbon footprint by supporting such as activities as managing bush fires and rehabilitating degraded forest in the buffer zone of the Gorongosa National Park in central Mozambique, this is not linked in any way to Brad Pit. Money from CAA has paid for fire fighting equipment and towards other infrastructure in the community including schools. The company has also donated 200 XA laptops to the local schools in the community.
The claims made about the project were not made by the European Union as claimed by the Sunday Times, but by a third party in a “desk review” undertaken without the benefit of direct access to the project and its developers or a site visit. It is factually incorrect to attribute the opinions expressed to the EU.
The technical support work carried out by the University of Edinburgh and the activities of the project developers has been praised by a series of independent reviewers who have actually visited the project and investigated its claims of success. These reviews are publicly available.
All of the transactions and carbon offset sales are monitored and certified by an independent body that maintains a publicly database of all transactions to ensure that offsetting is genuine and that credits are retired to prevent double selling. It is incorrect for the Sunday Times to claim that information regarding sales is not available – it is in the public domain. Attempting to create the impression that the project has something to hide in this regard is disingenuous.
Equally ridiculous is the claim that the project has produced limited scientific evidence to support the work done on the ground. The project has produced a significant body of academic research that has been shared in an international conference held in 2008 on the work done and is all available for public access on a website (www.miombo.org.uk). This research is already being used to replicate the project in other areas.
The project plants back thousands of indigenous trees selecting species that live for hundreds of years as well as fruit trees that provide valuable extra food and nitrogen fixing trees intercropped with cereal crops to boost soil fertility. All of this is aimed at reducing dependency on aid and food handouts by building transforming subsistence agriculture into sustainable livelihoods. Claims about the permanence of the trees planted are a “red herring” that ignores the contribution the project is making to food security.
By the very nature of the tree species selected there is a reasonable expectation that the majority will survive, the project uses very conservative sequestration calculations that contain buffers with anticipated mortality and a degree of failure built into them for estimating the impact of the tree planting.
As one of the people involved in the creation of the project and its delivery in Mozambique it is true that I am a South African who as a member of the Inkatha Freedom Party and former member of the security services was involved in the conflict and civil war that led up to democratic elections in South Africa. I was involved in the training of self-protection units for rural African communities who were victims of this violence. I served as an opposition member of parliament in the post-Apartheid democratic parliament and was the co-founder of the company that has played a central role in delivering this project. While the Truth and Reconciliation Commission raised issues about the human rights implications of my involvement as a participant in the conflict I have never been convicted of any crime in South Africa and deny being part of a hit-squad or giving instructions for anyone to be killed as suggested in the title to this blog. I hope that my life experiences in this regard have equipped me to play a part in helping people in communties who have had similar experiences.
Perhaps the most inappropriate criticism of the project contained in the article concerns the movement of new people into the community participating in the project and a suggestion that this has triggered an increase in deforestation. One of the key objectives of the project is to take pressure off natural resources inside the neighbouring national park to conserve its precious flora and fauna. It is a measure of the projects success that returning refugees have settled in the community rather than invade land in the national park historically owned by the community as has happened in other parts of the park were communities have not had the benefit of access to the this kind of assistance.