Isn’t one of Shell’s carbon offsets projects fundamentally flawed?
Peru’s Cordillera Azul National Park was established years before the project started, raising doubts how CO2 sequestered there is “additional”
David Hill: May 23, 2022Oil and gas company Shell, holding its AGM tomorrow, claims that customers can drive “carbon neutral” or buy “carbon neutral” liquified natural gas because it purchases carbon credits from various offsetting projects around the world, one of them dubbed “Cordillera Azul, Peru” in the remote Amazon. The project, from which numerous other companies buy credits too, supports “a rich ecosystem of indigenous biodiversity, high carbon stock forests,” shell.com states. “A multicultural population of more than 250,000 people organised in 400 communities live in the buffer zone around the Park boundaries. By 2021, [the project] aims to have protected 1.6 million hectares of threatened forest and 28 high conservation value species, supported 716 jobs and created or supported 24 sustainable enterprises.”