Tropical forest carbon markets and the Indigenous critique

Programme:

13:00 – 13:30 Introduction

• Arild Angelsen, Professor of Economics at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences – background on REDD+, forest carbon trading, and ART
• Ann Danaiya Usher, Journalist with Development Today – status on ART certifications and the indigenous critique of ART over the past four years

13:30 – 14:10 Indigenous critique of the ART standard

• Levi Sucre Romero, General Director of the Mesoamerican Alliance of People and Forests (AMPB) and former co-coordinator of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities (GATC) - pioneered the dialogue with ART since 2021
• Mario Hastings, former Toshao (indigenous leader) and President of the Amerindian People’s Association, which lodged a formal complaint and then an appeal to ART about credits issued to the Guyanese government
• Julia Naime, Senior Advisor, Rainforest Foundation Norway - coordinated international letter from indigenous organisations to ART in 2024 calling for reform of the standard

14:10-14:30 Break

14:30-15:15 The Architecture for REDD+ Transactions (ART) carbon standard

• Andreas Dahl-Jørgensen, Director of the Norwegian International Climate Forest Initiative (NICFI), member of ART’s first Interim Board. NICFI has financed the ART-TREES standard since its establishment in 2018
• Christina Voigt, Professor of Law at University of Oslo and member of the ART Board – formerly with NICFI, Norway’s REDD+ safeguards negotiator over several years
• Darragh Conway, Senior Programme Officer, Tenure Facility, coordinating the organisation’s work to support Indigenous Peoples and local communities in understanding and navigating carbon markets and REDD+

15:15-15:45 Panel discussion – ART in theory and practice: Mario Hastings, Julia Naime, Anders Dahl-Jørgensen, Christine Voigt, Darragh Conway, Arild Angelsen.
Ann Danaiya Usher moderates.

With thanks to Fritt Ord for support.

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Transcript.

Arild Angelsen, Professor of Economics at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU): We have more than 200 people registered for this seminar, most of them digitally. Welcome everyone to an exciting seminar, an exciting topic, and an exciting set of speakers.

My name is Arild Angelsen. I’m a professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). The seminar topic is the Architecture for REDD+ Transactions (ART) and the critique from Indigenous peoples of tropical forest carbon credits, using ART as an example of a broader debate that has been going on for quite some time. The organizers are Development Today journal, represented by Ann Danaiya Usher. The editor, Bjørn H Amland is also here.

NMBU is the second oldest and most beautiful campus in Norway with about 8,000 students. It is the old agriculture University, there is still a strong focus on that.

We have financial support from Fritt Ord Foundation, which I had trouble translating, but it’s “free word” or “free speech,” a foundation that promotes freedom of expression, public debate and culture. So that is what we’ll do. We have a lot of nice debates ahead for the next three and a half hours.

To set the scene here, I’ll say a few things, and Ann will take over, and then some of the Indigenous critique by Levi Sucre Romero, who is from Costa Rica, Mario Hastings from Guyana, and Julia, sitting in Mexico on holiday, but normally based in Oslo at the Rainforest Foundation Norway and has been coordinating a letter that many of you may know of that was sent to ART.

After the coffee break, Andreas Dahl-Jørgensen, just back from a semi-long stay in Brazil and back to being the Head of the Norwegian International Climate Forest Initiative (NICFI). Christina Voigt is a Professor of Law at the University of Oslo and has been involved in REDD+ negotiations for quite a while, and also currently a member of the ART Board. Darragh Conway is here with us from the Tenure Facility in Stockholm. After that, we have a small panel discussion.

So REDD+, what is it? The basic logic of REDD that has been around since, let’s say, 2007 the Bali COP, when Norway launched its NICFI initiative, is as follows: climate change is real. We are committed to the Paris targets, preferably 1.5 degrees. And we cannot reach those targets without protecting tropical forests. Tropical forest and nature-based solutions may be up to 1/3 of the climate solution. We cannot protect those forests without proper incentives, conditional payments. You are rewarded for doing something that is an incentive in the form of result-based payments. In order to have result-based payments, we need a sound system for verifying or certifying emission reductions, verifying, referring to voluntary markets, and certifying, to compliance. (My rule of thumb is: V, verifying voluntary C, certifying compliance.)

So, we need a good system for that, and we need to mobilise the funding to pay for it. It can be development aid, as it has to a large extent been so far, or it can be private funds from carbon markets, doing various types of offsetting. I often distinguish been types of offsetting: it can be moral offsetting - if I fly, I normally offset it and buy carbon credits. And it can be political. Some have argued that that is what Norway is doing to offset the fact that we are, after all, one of the main oil-exporting countries in the world. Or, it can be regulatory, where you have a mandatory cap, and you have to meet that cap either by cutting your own emissions or by buying credits.

Now let me say that I am not against offsetting. I don’t think it is morally wrong to offset. We do it, and we should do it. The problem is when it can become an excuse and a sleeping pad for doing less to cut your own emissions.

For all of that, we got ART-TREES and LEAF, ingredients in this acronym soup.

REDD: We know more or less what it is, but I have been confused about what REDD is. When we worked on some of the books with CIFOR, we came up with what we thought is a useful definition. And remember, a definition is a definition. It is not right or wrong. It is useful to varying degrees. So, we defined it as being characterised by two things: It’s the conservation of tropical forest and emission reduction is a main goal. There is some type of performance-based or result-based incentive involved. You sometimes use the term “unconditional incentives,” which I think is a contradiction. Some rewards are based on performance, for example, in terms of emission reductions.

The Architecture for REDD+ Transactions (ART) came in 2018. It is a verifier of these carbon credits for jurisdictional REDD+ programmes. The REDD+ Environmental Excellence Standard (TREES), that’s the acronym, is the standard. And the current version TREES 2.0 is four years old and is under revision. So, we are talking about ART or TREES, or even ART-TREES credits. I see this being used interchangeably, but ART is the overall architecture and TREES is the standard.

Then, we have LEAF, the Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest Finance. This is a mouthful, founded in 2021, a coalition of three countries, initially, Norway, the UK and the US, also joined by South Korea and some 30 corporations that can buy ART credits. ART credits may also be bought by, say, CORSIA, or countries may sell to any other company, as we will see in the case of Guyana.

And then you have Emergent as a broker and transaction platform between the countries and the private sector.

My simple slide that I use for how to create a market: we need a commodity - that is the ART-TREES credits. We need the buyers - they are represented by the LEAF coalition. You need the seller - that’s the tropical jurisdictions at the sub-national or national level. And you need a broker or marketplace - which is Emergent.

Why did ART-TREES and LEAF come about? This is my reading as an outsider, maybe Andreas or others will have more to add and take a slightly different angle. First, in the UNFCC, the climate negotiations under the UN, the standards are too lax, particularly when it comes to this environmental integrity, additionality, which is essentially setting realistic reference levels - the counterfactuals. So, the countries submit their reference levels to the UNFCCC Secretariat in Bonn. There are obvious incentives to exaggerate, to make them higher, because an emission reduction is the difference between the reference level and the actual emissions. The larger that difference is, the larger the emission reductions and the larger the potential payment is. You don’t have these checks and balances, which is very hard if you have a consensus process like the UN.

The carbon project critique has been strong, maybe particularly after LEAF and ART were formed two or three years ago. The Guardian articles, you all know about that, the critique that there is no additionality, these are fake credits. Some of that is correct, but I think, it is also missing some nuances in the debate, though this is not the topic of this seminar. It was therefore we should go to a higher scale with the jurisdictional approach – sub-national and national, state, provinces - because reference level setting is easier and you can invoke policies.

The third point was the failure to create a global carbon market. In the early days, for those of you remember, the idea was to have a cap-and-trade market where countries take on caps like we did in the Kyoto Protocol. That was only for so-called Annex 1 countries, but that could be enlarged so that all countries have caps. Maybe we could use forest carbon credits as a trading within that, like we had for the Clean Development Mechanism. We could get funding from compliance offsetting.

That idea, I think, is dead. It was more or less killed in Copenhagen or a few years after. There were some attempts, but eventually they were turned down.                        

The COP 21 in Paris was a very different ball game. It’s Nationally Determined Contribution submissions, but no global carbon market. At least some had a vision 10-15 years ago. You can still do it under Article 6.2 and 6.4, but progress has been relatively slow. ART-TREES is a response to this, but the road has been bumpy. And one of the things that we will discuss today is this Indigenous critique.

Let me just close with a couple of words. One is, I don’t know who said this, but I heard the first head of NICFI say it. Ministers have also said it: “We are doing REDD+ because it’s important, not because it’s easy.” This has become, I think, a Norwegian folk proverb, more or less. I would add that because it’s so important to succeed, we need to be extra critical. We cannot afford to do things and have proposals that don’t work. We should be extra critical, not to shut down the idea. There is always a risk if you are too critical, but to make sure that it works for the planet and for people. That at least is my approach to going into this debate and this seminar. I welcome you all and wish a good seminar before I give the floor to Ann Danaiya Usher, journalist with Development Today who will dig more into the details of the critique.

Ann Danaiya Usher, journalist, Development Today: Hi, good morning, good afternoon. I would also like to welcome everybody here in Oslo and to many, many people who are watching from all over the world.

Arild has already helped us through this alphabet soup of acronyms, and it is not simple stuff. I’ve been trying to dig through it for several years now. I am going to try to help us through this material as best I can. I will start by situating us a bit more in the Norwegian context.

The Norwegian International Climate Finance Initiative (NICFI for short) is an enormous undertaking. Though it is managed from the Climate Ministry, it is entirely financed from the aid budget. Since 2008, NICFI has dispersed NOK 45 billion, and the initiative was recently extended to 2030 by which time it will have dispersed NOK 65 billion. I think it is safe to say that there has never been anything on this scale in Norwegian aid.

Starting in around 2018, when it was clear that other donors were not going to be putting up aid money for REDD+ on a similar scale as Norway, NICFI shifted strategy to trying to help countries access private finance. They started building up an architecture to facilitate the trade in tropical forest carbon credits between governments in forest countries and large private companies. Arild has laid out the main components of that architecture.

Now, the currency in this trading system between governments and eventually companies like Amazon, Unilever, Bayer, Walmart, GSK - the central the central piece in this architecture - is a new kind of carbon credit to be managed by a brand-new carbon certifier called ART. ART stands for Architecture for REDD+ Transactions. Unlike small carbon projects covering a limited area of forest that have been quite badly criticized over the last couple of years, these credits will be so called “jurisdictional.” That means they will cover entire countries or large provinces within countries. The idea is that because of the sheer size of these areas, the trading system will rapidly generate billions of dollars in revenue for tropical forest countries governments and serve as a powerful incentive to them to then slow deforestation.

NICFI’s role as a donor and as a driving force behind ART and this architecture really cannot be overstated. Norway was the sole financier of ART for the first five years or so. NICFI contributed intellectually to ART’s design, provided financing for the setup. Andreas Dahl-Jørgensen, who will be speaking later, the head of NICFI, was a member of the first Interim ART Board. The point is that ART is very much a Norwegian aid-financed project. As such, Norway also bears special responsibility for what ART does.

In fact, part of the impetus for this seminar is that there has been so little critical discussion in Norway about this, from NGOs, from politicians, from mainstream media.

Now, Norway has a unique history of funding Indigenous people’s organisations, and NICFI fully acknowledges the growing body of scientific evidence that shows that Indigenous peoples are the best guardians of tropical forests where Indigenous peoples live, and especially where their tenure is recognized, tropical forests tend to thrive.

NICFI has consistently claimed that ART has the highest integrity in the market, safeguarding the environment and respecting Indigenous rights. But for years now, even before ART issued its first credits almost three years ago, Indigenous organisations have been arguing that that is not the case, that the ART set-up does not guarantee that their rights are respected.

So, why is this important for us? Because it is estimated that Indigenous communities claim ownership to more than one-third of the world’s remaining intact tropical forests. The carbon sequestered in these forests exists because of their actions. The carbon in these forests is their carbon.

The point is not that ART ignores that fact. ART’s standard, TREES, (I try to avoid too many acronyms) recognises this. It specifies that when a government applies to ART for credits, it must describe how carbon rights “will be obtained” from Indigenous communities. I’m quoting from the from the text of the standard. The government must have “clear proof of ownership” of the carbon before the credits can be issued. Basically, it must demonstrate to ART that communities have ceded their ownership and control over the carbon held in their forests. ART doesn’t get involved in the nitty gritty of consultations, negotiations, conflicts between governments and communities. All that is supposed to be sorted out and verified by a consultancy company before ART can approve the credits.

Currently, 26 jurisdictions have started the process of applying to ART for carbon credits, but so far, only one country has crossed the finish line: in December 2022, ART issued its very first carbon credits, 33 million tonnes worth to Guyana. These were immediately sold on to an American oil company, Hess Oil for USD 750 million.

In other words, ART has only been tested once. In Guyana, Indigenous communities claim about claim ownership to about 30 per cent of the forest estate, though they have legal rights to a smaller part of that territory. When ART announced its decision, it declared that the national Indigenous body, the so-called National Toshoas Council, had endorsed the sale of the credits generated in “both titled and untitled lands.” Indigenous leaders, including Mario Hastings, who we will hear from soon, a member of the Executive Committee of the National Toshaos Council at that time, said that communities were not properly consulted, and that the government had not obtained rights to sell the carbon.

As another toshao said to me back in 2022: “In effect, the government is selling something that isn’t theirs to sell.”

So what happens when a government claims to have clear proof of ownership to the carbon and ART takes the government at its word, but Indigenous peoples disagree? What kind of recourse do communities have?

Well, ART’s grievance mechanism was triggered for the first time when the Amerindian People’s Association, a Guyanese Indigenous NGO, of which Mario Hastings is now President, submitted a formal complaint to ART. It was dismissed, mainly on technical grounds. The Amerindian People’s Association then appealed. The appeal was not accepted.

It’s worth mentioning, though, that according to ART’s rules, both TREES 1.0 and TREES 2.0, the appeals committee must have three members: one member coming from Winrock International, which is the American organisation that hosts ART; one member coming from the ART board – so, a person who had been part of the original decision to approve the credits; and then one external expert. By any measure, it’s a rigged setup.

We will hear more from Mario Hastings about what went down and his reflections on this.

But now I would like to introduce our first speaker, Levi Sucre Romero, a Bri Bri Indigenous leader from Costa Rica. He is the general director of the Mesoamerican Alliance for People and Forests (AMPB). When he was involved in a lot of these discussions, he was also the co-leader of the Global Alliance for Territorial Communities (GATC), which has been a key actor in global climate negotiations. We have invited him to speak because more than a year before ART approved the first credits to Guyana, Levi Sucre was already raising questions about how ART and the TREES standard would function in practice. He warned that ART’s design carried an inherent risk: that governments would sell off Indigenous carbon without their consent and even without their knowledge.

He contrasts his own country, Costa Rica, where there has been extensive consultation around forest carbon and REDD+ for over a decade, with a situation in most tropical forest countries where Indigenous communities are much more vulnerable in relation to their governments.

During much of 2022, AMPB, the organisation that Levi heads, tried to work with ART to improve the TREES standard based on the Costa Rica experience. In total, there were five in-person meetings between ART and AMPB, as well as three online conversations. By the end of that year, Levi Sucre said that he believed that the parties had come to an understanding about the need to modify the standard and on a roadmap for doing so. Then in December, the ART board announced that it had issued credits to Guyana.

After that, Levi Sucre said: “We have been telling ART since last year that this mechanism would not work, and now the situation in Guyana proves that.” He eventually gave up on the dialogue with ART.

We wish, of course, that we could have invited him here in person with a proper translator and so on, but we didn’t have the resources for that to make that happen. But we are very grateful that he has sent a video message to this seminar. It is in Spanish with English subtitles. Here is the presentation of Levi Sucre Romero of AMPB. Thank you so much.

Levi Sucre Romero, General Director of the Mesoamerican Alliance for People and Forests.

See video from 32:00 to 41:00, in Spanish with English subtitles.

Ann Danaiya Usher: Thank you Levi and thank you Maribel, for your help with that. I will now move on to our next speaker, Mario Hastings.

Mario Hastings is an Indigenous leader from Upper Mazaruni District in the west of Guyana. He has served as toshao, Indigenous leader for 12 years, and he has advocated for Indigenous people’s land rights for decades. Last year, he was elected president of the Amerindian People’s Association, an Indigenous NGO, also a member of COICA. Again, we wish we could have invited you, Mr. Hastings, to join us in person, but we are grateful to have you online. He is speaking from his home, I believe, in Kako village in Upper Mazaruni. The floor is yours. Thank you very much.

Mario Hastings, President of Amerindian People’s Association: Thank you for giving me this time. Good morning, good afternoon to each and everyone who are in person there, and also who are listening to us virtually. Yes, my name is Mario Hastings, and I’ve already been introduced. And I am happy for this opportunity to let everyone know what has been happening in our country, Guyana, as it is the first country that has been certified by the Architecture for REDD+ Transactions (ART).

I would like to speak about the consultation process that happened in our country. You will be aware that the government has been saying that the consultation process in Guyana was good. But we have said this before, and I would like to repeat by saying that the consultation process in Guyana was not good. Many of our communities have stated that they were not properly, if at all, consulted on the sale of carbon credits in Guyana. Many do not fully understand the measuring formula being used by the government through the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) programme, and communities have been receiving their disbursements from the carbon sale and recognize that this can have positive effects on their development.

However, communities are still concerned about the implications of the programme regarding their rights to land and self-determination. I would like to highlight here that when all of this began, the government, in his proposal to ART would have committed the Indigenous forest under title lands and also under customary lands, without their consent. They were not aware that the forest on these lands would have become part, as we would have heard. That is what caused the whole concern in Guyana as the Indigenous people. That is why we keep saying that we were not adequately or properly consulted. There was not much information that would have been disseminated to the people so that they would have made the right decision. And so our communities are concerned about the programme having impacts on the rights to land and self-determination. We feel that as Indigenous people, we have that decision or the choice to make with regards to our lands and anything that happens on it, whether it be projects, programmes or whatever by the government, and the implications of such agreements will have on our land and territorial rights.

The government did not consult with village councils on the carbon market programme and its implications for Indigenous governance structure. Also, the 15 per cent allocation to Amerindian villages was not done in consultation with Indigenous governance bodies, such as district and village councils. I must say that this came about from the government, and we were just told that they have decided to give us 15 per cent from this carbon credit scheme. That is when most of the toshaos, they would have agreed, I would say maybe they were not too clear, but at least they were happy to benefit from the proceeds from this carbon scheme. There has been limited access to information regarding how funds should be used and administered.

That is how we have participated, without much information, and also people would have complained about the technicality of the documents, you know, languages. At the beginning, you are giving us a background to all of the acronyms. So many acronyms and all the big words. They were very hard and that would have needed time in order for the people to really understand and to make collective decisions on these carbon credits in Guyana.

I would also like to speak on the legal representative of Indigenous people in this case, the National Toshaos Council (NTC). Again, you would have seen that the government would have said that the NTC is the only legal representative of Indigenous people, and their endorsement of the resolution at one of the national toshaos conferences, which is a yearly conference, would have given that go-ahead for the government to get into agreement for this carbon deal.

I would like to say that NTC is not the only legal representative of Indigenous peoples in Guyana. According to the Amerindian Act, the National Toshaos Council is an advisory body to the government. The National Toshaos Council does not have the power to decide on village matters, nor territorial and resource management issues, which is what carbon market programmes are tied to. It is the village councils that hold title for the village, and not the National Toshaos Council. So, any decision related to lands, those decisions have to be made at what you call a village general meeting where all the residents will be present, and that majority of the residents would have to agree to whatever would pertain to the lands in this case, like carbon credit schemes.

It is wrong to say that the National Toshaos Council is the only legitimate body to represent the Indigenous people. The NTC’s role is to advise the government on national policies based on the consultations and mandates they receive from the various village councils. By endorsing the carbon credit field without proper consultation and consent from village councils, the National Toshaos Council oversteps its role in the decision-making process of Indigenous peoples. The National Toshaos Council is meant to facilitate this process and advise the government of Guyana on national policies affecting Indigenous people based on community level deliberations.

All toshaos did not endorse their resolution based on limited consultation, a quick turnover, and that they did not meet with their village council to decide on their involvement in the program. While the National Toshaos Council passed a resolution endorsing the low carbon development strategy, 2030 programme, some toshaos and Indigenous groups, including the Amerindian People’s Association, raised concerns about the process and whether it truly reflected the will of the communities, especially on carbon markets.

I must be honest to say that I am still learning. I have a lot to learn on these carbon markets, as I stand here. After the approval of the credits, the Amerindian People’s Association would have submitted a complaint and then an appeal to ART. Their reaction to our complaint was not accommodating. Our organisation recommended how the grievance mechanism should be activated, happen with respect to our decision-making processes at an Indigenous People’s Organization. The Amerindian People’s Association’s position on the ART grievance mechanism remains that it needs to be more independent and responsive to the decision-making processes of Indigenous peoples. The Amerindian People’s Association has published its position in more detail on its website.

In summary, ART maintained that the government of Guyana was in conformance with the TREES standards to move ahead with the carbon deal, despite the Amerindian People’s Association highlighting how it failed to be compliant with the standard.

The design of the ART grievance mechanism falls short of international standards for non-state-based grievance mechanisms. Moreover, TREES does not contain detailed information about the mechanisms, mandate or objectives, nor the policies and processes for resolving grievances. This model is insufficient in addressing how to respect Indigenous people, decision-making processes and concerns for such programmes. We hope that with the upcoming ART-TREES 3.0 review process, this can be improved. Additionally, international standards for non-state-based grievance mechanisms, such as ART, state that for such mechanisms to be effective, they must be legitimate, accessible, predictable, equitable, transparent, rights compatible and a source of continuous learning. These standards form part of the UN principles on Business and Human Rights and have been further elaborated by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Therefore, this needs to be incorporated into ART-TREES’ general operation, given the significant role of Indigenous peoples in this programme.

Finally, our message to the Norwegian government about how ART works in practice in Guyana, the only country where credits have so far been approved. The ART system puts Indigenous peoples at risk of losing their rights at the cost of financial benefits without proper consultation and consent. The ART system relies heavily on the government stating that it complies with the TREES standard without independent validation of this practice and at domestic and expertise levels. Although there are periods for which stakeholders and right holders can comment on the government’s submission to ART, it does not take into consideration the time, resources and technical knowledge required for Indigenous communities to learn, adopt and respond to the carbon market initiative.

The system therefore makes Indigenous peoples vulnerable to state intervention without proper, free, prior and informed consent, while prioritizing the financial goals of buyers that can subject programmes to claims of green washing. My message to the Norwegian government is that while communities are interested in ways to financially benefit from the work they have been doing since time immemorial in sustaining the natural environment, it should not come at the expense of our right to our lands and territories, nor our right to self-determination and free prior uninformed consent. Therefore, the Norwegian government must ensure that these programmes have robust consideration of Indigenous people’s rights to ensure that there are systems in place that prioritize the social integrity of carbon market sales along with their environmental integrity. Thank you.

Ann Danaiya Usher: Thank you, Mr. Hastings, we have time for a few questions.

Arild Angelsen: My question is about when the government of Guyana signs this agreement, does it have implications for land use to achieve emission reductions. Do you have to do something that you would not normally do? Do you have to change your use of the forest? Has been any discussion about whether you must change your behaviour? What are the implications on your actual forest use from this agreement or the certification process?

Mario Hastings: As I would have mentioned earlier, I did say that we have a lot of questions and concerns that have not been addressed, even until now, and those were some of the questions that we were asking the government. What would be the implications? What are the conditions in this agreement? But they have not responded positively all. They would have said that there is nothing that would have any kind of impact. But we just cannot believe it. We haven’t even participated in the negotiations. It was between the government and the other party, and then we were just told that the agreement was signed and that we would receive money. So, the impact that we are fearing would be like prohibiting us from continuing our way of life. But as I said, we haven’t received much information on this as Indigenous people, because we depend on the forest. Would it affect our farming? These are questions that needed to be answered but were not really given a positive response.

Ann Danaiya Usher: Thank you so much. We would like to welcome you back for the panel discussion a little bit later. With that, I would like to move on to our next speaker.

As part of the process of revising the TREES standard, the ART Secretariat has engaged with some Indigenous organisations. ART says that they have held three regional consultations during 2024 in Peru, in Nepal, and in Cameroon. But ART has refused to make public which organisations were invited and what was discussed at those meetings. Over the same period last year, other Indigenous organisations have called for reform of ART’s carbon standard, but ART has refused to meet with them.

Our next speaker, Julia Naime will tell us a little bit more about this. She is Senior Advisor at Rainforest Foundation Norway, where she focuses on international forest finance, carbon markets, and protection of Indigenous people’s rights in supply chains. Before joining RFN, she was a researcher with CIFOR, Centre for International Forest Research. She studied environmental economics at London School of Economics and did a PhD in Economics at NMBU with her research focusing on economic development and deforestation. Julia actually lives in Oslo, but she is in she is joining us today from Mexico. Welcome Julia. The floor is yours.

Julia Naime, Senior Researcher, Rainforest Foundation Norway: Hi everyone. It is a pleasure to be joining you, although online. I had to take a late summer vacation this year, so it was impossible for me to join physically, although I would have loved to. Thank you, NMBU and Development Today for organising this seminar, and inviting us. I assume most of the audience knows Rainforest Foundation Norway. For those who don’t, we are a rights-based conservation organisation. Our position and goal in the work we do in carbon markets is to ensure that Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) can drive their own climate and mitigation agenda in REDD+ projects and programmes. In that sense, we’re not against carbon markets, but rather work with IPs and LCs so they can choose for themselves whether they want to participate, how they want to participate, and ensure that carbon markets and the benefits that derive from them are aligned with their self-determined priorities. We also work on jurisdictional REDD+, as opposed to projects, because we believe that jurisdictional REDD+ has the greatest potential to create change by giving incentives to states and governments to improve their institutional structures that lead to deforestation. This includes unclear land tenure, harmful policies and programmes, weak enforcement, and regulation that allow deforestation to continue, but it will also lead to violation of Indigenous peoples and local communities’ rights.

We see those two interrelated problems between deforestation and violation of Indigenous people’s rights, and in that sense, we believe that the jurisdictional programmes have to be aligned with ensuring greater protection of Indigenous people’s rights.

We are constantly exposed to scientific evidence showing that protecting IP rights and clarifying land tenure, is one of the most effective ways to protect rainforest, and it only makes sense that jurisdictional progress also ensures that the rights are properly protected. Our work on jurisdictional REDD has really been driven by partners’ demand and the work we have been putting up together with partners.

What I will present today is the work we did in preparation for the revision of the TREES standard. We had a workshop with multiple partners to discuss carbon markets, the challenges they’re facing. And after that workshop, it was decided that one of the most important priorities we could jointly organize and do some advocacy work was the engagement on the revision of the TREES standard. This is recognizing that jurisdictional REDD+ is having an important role in many of the jurisdictions where our partners are based, and the increasing awareness of the challenges of implementing jurisdictional REDD+, and in particular the implementation of the Cancun safeguards on the verification.

On the slide you have the QR code with access to the letter, and you also can see the list of signatories. Before getting into the specific recommendations, I’ll go back a little bit into the origins of the letter. I mentioned that we had a workshop with partners at New York Climate Week in 2024. After that workshop, we jointly decided to prioritize putting together a set of recommendations to the ART Secretariat, given that they are revising the TREES standard this year.

The recommendations are based on that discussion, but also on a lot of the partners’ work, including the AMPB guidelines that Levi Sucre Romero mentioned, including the experience that we have heard from Mario Hastings in Guyana. After the workshop in New York, we set up a specific working group with nine partners, where we met repeatedly, either online or physically, at conferences in the autumn to discuss the specific recommendations of the letter.

We sent this letter on December 18, 2024, to the ART Secretariat, and it was signed by a total of 14 organisations from Latin America. We have Indigenous peoples and local communities’ representatives from Belize, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Guyana, and Peru.

I do want to highlight that we recognize that ART has made significant efforts to provide guidance on how the Cancun safeguards can be implemented. It has come a long way compared to other standards and initiatives. It is the only standard that has third-party certification on the safeguards and that provides this specific guidance with different teams on how the safeguards can be implemented. But then we see from the experiences from partners that there is a lot of room for improvement.

Regarding the ten recommendations in the letter. They are grouped into three main topics. The first topic is the consultation procedure. Mario has mentioned that one of the main difficulties they had, and a big source of a complaint, was the fact that they were not properly consulted. The process was going too fast, the information was not shared well enough. So, the first set of recommendations is really emphasising the fact that there needs to be early consultation procedures. By early, we mean as early as the concept note [the first document that a government submits in its application procedure to ART]. We are aware that the concept note is not subject to third-party verification. It’s a tentative proposal on jurisdictional REDD+. But for that reason, it is important to open it up, to share it with different stakeholders, so that the consultation is as inclusive as possible.

Within that set of recommendations, we also ask for new requirements for public consultations by the ART participants [governments] themselves. The standard can create expectations, provide some guidance on what feedback has been received from different stakeholders, and how the ART participant replies to this feedback? We also suggested to extend ART’s own consultation procedures to 60 days.

Another very important element of the recommendations is that the consultation plans have to be designed inclusively with participation of Indigenous peoples and local representatives, because otherwise it risks leaving stakeholders, relevant rights holder out of the discussion. So the earlier the consultation process can start and the more inclusive it is, the better it will be for the overall programme.

The second set of consultations has to do with programme governance and the design and implementation. Here, what we really want to emphasize is that there has to be a specific governance that ensures adequate and sufficient participation for Indigenous peoples and local communities. This involves, clearly, adequate participation in the benefit sharing plan, but also the safeguards information system where Indigenous peoples, local communities can decide on and influence what is monitored. How is it monitored? What are the outcomes that are relevant? For themselves, according to their self-determined priorities to monitor, as being a well implemented REDD+ programme that benefits their communities.

The last set of recommendations have to do with improving the certification process itself. We have a heard from Mario Hastings the problems with the grievance mechanism, from Levi Sucre Romero, the problems of the validation and verification procedure, where the validation and verification bodies (VVB), the auditors, are not well trained in the local context, the local legislation. They may perhaps not speak the local language. These are requirements that should be incorporated to have a more robust third-party auditing procedure.

There has to be an independent grievance mechanism. Ann mentioned the decisions about which grievances proceed or are not completely independent. This is not in accordance with international best practice. And we also expect there to be an evaluation of the status of the national legislation and whether this is in accordance with the protection and the defence of Indigenous peoples and local communities’ rights.

We have presented this letter to NICFI and the Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA). We have also presented it to other standards like Verra, which also has a jurisdictional standard, and we have presented it to the Stakeholder Engagement Group of the LEAF Coalition.

When we drafted the letter, we requested to have a meeting with ART, but it was never granted to us. This was disappointing given that this was a coordinated effort from a diverse group of organisations in Latin America. Given this effort and the value of the comments coming from partners’ experiences, we would have loved to have this opportunity to discuss the positions, the expectations, and also build a common understanding through constructive dialogue on what is expected. We have been unable to do it so far.

[A proposed text for] TREES 3.0 was recently released, and we do see some significant improvements, like the inclusion of a requirement to have a benefit sharing agreement that has to be negotiated in line with safeguards, explicit rights of IPs and LCS to participate in the decisions related to the benefit sharing agreement. This was not incorporated in the previous version of the standard. But we also think, based on the recommendations we sent in December, there’s room for improvement in this new version of the standard, such as ensuring early consultation. There is also a lot to do with incorporating IP and LC decision making in the safeguard information system, as well as strengthening the certification process and the auditing.

Question from Claudia Melim-McLeod Future Horizons Institute: I have a question to you regarding the best-case scenario that you think we can expect given your efforts and given the efforts of all these organisations and the response you’ve had so far. What do you think is the best-case scenario in the medium term? Thank you.

Julia Naime responds: The best-case scenario is that all our recommendations are incorporated in the TREES 3.0 standard. Whether it’s realistic, we hope so. We hope to engage with ART and have a continuous discussion to incorporate these expectations into the standard. We do consider that the standard has an important role to play in the supply chain. They set the expectations. They can lead the way. They can improve jurisdictional REDD+ and go a long way in improving the governance structures in many of the jurisdictions where we work and where we need to conserve tropical rainforest. This can only be done through strengthening the legal protection of Indigenous peoples and local communities’ rights.

Question from Wenting Chen, Senior Research Scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA): I have a question about the third-party verification. What is the main barrier to involve the third-party verification?

Julia Naime responds: Thank you for bringing up this question, because the validation and verification bodies (VVBs) have a very important role to play. They have to be well informed, well trained, but the standard also has to be clear and good so that the VBBs can actually know what they’re looking for.

Right now, there’s a lot of flexibility. The VBB can report many things that will give the thumbs up to having complied with a standard, but that does not necessarily meet the expectations of rights holders.

Thinking also about the best-case scenario, there has to be clear guidance on what is expected for safeguard compliance, and the VBBs then have to be selected and trained so that they can actually verify the standard. But there’s a responsibility as well from the standard to provide clear guidance to the VBBs in terms of what is expected. This is a new market, right? So there is not a lot of good expertise in the VBBs yet. Therefore, the opportunity for improving a lot and training, and having those high expectations so that we actually have good jurisdictional REDD+ programmes.

My main point is that it is a difficult challenge because there’s not a lot of supply of good validation and verification bodies. This has to be built by providing clearer guidance on what can be expected, on safeguards, and also increasing the expectations and the requirements - language, understanding the local context, having expertise on human rights and Indigenous people’s rights and so on. So we have to set requirements that are as strong on international human rights as they are on the environmental integrity aspects.

Ann Danaiya Usher: Thank you, Julia. VVB stands for “validation and verification bodies.” These are external consultant companies that are certified by ART to go in and verify that the applicants have checked off the all the requirements of the standard, and then the decision goes to the ART board.

Question from Hege Ragnhildstveit, former Acting Director of NICFI: Thank you very much, Julia, for your input. And thanks also to Mario and Levi. I think many of these considerations are, of course, really worthwhile to think about and to think about how we can improve the standards. But one of the things that I think we’re battling with a little bit here is the time that it takes both in terms of language and to make these consultations. I think it took about eight months in Guyana, and still we hear the critique from Guyana. But it was an eight-month process. So, the time it takes to do this and the way you would like to see, versus the fact that we are losing rainforests at a much, much higher speed than I think anyone in this room would like to see. What are we racing against and how can we walk together in a way that we can meet several targets and still keep the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement. So that’s my question. It is about timing. Thank you.

Question from Henrik Wiig, Oslo New University College: I am involved in some smaller projects in Peru and Colombia. My main question is about how you see the future of the market for ART-TREES. The territorial approach is some kind of a response to the project by project, community by community, approach that has failed in many ways and with a lot of scams and so forth. The confidence in this project market is almost none. And my interpretation is that, from these presentations we had from the local people, they complain about getting too little of the payment, and they don’t really trust the government to pass on the payment to them. And as of today, there is hardly any alternative to sell their own private project, on their own private market. So they don’t complain too much. But at the moment, you actually get higher payment on the private market, which might come through, IMO, through ICAO CORSIA, through the compliance market, then you can see much higher prices. And then they will start complaining if they’re not allowed to sell their own private projects, because actually the government has sold them already. So how do you see this competition between the two different systems?

Julia Naime responds: For my answers, I will really focus on our work, which is the rights holders’ perspective. On the question of timing, I think here, from a rights holders’ perspective, this is non-negotiable. If my rights are not being respected, as Mario Hastings is saying, if I don’t know exactly what is happening with this programme, what it means in the future, am I going to lose my ability to have my shifting agriculture? Am I going to lose my ability to take trees to build my house? I mean, it sounds like small things that, in the broader scale, also have an impact on the forest, but that also have impact on people’s lives. So I think that that should not be negotiable. Even if it takes time, we have to do it.

Also, on how to address this challenge of timing: that is why we are asking for early consultations. The earlier we engage with stakeholders, the better the programme we will have. Including making the concept note public. People are going to start expressing opinions early on. Those can be addressed. They can share expectations. And I think, if I remember correctly, ART now has a limit of two years between the concept note and the registration note. So ART itself has a tolerance of two years to get the programme running. And this should give more time for relevant and important rights holders to participate.

There is a time constraint. There’s a resource constraint. Consultations are expensive. A lot of actors in the supply chain don’t want to invest a lot in them. But, I am framing this as an investment. It’s not paying for the consultations. It’s an investment because if you have a good programme, it reduces the financial risk. It makes it more effective, because IPs have a big responsibility in protecting forests. So, the sooner and the better you have those consultations.

On the second question on the future of the market, I cannot predict, but I think national legislations will play a big role. And again, these are only being developed now. In many of the countries where we’re looking to implement jurisdictional REDD+, a big question is around “nesting.” So what happens with the projects? countries have to have a registration system for all their projects so that they don’t overlap with jurisdictional programmes?

We see some progress in Peru. We see progress in Brazil. But I think this is something that will be very context dependent. The other element is that it is important that Indigenous peoples have the right to decide how and whether they want to participate in the market. I think this is also very important to think about when we think about the future of the markets, because there might be an opportunity cost for them in the future if they engage in the jurisdictional versus more project-level markets. This is not something we’re working with directly, but I think it will be very important for communities to address in the future.

15-minute pause.

Arild Angelsen: Welcome back. The next speaker, I am happy to introduce is Andreas Dahl-Jørgensen, head of the Norwegian International Climate Forest Initiative (NICFI), established in 2008. He was a member of first Interim Board of Art. We have heard about Norway’s role as the main funder, and happy that he’s just back from Brazil. Welcome.

Andreas Dahl-Jørgensen, Director of NICFI: Thanks for leaving this quote up here from my predecessor, I believe, who I think, stole it from Kennedy and got away with it. REDD+ wasn’t part of the original quote.

Thanks for putting this together. I think it’s great to have a big group interested in this important topic. Thanks also to those who are joining us online. I think it’s important to position this work as part of what NICFI does. I’m going to stick to the topic, but just to say this is one of many strategies that we pursue to help forest countries protect their forests, to reduce emissions, to protect biodiversity and to strengthen and protect the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities.

From the outset, we thought how to go about this when this initiative was born. I wasn’t there at the very beginning. I have been twice at NICFI, in the first period I was there in the early days. Christina Voigt, I remember from our days in the climate convention. From the start, we recognised that one important piece of this North-South collaboration, if you will, has to be some kind of an incentive structure to support forests, to reduce deforestation and support standing forests. It’s not the only one. So, we set up these bilateral partnerships where we typically did it in a results-based way to pilot and to learn from and because we thought results-based payments were the best way of targeting the incentive where it’s needed to support the governance decisions and policies needed to protect forest, be it from land use planning, law enforcement, protected areas, Indigenous territories and aligned sector policies across the board, be it agricultural policies, energy, mining and so on.

We cannot from Norway, sit and decide what policy changes a country can do. But we can support the overall impact of that which is not easily measured but is measurable in the form of reduced deforestation. Later, we developed a broader set of strategies, partially as a response. I think it’s right to say that initially, we were more narrowly focused on REDD+ as a mechanism in the climate convention, in our bilateral work, and in our support to civil society. Partially as a response to this demand not coming about through the climate convention in Copenhagen from binding targets, as Arild mentioned in the beginning, or from legislation in the US or the EU.

The US was actually quite close, and Obama pushed healthcare first, and after that, there was no climate legislation. The EU also did not include REDD+ in its Emissions Trading Scheme, I think partially due to the challenges of oversupply and balancing and maintaining a pricing for carbon in the EU. So, we were left with many years of ODA for continuing to pilot REDD+ to work together to reduce deforestation and results-based payments being one mechanism for doing that. We still believed in it, despite we didn’t always do it to mobilise the market. We did it because we thought it was a good way of spending our taxpayers’ money in a targeted way to support governments and support leadership of countries that reduce deforestation.

We then later broadened our strategy, as I said, to other areas, including collaboration on international forest crime, critically, collaboration on reduced deforestation from global supply chains, particularly from agriculture, from soy, meat, and palm oil, which remains a big part of our work today. Our work with financial markets to measure deforestation and account for deforestation in investment portfolio and to support all of these initiatives.

I should say, partially a topic of today is our work to protect Indigenous peoples more broadly, not just in REDD+ and carbon markets, but it’s a very broad portfolio of supporting the rights of Indigenous peoples, the livelihoods of Indigenous peoples, locally and globally, in different aspects. To support all these strategies, our work to improve satellite imagery and data around deforestation, not only as a transaction cost for a carbon transaction, but more importantly, to improve land use decisions and policy making, and to allow for Indigenous peoples to point to deforestation alerts, to allow for companies to track deforestation in their supply chains, to allow governments and others to go after international forest crime.

But REDD+ remains a very important part of our strategy, because we do not think it’s fair to say to tropical forest countries that they’re alone in this endeavour. We recognize that part of the drivers of deforestation are international. These are countries -they’re all different - but they don’t always have the capacities or the financial resources to implement the strategies that are not only in their national interest, to improve land use. It is not something that we only do for us. But it is a global service too, and so we should be part of a partnership with developing countries to provide incentives to support that transition.

The more we talk about REDD+ and the need for incentives, the more often people neglect that self-interest. And I think that’s very important. I just came from Brazil. You see the impact of deforestation on soils, on hydropower reservoirs. And so, there’s a very clear economic national self-interest in protecting forests. I think Brazil certainly recognizes that. But still, I think we do need to find ways of mobilizing incentives and resources to tropical forest countries. We had a breakthrough in Glasgow with more ODA several years ago. But that is not enough. We’re also having interesting discussions now around alternative ways of mobilizing private capital through the Tropical Forest Finance Facility. That is going to be challenging. We’re very engaged in that discussion too. I think carbon and other ways of monetizing economic or ecosystem services have a role to play. So that’s one framing point I would like to make.

The other, when it comes to REDD+ is many different things over time. One is the climate negotiations, one country reduces, and a trading mechanism, if you will, Article 6. Another is the ODA. That was the jurisdictional REDD and in parallel to our work with the tropical forest countries, typically Norway, the UK, Germany, a broader group through the World Bank Forest Carbon Partnership Facility. This was seen as the government’s work to work together to reduce emissions with REDD+ and the private sector focused on stand-alone carbon projects, some of them good for the local community, some of them robust in an environmental way. But as a totality, that market would never scale up to reduce deforestation at the pace we required. And as a totality, that market contained a number of human rights abuses. We saw that in many of our tropical forest partner countries, frustrations of Indigenous peoples, that there were “carbon cowboys,” as they are referred to, coming in and convincing them to sign agreements that they don’t know about, or inflated baselines that eat up the total volume of carbon to the extent that the government cannot engage, as a government, in carbon partnerships as well. So, we joined that criticism.

We had criticized that for a number of years. There were the articles in The Guardian that Arild mentioned, and we came out and also supported that criticism quite broadly, saying that there is another way REDD can be done in a way that supports the targets, incentives and policy changes needed, and distributes benefits and includes stakeholders in a conversation around what’s needed to be done in a fair way. And that’s the jurisdictional REDD frame.

I think, going back to the early days, I think the debates in the beginning, I’ve seen a big change since the since the Copenhagen days, if you will, or even before, when I was working at the World Bank, when they set up the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility. There were Indigenous protests that said, Don’t do this. Don’t monetize our land or monetize carbon. Very important concerns, but there’s a very different discussion now around REDD+. I think there’s a broader support for jurisdictional REDD from Indigenous peoples. I think we’ve come a long way.

There are absolutely challenges in every country in the world, including our own, to consult and include Indigenous peoples. But I think the Indigenous movement we have seen has supported efforts to work with tropical forest countries at the government level, at the country level, and to set up mechanisms to support in that process their livelihoods and their rights.

The debate is not whether or not to do jurisdictional REDD, rather, whether it can be good. Certainly, there can be discussions around who buys, or there can be discussion of how it’s implemented. But it’s not a criticism of jurisdictional REDD+ as a concept, as much as we saw in the in the beginning. If anything, there was the concern around REDD understood as the carbon cowboys coming in with independent, stand-alone projects, not connected to a broader national framework.

I think the debates we’ve heard and some of the interventions now are about how it is implemented. So, it’s not necessarily about whether jurisdictional REDD can be a good thing, or whether ART’s standard TREES, as you mentioned, is a robust standard. I think most would argue that it goes further than anything we’ve done before, even further than the agreement in the climate negotiations among countries. Of course, when it comes to implementation, there will be challenges. And to the quote, “we’re doing REDD because it’s important, not because it’s easy,” I would say we’re doing jurisdictional REDD because it’s important, not because it’s easy. It is comparatively easier to have a carbon project, and that’s part of the reason companies did that and bought from that. They could maintain the risk, isolate the risk, they could send in the best consultant on human rights and have a consultation with one community. It is much harder to do REDD across a state or a country.

Some of the Brazilian states, like Pará, are doing consultations of 50 locations in a state that is three or four times the size of Germany, an area with very little infrastructure. That is very complex, and each of those communities has a different history, different culture and so on. Doing that right is very complex. I think we heard many examples here of how there are disagreements around how it’s done, and important discussions around how it could be done better. I think that’s important as a reflection of where we are in this debate.

The fact that there is a process at the global level with the standard to provide these inputs to the ART Secretariat periodically is very important. I encourage all the speakers and all the people in the room to make use of that process and to provide comments. Of course, in the country, the best recipient of that message, of how it’s implemented, is actors involved in that country. I regret the fact that we don’t have some of the governments in the room that were mentioned in these in these processes today. I think Guyana or Costa Rica would have their views of the governments, of the process that has expired and how they will go about to take on that feedback. You can’t do everything in three hours. But I think that that’s an important conversation that needs to happen as well.

Similarly, some of the concerns raised, I think the ART Secretariat probably should opine on also. When it comes to our role, we have funded the establishment and the operations of ART, precisely because we wanted to support increased demand for jurisdictional REDD done right, and to try to capture the energy that was in the market that we did not support; to channel that in a way that supports the governments. And to support processes that are inclusive of Indigenous peoples, local communities, and respects their rights and allow them to benefit from the structures.

I spoke a bit off script. I’ll just take a second here to see if there’s anything I forgot to mention. So, of the jurisdictional standards, there is also Verra in this landscape that ART has sort of trailblazed, if you will, partially as a response to the criticism of the stand-alone projects. I don’t know if there will be more standards supporting the jurisdictional process, but I do recognize that that ART is seen widely as a robust standard. We certainly think it is. I’m sure there are ways it can be improved. It’s not Norway’s standard, that I have to say. It’s very important to emphasize, yes, we were part of the initial discussions of setting up a standard. We support the establishment of a process to get feedback and expert advice on how to establish a standard. We did not write the standard, and we don’t determine how ART implements its decisions. There’s an independent board, there’s a secretariat. We have a dialogue with the Secretariat as a funder, and some of these issues have been part of that dialogue. But it’s not that we decide on behalf of ART, and - I’m not saying that to be defensive - it’s important that it is an independent standard. It’s not just Norway’s views, that determines what’s right and how it should be done. The standard has also in its development, operations and refinements, set up processes to include Indigenous peoples and local communities. So very much supportive of that. And I hope if there have been cases where communities or actors have not been heard that there could be a way through these channels to make sure that that your concerns are heard. Thank you for having me here.

Question from Wenting Chen, Senior Research Scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA): Thank you so much for a very good description of the programme and its history. You mentioned that at the project level, there are a lot of private companies involved in investing. You also mentioned that those projects are most likely small scale and difficult to scale up. From your experience, what are the main challenges for these companies to scale up their projects?

Andreas Dahl-Jørgensen responds: I’m not saying they’re all small scale. Some of these project areas are huge and they are complex too. But if we’re looking at what the science tells us is needed in terms of reductions in deforestation, if we’re talking about what countries aim to achieve, and if you’re thinking about how to incentivize change, I think that is part of our difference with the project approach. It’s not all bottom up.

This is interesting when it comes to jurisdictional REDD. There’s a bit of tension between what’s easiest from a social perspective, and what’s needed from an environment perspective. If you have a bottom-up process, community by community, which might take decades, but it is easier to get that right, if you will, from a social perspective. From an environment perspective, having 4,000 REDD projects in a country with different methodologies will not support the government or the policy changes needed to reduce deforestation. In fact, part of the baseline is often that the government doesn’t care. So rather than taking the government and the political will as an externality, we believe in jurisdictional REDD supporting a wanted transition that the government wants to implement, not alone, but with participation from communities.

That is the many reasons why jurisdictional REDD is preferred from a social perspective. I think it’s very hard to do these consultations right with the right resources, the languages and frameworks and that will be different from place to place. It’s not like  ART can set one set of rules that will be effective and support the rights in every setting, but it avoids the carbon cowboys social risk of having market actors with very limited care or knowledge of how this is done go in and offer some beers and sign a contract that is certainly not what we agreed in the climate convention, neither from a social perspective, nor from an environmental perspective.

Arild Angelsen: Christina Voigt is next. She is a Professor of Law at the University of Oslo and is also a member of the ART Board. She has worked as a REDD negotiator for Norway, including on Indigenous rights. Just to make clear, she joined the board after the Guyana decision of 2022 that we have discussed. So, you can speak open and freely about that. You are very much welcome. The floor is yours.

Christina Voigt, Professor of Law, University of Oslo: Thank you so much. Arild for both a very kind introduction, but also for the invitation to be here today. I say a couple of words about why I think this is particularly pertinent, but also, thank you, Ann and Development Today and Fritt Ord for organizing this super critical exchange.

In your slide you call for critical exchange, that we’re not here to shut down, to kill REDD+. That was your opening statement, but we’re here to make it better, and we can only make it better together with the experiences we are gaining together over the many years that we now have REDD+ with us.

A couple of caveats. As you mentioned, I’m a current member of the ART Board, but I was elected a member after the situation that was discussed earlier today. I’m also not here to speak on behalf of the board, because we are eight individuals working in our personal capacity. I cannot speak for all of them, but I will share, of course, some of my experiences with the board. I’d also like to reiterate something that Andreas said. I’ve been enjoying this conversation very much. The inputs that were given. But I do believe we would have benefited from having the respective countries joining the conversation, Guyana and Costa Rica. I think that would have been an added value to the exchange that we’ve we have today, as well as the ART Secretariat.

Please indulge me for a second. I would really like to thank the ART Secretariat in particular, Christy Magerkuth and Mary Grady, who spend an enormous amount of time and energy in making this work and also listening to the inputs and stakeholder feedback for quite some time. Thank you. Also, both the previous speakers that we heard today and some of the organisations that are represented here for your input and feedback on the revision of TREES towards the adoption of 3.0. It is eventually the board who will adopt it. So it is very relevant to hear this, although all the input is collected by the Secretariat and then compiled, and this is what then gets to the eight board members for consideration and eventually adoption.

These were lots of caveats and introductory remarks. Where should I start? Maybe very briefly, at the beginning. Andreas was also alluding a little bit to the beginning. I think we cannot understand where we are today and how far we’ve come, how many challenges we’ve encountered and mastered, if we don’t understand where we came from initially. I think it is fair to say that Indigenous people’s rights and local communities, which we haven’t really talked about that much, lie at the very heart of REDD+. From the very beginning, we were part of the very early conversations. Andreas and NICFI colleagues here in the room, and Lars Løvold from Rainforest Foundation Norway. It was a recognition that the forests that we do still have, the tropical forests that are standing, that are preserved and conserved, are to a significant extent, managed by Indigenous peoples, either on their land or under their use and have been protected because of Indigenous peoples acting as stewards of the forests. So, the protection of Indigenous people’s rights in the context of the framework of REDD, and being a lawyer, I talk a lot about the rules we have as an absolutely central component, and have been from the very beginning of the REDD+ framework, both under the convention, and now also part of the Paris agreement, of ART and many bilateral arrangements.

In fact, maybe you know that, but ART has six what is called “immutable principles,” that cannot be deviated from. One of the principles is the consistency of everything that ART does with the REDD+ framework, and in particular the safeguards, and Indigenous people’s rights, as you perhaps know, are part of the safeguards. The safeguards capture broader than just Indigenous people’s rights. They have environmental components as well as social components, including Indigenous people’s rights and respect for their rights and knowledge.

The REDD+ safeguards were negotiated up to and in Copenhagen, and were agreed in Copenhagen, but not adopted due to the chaos that erupted. But I went last night through my memorabilia from Copenhagen, and I found this scarf. It’s not so very cold here today, but I thought it was a very interesting thing to have, because in Copenhagen, it says: no rights, no REDD. We had a significant mobilisation of Indigenous people’s representatives and stakeholders that pointed to the absolute need to have Indigenous people’s rights recognized in the framework for REDD+, and that aligned very well with Norway’s priorities, in addition to the environmental safeguards and the robustness of baselines and so forth, with having a robust set of safeguards.

Now, when the first REDD decision, including the safeguards, was adopted one year later in Cancun, it was celebrated as a significant achievement, a breakthrough to have safeguards. This was something previously unheard of in a climate context. It just did not exist before under the UN climate treaties. It was the first time that in a climate context, Indigenous people’s rights were explicitly mentioned. That was the starting point, and this is important to remember when we think about where we are today.

The second importance of these safeguards was that they also gave a very important signal to forest countries, to host countries, about the need for policy reforms, legal changes, institutional changes, in order to make sure that they were able to protect and respect the rights of Indigenous peoples, and it’s always a very delicate balance negotiating these agreements. Many of you, perhaps, know that because on the one hand, you have the sovereign interest of the host states who don’t want to be told what to do domestically. On the other hand, you have, of course, the interest of donors in a legitimate and credible setup where we also have to report back to taxpayers about where the money goes. It has to be made sure that it’s not doing any harm, or even doing better than not doing any harm. That balance was carefully negotiated and included in the REDD+ safeguards.

I do think it’s fair to say, and I think we’ve heard it also from Julia and earlier speakers, that the REDD+ framework, as it was adopted and then implemented, has led to a significant strengthening of the rights of Indigenous peoples that perhaps otherwise would not have happened, in particular in the context of identification of who the Indigenous communities are, in terms of participation and consultation, but also in terms of recognizing their material rights, land rights, tenure rights, usage rights and so forth, and in some cases, also the recognition of carbon rights. But that is a domestic issue, like how countries’ domestically national jurisdictions regulate the recognition of carbon rights, and that differs from country to country.

Finally, it has also led to benefit sharing agreements between the government and Indigenous communities, where the revenues from REDD+ activities trickle down all the way to the Indigenous peoples on the ground. These are positive outcomes that we’ve seen, and they should not be forgotten in our critical exchange today.

The establishment of the safeguard information system - you may think, well, it’s a safeguard information system. But it focused international attention on what is happening domestically, to how countries implement their human rights, their Indigenous people’s obligations, because that information is publicly available to everyone on the Lima Information Hub and increases the transparency and openness about what is happening domestically. Information that maybe otherwise would not have been so easily accessible.

Now, as I said, much of what I just said would perhaps not have happened without REDD and without the safeguards in REDD. But not everything is perfect. I’m not saying that. We’ve come a long way, and we’ve learned a lot through learning by doing. I remember the very early days of NICFI, learning by doing, trying to gather best practices, thinking ahead of what is necessary, but also to revisions over time of the frameworks that we were trying to improve and improve and improve to make it better. In this context, consultations and exchanges like this were and are absolutely crucial.

The REDD+ framework was considered to be so important, in particular, the safeguards, that they have been included now in the Paris Agreement, in Article 5.2, as you perhaps know, but also in the Sustainable Development Tool recently adopted by the Supervisory Body of the Article 6 crediting mechanism under Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement, which thought that the experience with REDD+ safeguards was so important, so crucial, that they upscaled them to the general interaction and transactions of credits under Article 6.4.

So much for REDD+. Now, briefly, to ART. ART, as I already said, has to be consistent with the REDD+ framework adopted under the convention, especially the Cancun safeguards, as an immutable principle, as I mentioned already in the beginning. That is based on the fact that this safeguard framework was adopted by 196 states after very lengthy negotiations, and this is why we now have the standard TREES 1.0, which was then replaced by TREES 2.0, and now we’re working on a revision of TREES 2.0 towards TREES 3.0, where the safeguards are squarely reflected. If you ever had a look at the TREES standard, you will see them there, all the safeguards, A to G, as they are written in the in the REDD+ decisions that adopted them. And the standard is what matters.

I think Julia mentioned that very clearly in her intervention, because it is the standard against which the validation and verification body (VVB) will check the list, as Ann mentioned, of whether the forest country has done everything correctly, and then make a decision on verification and eventually certification, and then it goes to the board. So, it’s very important that parties show how they address and respect all these safeguards that are included in in the standard, because it is in order to ensure that jurisdictional REDD+ activities, as Andreas just highlighted, do not just not do harm, but do better and lead even to co-benefits.

I will use my last two minutes in the end to speak a little bit about non-carbon co-benefits in the standard. Each safeguard from those Cancun safeguards is broken down to further indicators, three indicators. And that goes much beyond what was agreed under the framework convention or is in the Paris Agreement. It’s much more specific. They’re indicators for structure, for progress, process and outcome. And that goes above and beyond in terms of specificity of what parties managed to agree many years ago under the framework convention. I think that’s very important, because it shows the development of where we’ve come, how far we’ve come, and how much has happened in the meantime.

There’s also a stepwise approach, which is inherent in REDD+ in general, that we learn over time that applies also to the implementation of safeguards. Now, as we already heard, there’s also a grievance mechanism in terms of a complaint possibility and an appeals possibility. Again, that’s something that goes above and beyond what was multilaterally agreed under the Framework Convention on Climate Change. As I said, it’s not perfect. It is never perfect. We constantly learn. But REDD has always been based on the notion of improvement over time, based on the feedback, based on what we’ve learned and how it can be made better.

I think in general, it’s absolutely correct, as Andreas mentioned, there is much support. We’re not talking about shutting down REDD, as Arild said. But to be extra critical in making it better. And here, of course, the revision of the TREES standard comes in very squarely. It is now out for comments on the ART website. If you just Google ART TREES, you get there straight away, and you can send a message to the ART Secretariat with any comments you have. As I said, they compile them and bring them to the attention of the of the board. There have already been extensive consultations. There have been country visits. There have been meetings. There has been the establishment of an Indigenous peoples and local communities Advisory Group involved in the revision of the standard with the specific focus on improving Indigenous people’s rights, both these consultative rights and their recognition of their material rights, some of the issues that Julia mentioned in her intervention. That feedback is important. The feedback that you gave today, the feedback that you still will give, hopefully, to the revision of the standard, because the standard is the backbone of what ART does.

Finally, in addition to the standard against which validation and verification happens, ART and the ART Board also worked on something called Beyond Carbon Benefits (BCB), which is an additional layer of certification. It’s not something against which payments will be made, because payments will still be made on the reduced emissions and increased removals, but it is a certification layer that can guide priorities of buyers of which credits they would like to buy. This is also in order to avoid a race to the bottom and rather create a race to the top by adding that additional layer to the existing standard.

Again, in the development of the Beyond Carbon Benefit layer, we worked with Indigenous people’s organisations, and it was again open for public consultation, but that closed on the August 11, very recently. Thank you all very much, both for inviting me here, for sharing your concerns, but also, most importantly, for sharing your constructive inputs on how the standard can be improved. What are the concerns? I noted down quite a lot in terms of increasing transparency, consultation, language, reducing technicality and so forth. This will all be discussed, but this feedback is important, and it’s really the only way to make things work better for all of us, and most importantly, as well, for the climate. Thank you so much.

Question from Lars Løvold, former Executive Director of Rainforest Foundation Norway: I have a question to both Andreas and Christina. I think a common theme of the three interventions from Costa Rica, Guyana and the process that Julia from RFN has conducted, was in the sense that they had developed and engaged very deeply. They had very concrete proposals. They wanted to discuss those proposals, and they could not. Is there any explanation for that, or is that a wrong impression?

Christina Voigt responds: You mean in the revision of the standard 3.0? I don’t have any detailed overview of how the secretariat schedules the consultations and inputs, but it has asked for written input. I think that’s perhaps the only manageable way for the rather small secretariat, given that there are thousands of stakeholders that can be individuals, can be organisations that provide input. It is maybe a matter of efficiency in order to process everything. But as I said, I cannot speak for how the secretariat conducts the consultations, but the amount of input is something that we need to consider and the timeline necessary to make a proposal for the board for its adoption.

Arild Angelsen: Thank you. The last speaker is Darragh Conway. He is a senior programme officer at the Tenure Facility, which is based in Stockholm and works with Indigenous peoples and local communities relating to carbon markets and REDD. The Tenure Facility was established in 2014. It was the first international financial mechanism exclusively focused on land and forest rights of Indigenous people, Afro-descendant peoples and local communities, and is currently funding activities and work in more than 20 countries.

Darragh Conway, Senior Programme Officer at the Tenure Facility: Good afternoon. I know it’s the end of a long session, so I will try and keep it interesting. It’s hard sometimes to go at the end, because a lot of the things I wanted to say have been said, so I’ll try and say them in an interesting way. As Arild mentioned, Tenure Facility works directly with Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant peoples and local communities in more than 20 countries, now providing primarily finance, but also technical support.

We have had so many requests from them to understand better - What are these carbon markets? What is REDD+? - that we’ve started to provide more structured support on that. I’ll tell you a bit more about that in a minute. But I want to start with two fundamental truths. We’ve heard these before, but let’s just recap. The first fundamental truth is that in most tropical forest countries, and certainly most countries that have submitted concept notes to ART, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant peoples and local communities own a large amount of the forest. In the Brazilian Amazon, that’s about one-third. In the Colombian Amazon, it’s almost half. In much of the Congo Basin, it’s about 85 per cent, and in Papua New Guinea, it’s 97 per cent.

The second fundamental truth is that the forests managed and owned by these Indigenous peoples and local communities is in much better condition than other forests - that’s including forest that’s managed by government under protected areas, it is under much better condition, and it has much lower deforestation. So, we’re talking about actors who own, in many cases, most of the forest, who are the best managers of the forest, and yet, all too often, we hear them spoken of as “stakeholders” and “beneficiaries.” As semi-important actors that we need to talk to and we need to have on board somehow, but not really as central actors in the process. Recognizing that, of course, governments are always going to be central actors in jurisdictional processes, I would argue that Indigenous peoples and Afro descendant peoples and local communities should be equally, in many cases, important actors, and that requires a bit of a mindset shift. It’s a shift from stakeholders to partners. It’s a shift from beneficiaries to implementers.

So, how do we make this mindset shift happen and then translate it into what actually matters? And I would say that needs to happen on three levels: and that’s on the level of rulebooks, on the levels of playbooks, and on the level of chequebooks.

I’m going to speak a little bit about each of these, starting with rulebooks, because maybe as a lawyer as well, I’m a bit biased, and I think rulebooks are important. But it’s a lot of what we’ve been talking about today. And the main rulebook we’re talking about today is the ART TREES standard. What does the ART TREES standard need to do to ensure this mindset? I would say it’s two main things: the first is to ensure that Indigenous people’s rights and local communities rights are respected in the rules. And that’s looking at things like free prior and informed consent, which is not currently required in most cases. That’s looking at the ownership of emission reductions, recognizing that Indigenous people own emission reductions in the forest that they own. That’s things like ensuring that benefits are fairly distributed according to ownership of emission reductions, but also according to the role in achieving emission reductions. And as Julie has spoken a lot about how these rules could be improved, and so I don’t want to get into too much detail about that.

The second thing is ensuring the rules are implemented. And we’ve heard a lot from Christina about how the rules are based on the on the Warsaw safeguards and the Warsaw REDD framework. The Warsaw safeguards provide a really important starting point, because as mentioned, these were negotiated over many, many years by 190 plus governments. But then the question was that they were very broad. Anyone who’s familiar with the safeguards knows they’re quite broad. There is a lot of detail to be figured out, and part of that detail is in how the safeguards are translated into more detailed guidance.

ART has done something. I would agree with you. ART has definitely done a decent amount to make them a bit more detailed. But they are still quite broad. The second question is, how are they implemented? and how do we ensure that they’re implemented? The governments are the ones responsible for implementing but it’s these validation and verification bodies that are responsible for checking that they’ve been implemented. Then, ultimately the ART Secretariat checks the recommendations of these VVBs. And what we’ve heard today from various speakers, and it’s really true, is that the VVBs do not have the expertise to be able to do this. We heard from Levi speaking about VVBs going to Costa Rica and not even speaking Spanish. How can you go and really have conversations with Indigenous people if you don’t even speak the national language, let alone Indigenous languages?

If you look at the requirements that ART has for VVBs in the ART standard, they require a lot of expertise on technical topics like emissions calculations, and that’s really important, but there’s absolutely no requirement to have any expertise on Indigenous people’s rights. So how is it possible to assess compliance with safeguards on Indigenous people’s rights, if you don’t have any expertise on the topic, even in general, let alone in the country? We talked a bit about Verra earlier. That’s more project-based, although they’re moving a bit in the direction of jurisdictional REDD in their proposals for their new standard.

I think that will be really interesting for ART to look at how they could do the same. I think I would agree with Julia that the draft of TREES 3.0 has gone some way to addressing these concerns, but a lot of them haven’t yet been addressed. As there is a public consultation period currently underway, the deadline is coming up next month. This is a really important opportunity for those who are interested in this topic to make comments, because there is still a really, really important opportunity now to improve that rulebook.

Let’s move on from rulebooks and on to playbooks. The ones who are responsible for implementing the ART TREES rules are, ultimately, governments. They’re the ones who design the programmes. They’re the ones who implement the programmes. And I think here what the mindset shift that we need to see from governments is again, not looking at Indigenous people as stakeholders that we have to consult, not looking at these rules on things like free prior and informed consent as an obligation, but to looking at it as an opportunity if you want to implement a programme that actually reduces emissions from forests. That means stopping deforestation, that means ensuring sustainable forest management. That means doing very difficult things in very remote places. The best way to do those things is by working in partnership with the communities who live in those places, who have for 1000s of years been very, very successfully protecting those forests.

I think not enough governments are seeing this amazing opportunity that they have to design and implement programmes that are going to be very successful, and in many cases, doing it more cheaply, because you don’t have to spend a lot of money on having park rangers in very remote places, if you’re working with Indigenous people who are already there. I think sometimes governments are just looking at this like something that has been imposed on them from outside. But if you really look at how to make this successful, I think this is the opportunity, and you are seeing some governments start to move in that direction.

Some of you might be familiar with what’s happening in Peru. The government of Peru is collaborating with the main three Indigenous organisations there to develop what would be the first Indigenous-led jurisdictional REDD+ program. And this is a really encouraging sign, and I think it’d be really interesting to see if more governments decide to follow suit.

The third thing, where we need a mindset shift is in chequebooks. This is very antiquated language for any younger people in the room. Chequebooks were things that people used to write that meant they were going to pay money later. So, chequebooks. We are talking about buyers, of course, the buyers of the carbon credits. These are the ones who ultimately fund putting up the bill. At the moment, a lot of the development of these programmes is funded by international cooperation, folks like Norway. But ultimately, it’s the buyers who are putting the money into the market. And I think what the mindset shift that we need from buyers is to realize that the only credit worth buying is a high-quality credit. That is not just a credit that is backed by a real emission reduction. It’s a credit that has been developed in a way that’s fair, in a way that respects both national and international laws, and a credit that has been developed in partnership with those who guard the forest and who rely on the forest, and that means, in many cases, putting your money where your mouth is, because higher quality credits are going to cost more.

We’ve heard that doing free prior and informed consent properly takes time. That is true. It takes money as well. That’s also true. And the money needs to come up front. And the problem is a lot of the buyers are not willing to put that money up front. They only want to buy the credits once they’re absolutely ready. But we do see some encouraging signs again, going back to the Peruvian case, where Mercuria, this international commodity trader, is in discussions there about providing upfront finance for that programme. We need to see more of that, because Indigenous peoples and governments have limited finance to be able to implement these things well. Development finance and philanthropic finance can only go so far.

So, we’ve talked about rulebooks, playbooks, and chequebooks. Very briefly, I want to talk about the role that the Tenure Facility plays. As mentioned, our work on this is relatively new, and it’s really responding to demands that we’re receiving from our partners. At the moment, we’re in the process of discussing with them in more detail to see what they need. What we’re hearing from them is, on one hand, they need more information, and so we’re working with other organisations like Rainforest Foundation Norway and Rainforest Foundation US to see how to provide better and more consistent information so they can make informed decisions. They need decision-making support. They need actual analysis. We have jurisdictional REDD. How is this going to affect our rights? Is this an opportunity for us? Are there risks? How do we manage those risks? That is something we’re looking at supporting them with.

Another thing is, if we are going to get financed through this, how are we going to make sure that this is properly managed? And there’s a really interesting development here in that a lot of Indigenous people and Afro-descendant people and local communities have been developing their own funds over the last decade or so, and these are ways for them to have financial autonomy and a great way to channel resources. That’s also something we’re working with them on. Finally, one way we help often in the countries we work, we have very close relationships with the Indigenous people’s movements. We also have close relationships with the governments. And so often governments will come to us and seek some advice. We help to build bridges and provide a bit that perspective to governments of, how can you ensure that you implement a programme in a good way. I think in many cases, governments do want to do the right thing, and they’re not really quite sure how to. They’re worried about the time, and they’re worried about the cost, and so that’s something that we engage with governments on figuring out: how can we ensure that Indigenous people’s rights are properly respected in these programmes?

So to conclude, I think we need a mindset shift. This is not just about tinkering with a few rules here and there. This is really a fundamental shift away from looking at Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant peoples and local communities as stakeholders, as beneficiaries, to implementers, to partners. And that’s not necessarily going to be easy, but it is important. I really liked that quote earlier, and I think we can apply that to this particular issue. We don’t work with Indigenous peoples because it’s easy, but we work with them because it’s important.

One other quote that I’ve heard - I know there were some concerns that this is going to take a long time. I get that there’s a lot of urgency, and we’ve been discussing REDD+ now since, 2005 – that’s 20 years. And t’s not going fast enough. I really do get this sense that we need to move faster, but there’s a great saying in a lot of Spanish-speaking countries: “We have to go slowly because we’re in a hurry.” If we try and rush too much with these things, we’re going to shoot ourselves in the foot. If you try and implement programmes without partnering with those who are actually living in the forest, the ones who can really make a change on the ground, it’s not going to work, and we’ve seen that from the experience of governments with protected areas, which are often ineffective because it’s too expensive to run and because they don’t have the support on the ground. So, I would say really, when we’re looking at changing the ART-TREES standard, when we’re looking at how we implement it as governments, when we’re looking as buyers, at what credits we buy. Think about that. Let’s go slowly because we’re in a hurry. Thank you.

Panel discussion: Arild Angelsen, Andreas Dahl-Jørgensen, Christina Voigt, Darragh Conway, Julia Naime, Mario Hastings. Ann Danaiya Usher moderating.

Ann Danaiya Usher: Thank you so much to the three speakers. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for your thoughtful presentations. Really a lot of food for thought. I think we would really love to get your reaction to some of the presentations that were given earlier. I wanted first to just take the opportunity, since I have the mike, to respond to this feeling that all the governments should have been here, the ART Secretariat should have been here. In a larger format, it would have been really interesting to do that. We were doing this on a shoestring budget. And, you know, all of the generous contribution of Fritt Ord and others went straight to Litteraturhuset. So, this is what we were able to manage. Maybe the next time we can expand this discussion. I think that would be a great idea.

I wonder whether we could start with a question for Mario Hastings from Hege Ragnhildstveit, since it was really focusing on the Guyana experience. So, the question was: Climate crisis. Urgency. We don’t have time to wait. In the case of Guyana, it was mentioned that there was an eight-month consultation process. It sounds like a long time. Can you respond from your experience to that intervention?

Mario Hastings responds: Well, okay, well, we know that time factor was very important, but I would like to say that since it was something new, we still think we have to take time because of the newness of this project. We just don’t want to rush into things that we have never had any kind of experience, to be on the safe side. We feel, as Indigenous people, that time is very important, and unless we are part of these plans or programmes at the inception, I think we would go a great way, but excluding us, that is where we would face a lot of problems.

Ann Danaiya Usher: Thank you. And the next question, really, I wanted to repeat Lars Løvold’s question. I received a little text from Julia saying that she wanted to respond. And just to remind us, Lars was saying that, you know, from what Levi Sucre Romero was saying, from what Mario Hastings was saying, and from what Julia was telling us about this letter, Indigenous organisations have really tried to engage with ART - not just a phone call or a meeting, but several meetings over years, and have not received the kind of reception that you would hope.

Darragh mentioned that Peru is a unique case in that they are, for the first time, testing out an Indigenous co-government-led application to ART. I would mention that one of the organisations that is part of that application is AIDESEP, which signed the letter calling for reform of the standard. So they’re engaging, but at the same time, they have concerns. Julia, please go ahead.

Julia Naime responds: I’ll just briefly share the interaction with the ART Secretariat. So, the response was that, just for fairness considerations and giving the same voice to all stakeholders, they were not interested at this stage to give us a one-to-one meeting with our partners, the way we were able to have them with CLUA for example. This can be understood to some extent, but I think the level of effort and the coordination we had and the number of organisations we were, it would have been worthwhile for both sides.

And then the second one that you mentioned, Ann, was that there were some consultations. This question of fairness was not necessarily implemented by the standard itself, because there were some consultation procedures with some organisations but not others, and it was not fully transparent on what was shared, what was said, what were the feedback given.

Ann Danaiya Usher: Thank you, Julia. So, I feel like we need to focus on Guyana, because it’s the only test case we have. It’s the only country where ART credits have been issued. And initially, when the announcement was made by the ART Board, NICFI welcomed the credit issuance - this was back in December 2022 - calling it a “historic breakthrough for the emergence of a high-quality global carbon market to protect tropical forests.” But when Indigenous people said that their rights had been violated, there was no public comment from Norway. How do we understand that? I mean, ART clearly took the government’s side in this dispute. What is Norway’s assessment of what happened? And are you satisfied that that the credits that were issued by ART are actually high-integrity, based on the concerns that have been raised?

Andreas Dahl-Jørgensen responds: Well, I think this is an important discussion that I think Guyana should be asked to respond to. I think they could have replied or been part of this free of charge remotely, and I think that would be a better discussion to have.

When we congratulated Guyana on the transaction, I think it’s because we recognized that they had gone through, as the first country, a process that is very demanding, and that was a milestone in itself, and so and that was important news. There was serious interest in the jurisdictional market, not just in the project market, and that was also a cause for celebration. I cannot know what has transpired in Guyana. It is hard for us to follow that from here. I think it’s not appropriate for me to comment on what the process in Guyana has been. I think that’s why we have supported establishment of a structure. It’s not Norway running around certifying carbon credits, and there’s a reason for that. We don’t have the right or the capacity to do so, and so that’s why we supported ART to set up a structure.

As I said earlier, of course, ART is one thing at the written rules, the rulebook, but when it comes to a reality in a specific political or historical context, there will be different views. And I don’t want to defend one side or the other. I just want to recognize that and to say that we have had faith in the way that this structure is set up to work. When it comes to ART, I think it’s unfortunate that people feel that they have not been heard or had the chance to engage. I haven’t talked to them for a while but, but I do know that they have a very small team working endless hours and are obsessed with doing it the right way and having a due process that everyone feels fairly treated. So, I hope there’s a way to rectify this and make sure, in the process now, in the revisions, at least, that there can be a way to engage. But I think this treating everyone equal is also my impression that that might have expired there. Thanks.

Ann Danaiya Usher: Christina, as it was said before, and I think it’s really an important thing to remember, you weren’t there when the decision was made about the Guyana credits. Do you have any reflections about it? And I would just add that 33 million tonnes of carbon credits were sold to an oil company. I know ART has no say about who a government sells its credits to, but what are your reflections on the question that I asked Andreas? And what is the climate accounting of selling forest carbon credits to an oil company? Is there a climate benefit there?

Christina Voigt responds: Okay, that was like three questions in one. It was before my time, but I do know quite a bit of the details of what happened. It was the first issuance of credits. It’s a very complex landscape. The government provides information. There have been consultations with Indigenous people’s representatives in Guyana, including the National Toshaos Council that we discussed, and others. It is very difficult to evaluate one statement against another. For that reason, it’s very important to have that appeals mechanism. Now there are challenges with it, and it’s one of the issues that is now under revision. I think that’s a very important aspect, to have an independent appeal possibility in a situation like this, where the truth is, perhaps, somewhere in the middle. It is not very concise to know exactly where the challenges lie, where different perceptions are out there. So, having that independent appeal body in place and revised and strengthened, I think, is one of the very important aspects that at least we will take back to the ART 3.0 revision.

Now, your other element on what the money is being used for. It is correct. ART doesn’t have any say on the sovereign decision by the country or sub-national entity on which buyer they choose. It can be CORSIA, it can be a company. It can be one of the LEAF partners, a government or corporate actor that is outside our mandate. That is a sovereign decision. Now, the climate benefit, of course, in this case, isn’t as an offset, using the credits against otherwise happening emissions, but we talked about offsets. That’s more of an ideological discussion that we probably don’t want to go into here, but that’s the benefit, to offset. There’s also a possibility for host countries to freeze the credits or to de evaluate them, where, of course, then the climate benefit would be higher, but that’s again, the sovereign decision of the forest country.

Ann Danaiya Usher: Andreas, would you like to speak to that? Is there a climate benefit? A net climate benefit to selling tropical forest carbon credits to an oil company? I know oil companies are not eligible for the LEAF coalition, but this first jurisdictional REDD project went through, what’s the climate outcome of that, in your assessment?

Andreas Dahl-Jørgensen responds: It’s very hard for me to know. I don’t know the climate strategies or climate accounting of the buyer. In this case, all else equal, this is reducing emissions from the forest, whether that gives increased emissions on the other end, I don’t know. I don’t think this, to my knowledge, was a voluntary transaction, so that led to a slower energy transition. I don’t know. It’s an interesting sort of debate in the carbon market, whether or not and to what extent companies should be able to accredit their contributions to the voluntary carbon market for their own accounting.

There is the Science-Based Targets Initiative. There are other initiatives trying to give norms for what corporates should do in different sectors. I haven’t followed it for some months. I don’t know if they have a guidance on the oil and gas sector, but for other sectors to have tried to promote that or provide that guidance as long as you’re on the path towards science-based reductions in emissions. I do think – and this is not about oil and gas, but it’s a different, related topic - that the norms in the market now are that the companies should not use offsets much at all, that they are encouraged to provide the removals credits 20 years from now. To me, that’s the question from someone working on tropical for deforestation and trying to mobilise engagement from governments, from finance, from the corporate sector as well, is that the right guidance to send we’re letting the most biodiverse, cultural, rich carbon, rich forests disappear for a decade or two while asking companies to get carbon removal credits from planting trees.

I went to a conference in Brazil where they said they’re getting USD 50 per tonne for tree-planting projects. So that goes to the other discussion too, about complexity and timing. I don’t want to rush things. I don’t want to avoid good process. But there is a sense that this is so complex that it’s easier to buy land or lease land and plant trees and get away with it. From a climate perspective, I don’t think that’s the right way to mobilise the biggest climate action in the next 10-20 years.

Ann Danaiya Usher: Thank you, Andreas. So, I have a question that maybe Darragh could speak to, and then the others are also welcome to comment afterwards. So, Guyana has had two rounds of credits issued by ART. In the other 25 jurisdictions where governments are applying to ART for credits, I’m hearing from what Julia is saying, from what you’re saying about the feedback you’re getting from organisations that you work with, that people are worrying about this, or they’re trying to understand, what this is going to mean for us. Based on what you know now about ART to this point, what assurances do Indigenous communities have in those 25 jurisdictions that the experience that Mario Hastings describes in Guyana won’t be repeated?

Darragh Conway responds: It’s a great question: I think the answer will come in a few months’ time when ART TREES 3.0 is finalised. A lot of the feedback on the revision of the standard, as was mentioned, ART conducted regional consultations with Indigenous peoples and local communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America. They conducted consultations with NGOs. They accepted written feedback, as mentioned, the process wasn’t always very transparent. They didn’t publish the feedback they received. They were asked several times, and they refused to share it.

There is now a public comment period, and that that feedback will be available online, as far as I’m aware. So, we’ll depend quite a bit on the results of that process. I think you know, at the moment, Indigenous peoples and local communities are concerned in a lot of cases. We’ve heard, for example, from partners in the Democratic Republic of Congo that a concept note has been submitted to ART-TREES quite a while ago. We are working with a lot of the main Indigenous and local community organisations in these countries. In the DRC, we’re working with seven different organisations, and they haven’t been engaged at all. They haven’t really heard much about it. They don’t know what’s happening.

This is not necessarily surprising, but it is kind of shocking. To think that in the country where more than 85 per cent of the forest is owned by Indigenous peoples and by local communities, that the government would have submitted a concept note without consulting at all, without even informing the main Indigenous peoples and local communities’ organisations. My guess is that what we’ve seen with the new draft of TREES 3.0, there are definite improvements in there, but a lot of the issues have not been addressed. There is still a sense that, well, we’ll leave it up to governments to implement this in the right way. And I think if you do that, some governments will do it better, and some governments won’t do it great. There is a big opportunity to have a stronger standard, to have stronger guidance on how to follow the standard, and to have stronger processes for reviewing whether the standard has been complied with, and that goes back to the qualifications of the validation and verification bodies and to the grievance mechanism that Christina just mentioned.

Arild Angelsen: It was alluded to that, as you know, the history of REDD and the way it has been perceived, and including LEAF when it was launched, some countries think that the whole REDD project is “green imperialism.” Some perceive it as the Global North paying and imposing demands and standards on the Global South, although it also comes with money. I wonder if the ART standard should be more specific. For example, there’s no details on benefit sharing. I asked the question to Mario Hastings about what exactly are the implications for you on the ground? Is there a kind of a constraint in the revision of the ART standards? Beyond that the world is complicated, blah blah - that there is a limit to how much a standard supported by three or four rich countries, involving big multinational companies, with a secretariat in the United States, Emergent based in the US, perceived as the Global North coming here and saying: we just want you to reduce carbon emissions, but here is how you should do it. Is that kind of a problem? A constraint on some of the issues that we can sit here and discuss? This is the way it should be done. It’s not simply acceptable, the political reality.

Andreas Dahl-Jørgensen responds: Absolutely. I mean, that is why we cannot sit here and discuss how Brazil should reduce deforestation. That’s why they have a strategy. That’s why they set up their own policies and their own systems for sharing benefits. I think there is a limit to how much you can provide detail and standardisation that applies to every situation. There are ways around that, perhaps by setting expectations of a process that is inclusive, or other elements that bring the local context, can do it in an appropriate way. And of course, there’s a tension.

Christina and I were both in the REDD negotiations. There was certainly a feeling that we both wanted to respect sovereignty, but we wanted to impose things in the text that we thought were important. And I think that’s what this standard does too. There’s a clear recognition from our end that we need to respect sovereignty, and that the national situation is what is important. And if a country, any country that we work with, feels like we’re just imposing our will on them, they will not want to have our partnership. But there are also some universal, fundamental ideas that we believe are important if we are to be part of this. And that’s why we were fighting hard for 91d, or whatever it was we discussed in Cancun, after you [Christina] sat on the A to G … that was important to us. So, there is a balancing act there. How much you can impose from outside and what is appropriate to impose from outside for having a good outcome.

Darragh Conway reponds: I think it’s a really interesting argument. Because you have this idea of green colonialism, this idea that the Global North is imposing standards on the Global South. I very much understand this idea that Norway, as a Global North country, doesn’t want to impose their standards on Guyana or any other Global South country. And that makes total sense. But on the other hand, if we really think about colonialism as it is today, the real victims of colonialism are Indigenous peoples and the local communities on the ground. In many cases, they’re continuing to be the victims of colonialism because they don’t have their rights recognised by the governments that that have sovereignty over those lands. They don’t have their own sovereignty recognized. These are nations. These are nations whose sovereignty has not been recognized. So, I find it a bit strange to say that we shouldn’t recognize Indigenous rights because that would be colonial. It’s a bit of a weird argument.

Andreas Dahl-Jørgensen: Although just to be fair, I did not say that.

Darragh Conway: But Arild did, and that was the premise of the question. Sorry, not implying any statement on your behalf. But I do find that a bit strange, but it’s a complex one, and it has multiple layers. I do think we need to think of practical solutions. And I think one is the process that you mentioned, making sure that certainly Norway or no other Global North country should be telling countries how to reduce emissions, but ensuring that there’s a fair process, ensuring that Indigenous people have a seat at the table, I think should be basic.

The second thing, and I’m going to sound like a broken record, but ensuring that these things are actually implemented. And it goes to the VVBs, as I mentioned, but it also goes to the ART secretariat. We’ve talked about how they just, there are a few people, and they don’t have the capacity to be able to engage. Julia mentioned they wouldn’t engage with some of the biggest Indigenous organisations in Latin America. They all came together for a huge effort to make a submission, and ART couldn’t meet them.

There is this argument that ART doesn’t have the capacity, and it’s true they don’t. But the question is why? If we want to do these things right, maybe ART should have more capacity to be able to do those things. I think it comes back to the question, if we’re going to do this, we should do it right and we should be investing in that.

Arild Angelsen concludes: Great, we have come to an end. First of all, thanks to everyone online and in the audience. For the record, I didn’t say it was a green imperialism. I was just referring.

I think we have raised a few issues, and these are important ones. I’m reading a little bit of political science, and a couple of things I picked up in preparation for a course is the terms we use. I think Darragh, you pointed to “beneficiaries.” It is as if we have the almighty state generously giving out benefits to its subjects, their Indigenous people. No. If they protect forests and the government can sell it. The state government is the beneficiary of what is being done on the ground by Indigenous peoples and local communities. So just be aware of the language we use. Maybe they are partners or implementers, as you say. So that’s important.

The second thing I learned about is that politics should be seen as experiments, and these are experiments. The key thing may not be if we get it right from the beginning, but our ability to learn and improve on the system. So, google “ART TREES carbon” and provide inputs. You may not have a big say, but if 100 people say the same thing, it may be listened to by Christina and others. Thanks everyone for an important debate and for your participation, both online and here, and have a good day. Thanks to everyone.