Something is rotten in the carbon-offset market - UN suspends leading firm

Many people are suspicious of the carbon-offset trade market. It seems that these suspicions are being confirmed as the United Nations have suspended the main company involved in this questionable trade.

Det Norske Veritas is a consulting company with around 8,000 employees in more than 100 countries. The Oslo based company has in the past four years validated and certified almost 50% of the 1200 projects that have been approved in accordance with the Clean Development Mechanism of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Nature reports that the executive board of the CDM has now temporarily withdrawn the accreditation of Det Norske Veritas after a spot check in early November at the company's headquarters revealed serious flaws. One of the criticism is that a person without the proper qualifications was verifying the CDM projects. Whether this is important, is unclear. "Proper qualifications" usually refers to some type of diploma or certificate, and it is no secret that many of these are not worth the paper they are written on. This may very well end up being no more important than a "war of papers," so typical of useless standards. Quickly printing out a certificate or a diploma on the printer of the department may be all that is required to become compliant. Critics of CDM are laughing right now, since they have warned for this type of problem for a long time. International Rivers, an environmentalist group operating out of Berkeley, California, has for example accused both Det Norske Veritas and the TÜV-SÜD Group, based in Münich, Germany of being too lax while assessing the social and environmental impacts of hydro-power projects in China and India. Det Norske Veritas says the decision is too harsh, but does admit that there are problems that it needs to address. Det Norske Veritas itself does certify other companies as compliant to certain standards, such as the notoriously useless ISO 9002/9001. It is rather ironic that they are now being accused of not being compliant to certain standards. CDM projects are supposed to have prevented around 250 million tonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions since the Kyoto Protocol came into force in 2005. The UN hopes that around 3 billion tonnes will have been kept out of the air by the end of 2012, the time the Kyoto protocol is expected to be replaced by a new treaty, that is currently being discussed in Poland. Whether the problem is serious or not, it certainly throws further suspicion on a trade that is already being looked upon with suspicion by environmentalists.