Every year Australian governments and businesses spend millions of dollars on carbon credits to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. You may have even paid to offset emissions yourself when booking a flight.But do all of those offsets actually make a difference?
According to a new analysis by the Australia Institute and The Australian Conservation Foundation, the answer is: "often not".
It found the amount of "avoided" deforestation — paid for by carbon offset schemes — could not have realistically occurred in the first place.
"It's like paying someone not to drive to work when they never drove to begin with," said Richie Merzian from the Australia Institute, one of the report authors.
Australian carbon credit units (ACCUs) are some of the most respected forms of carbon offsets in the world.
They are created when someone avoids creating emissions that would otherwise have occurred, or when they remove emissions from the atmosphere, and they are regulated by the federal government through the Clean Energy Regulator.
The emission reduction needs to fit into one of a set of "methodologies", one of which is "avoided deforestation".
Strip out the politics, and the climate change story is very different to the one we've been told.
ACCUs are used as "offsets" by companies that want to reduce their carbon footprint. After a company reduces emissions as much as it can, it buys offset credits to make up for its remaining emissions.
But offsets are also the central plank of Australia's main emissions reduction policy, the Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF).
The ERF is a $4.5 billion reverse auction that buys ACCUs at the cheapest rate someone is willing to sell them for.
So far, the government has committed to spending more than $300 million on ACCUs created through "avoided deforestation" via the ERF. More than a fifth of the money spent through that fund has already gone to that method.
And it is a common source of credits sold to organisations as offsets. Not 'enough bulldozers in NSW' for assumed clearing
According to the report authors, there is simply no way all the emissions reductions paid for by those credits are real.
They examined past rates of deforestation and compared them to the amount of deforestation claimed to have been avoided through these ACCUs.
Mr Merzian said the amount claimed as "avoided deforestation" was a fantasy because it would have been impossible for that much deforestation to have occurred.
"It's hard to think that there are even enough bulldozers in New South Wales to follow through on the inflated land-clearing rates that sit behind this methodology," he said.
The federal government assumed that any farmer who had approval to clear forest under a particular type of permit in NSW would have cleared it, and so it was eligible for ACCUs if they committed to not clearing it.
