Global leaders to Wall Street are betting the struggle toward net-zero targets will reignite the troubled trade in carbon offsets.
From a five-storey high wooden watchtower, workers at one of the world’s largest carbon offsets projects can see in all directions: across grasslands studded with thick clusters of reeds and toward a towering canopy of tropical forest that’s home to one of the last wild orangutan populations.
It’s a vantage point that’s crucial to survey a development roughly the size of Las Vegas, stretched across 36,000 hectares (139 square miles) of Borneo’s central Kalimantan region, where mangrove swamps to woodlands and meandering rivers abound with exotic and endangered species.
Patrols monitor for signs of fire that threatens the area’s other prized resource — layers of peat up to a dozen meters thick that build up as leaves and branches accumulate in the waterlogged ground. Millions of tons of carbon dioxide are trapped in the muddy debris, a vital natural defense against the release of the planet-warming gas into the atmosphere.
The value of protecting that peat — in an area where vast tracts have been cleared for palm oil plantations — has been harnessed by the world’s turbulent market for carbon credits. The Rimba Raya site in Borneo alone has generated offsets that companies, including Volkswagen AG, Gucci and McKinsey & Co., have used to claim they’ve canceled out a total of 26 million tons of emissions since 2013 — roughly equivalent to London’s annual footprint.
When flames spread, staff at the vast site have dashed out in fire-proof shirts, masks and helmets, dousing blazes that can otherwise strip through forests and burn underground for weeks, releasing stores of carbon built up over centuries and imperiling habitats. During the worst of the dry season, the site can resemble a conflict zone — blanketed with thick gray and white smoke.
“The threat of fire is extremely high,” Anthon Kesaulya, then the project’s general manager, said peering down from the lookout last September. “We must extinguish it — so there is no bargaining, it is something that we must face.” Past drainage for logging has left the ground tinder dry and susceptible to quickly spreading blazes used by farmers and others to clear land.
