New Forests’ Africa managing director Yida Kemoli has said the firm does not sell carbon credits to buyers who are not already working towards reducing their own emissions.
Kemoli was responding to a question at affiliate title New Private Markets’ Impact Investor Global Summit, which asked whether carbon credits give buyers “a license to pollute.”
“I wouldn’t call it a license to pollute,” said Kemoli. “There is a potential for Africa to provide this environmental service, which is absorbing carbon, and that’s going to benefit all of us in the world – we’re all being impacted by this issue.
“So I would step away from that [categorization]. There are a lot of mechanisms that exist and, essentially, we wouldn’t sell a carbon credit to an organization that itself is not trying to reduce its emissions. That’s a major policy for the group.”
Regenerate Asset Management chief executive Ben Stafford echoed Kemoli’s comments, saying the firm “takes the same view.”
Regenerate AM is a regenerative agriculture fund manager that views the carbon credits it generates from farmland as a potential upside, and a means of enhancing strategic partnerships within its supply chain.
“Would we sell to a third-party company that’s ignoring all of the warnings? No, we wouldn’t,” said Stafford.
“We see a huge amount of opportunity within the supply chain and it’s actually linked to sensible business, because those businesses pay the highest price because they want agriculture-derived credits. So while we’re probably not classifying these as insets, they’re still very much offsets.
“We’ve seen a huge amount of effort from the companies that we’re selling to for them to decarbonize. But at the same time, that agricultural origin is key – it creates a thematic narrative around the credits and so you’re not just trading credits, you’re trading the narrative of this project. So I also disagree with the ‘license to pollute’ terminology, but we do hear it a lot,” said Stafford.
See here for further talking points from Day 1 of the Global Summit.
