68: Carbon Offsetting For Communities 2 - Framing, evaluating and facilitating community benefit from nature-based carbon offsets
How do we frame, evaluate and facilitate community benefit from voluntary nature-based carbon offset projects?
The second episode from our Community Carbon Offsetting mini seires is a live recorded Q&A session featuring Hamish Trench, CEO of the Scottish Land Commission, Sarah Nicholas, Carbon Projects Manager at Forestry and Land Scotland, and Ailsa Raeburn, Head of the Community Assets Team and Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Chair of Community Land Scotland.
Essential Reading:
https://www.scottishinsight.ac.uk/
Episode Transcript:
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Matt: Hello and welcome to Local Zero. This episode forms the second in a mini-series all about nature-based community carbon offsetting. If you missed the first, you can go back and catch our episode featuring a talk from the renowned writer, academic and activist, Alastair McIntosh, which is definitely not to be missed. The mini-series follows an event I hosted in March with funding from the Scottish Universities Insight Institute and the University of Strathclyde’s Centre for Sustainable Development. It was a fascinating gathering of people to discuss how land use and land ownership are changing across rural Scotland in response to the booming carbon-offset market. We focused explicitly on voluntary, nature-based carbon offsetting and this is where landowners invest in natural forms of carbon sequestration or carbon capture such as afforestation or peatland restoration and this is to generate carbon credits for sale on the open market. These credits are bought up by organisations wanting to offset their own carbon emissions by funding reductions or avoidance elsewhere instead of cutting their own emissions. So in this episode, you’ll listen to a panel discussion that explored how we frame, evaluate and finally facilitate community benefit from these voluntary, nature-based carbon-offset projects.
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We’re really lucky to hear from three leading experts in this field: the first, Hamish Trench, Chief Executive at the Scottish Land Commission; Sarah Nicholas, Carbon Project’s Manager at Forestry and Land Scotland and finally, Ailsa Raeburn, Head of Community Assets Team at Highlands and Islands Enterprise but also Chair of Community Land Scotland. It was great to get a range of different perspectives and opinions on this complex and, at times, very controversial issue. So enjoy diving into this discussion and if you have any thoughts or points you’d like to raise, do not hesitate to get in touch with us @LocalZeroPod on Twitter or send some longer thoughts to LocalZeroPod@gmail.com. Enjoy.
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Matt: So I asked the panellists three questions and to prepare some thoughts in relation to these. The first was how might you frame community benefit in the context of natural capital, what is your perspective or have you engaged in any evaluation of community benefit and from your experience, how might we best facilitate community benefit? So three different questions: framing it, evaluating it and facilitating it. I will begin with Hamish because you’re closest to me and I’ll pass you the microphone. So just a few minutes and then I’m going to give way to the floor for questions and then we’ll break for lunch. Thank you.
Hamish: I think the last couple of days of discussion have been just enormously valuable and helpful and a fascinating mix of perspectives here. I think one of the things that I reflected on particularly is the mix of sensible scepticism around carbon offsetting and the role of that with some very pragmatic, practical ideas for how we can actually make this work well. I think that kind of reflects where we, as the Land Commission, are as well in thinking about this at a systems level but also about, practically, what’s happening around us at the moment and what we see in the land market. I want to just say three things quickly just to reflect on the questions that Matt posed to us. The first is at the very practical level. So if we look at what’s going on around us now and what we can do to influence that and shape it, we published a discussion paper recently around community benefits and natural capital and inviting responses. In fact, I think the response is by today. That is really trying to put some shape around the practice that we see going on around us at the moment. We know transactions are happening. We know money is coming into Scotland and so let’s do our best now to try and make that work well. In that, we framed community benefit and we’ve suggested that they can be framed with three very important fundamentals which are that they are deliberate, as in not a by-product or wider public benefit but a very deliberate, intentional set of benefits; they are negotiated and agreed directly with the community, i.e. it’s not an offer or something done to and it is negotiated and agreed; the third thing is that they place-specific, i.e. that happens with reference to a community of place. We think that helps differentiate community benefits from the wider sense of public benefit. I think the second thing I would then want to just reflect on is that’s okay as far as it goes at a very practical level in trying to influence what’s happening now but we also see a need, I think, for further policy work around this. For example, it seems very unclear, from some of the discussion, where value lies in the system but what does seem clear is that much of that value will end up being capitalised into land values over time. If that’s the case, part of the thinking about benefits must then move on to thinking about tax or wealth funds, for example, as a broader means of sharing value in this system. I suppose that takes me on to the third brief reflection which is that this isn’t all about carbon. Someone said yesterday that we’re trying to load too much onto the Carbon Codes and I think that’s probably right. Much of what we’ve talked about and much of the crux of some of why this is difficult is that this is actually about our land system. So, for me, carbon credits will come and go. Over what timescale we don’t know but they will come and go. Biodiversity credits will be next. There will be other things that we can’t yet foresee that will come and go. So, for me, one of the fundamentals here is let’s get the basics of the land system right which comes back to ownership, power of control and benefit. If we do that, then we should be able to cope with investment from whatever source that it comes over the years ahead. Yeah, brief reflections.
Sarah: Thank you and just to echo Hamish’s thoughts on how fascinating the last couple of days have been. I’m from Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) and for those of you who don’t know us, Forestry and Land Scotland manages about 9% of Scotland. We, as in FLS, manage the land but it’s national land so ours, yours and my land and owned by whoever we collectively elect to the Scottish Parliament. As Hamish has said, public benefit and community benefit are two distinct things and I am going to reflect a bit on the facilitate part of the question and how FLS facilitates communities in what we do across the land that we manage. This is on a sliding scale. We have the bare minimum which is consultation. All of our land is part of land management plans that are reviewed fully every ten years with
full community consultation, new ecological surveys, statutory reviews and all of that kind of stuff but with community feedback really at the heart of that and community design as well. They’re interim reviewed every five years. Next up the sliding scale, we have access and so anything that’s not covered by Open Access Code and that’s short-term events and opportunities we can issue permits for. Next up, we’ve got the longer-term links with local groups that are using the forests and land which are relationships that are built over time with a network of community officers in our various local offices around the country. There’s then the more formal end of the spectrum like partnerships and joint ventures. There are about 90 community partnerships across Scotland in operation at the moment. Finally, we’ve got the Community Asset Transfer Scheme which is known in shorthand as CATS. Since the 2015 Community Empowerment Act, the communities can put in a request for a transfer of any of the assets and land that we hold and about 22 of those have been completed to date. There are quite a few more in progress. This is everything from what you might expect in terms of community woodlands to community hydro schemes and more recently, woodland crofts and others like car parks at the ferry ports in Skye, for example. What I think is quite good about this sliding scale is that there are various different entry points for communities to engage with public land and quite often, communities will first get in touch about one thing and then over time, as they develop the confidence and the capacity, they can move up that scale and grow their involvement and ownership. Sometimes, it actually works the other way. They’ll come to us with a full-blown CATS request and actually, through exploration of that, they are quite happy for us to continue to hold the land and actually, are more interested in engaging in a different way. All of this work is led by our Communities Team. That’s not where I sit. This applies across all of our land but there’s no reason why it can’t also be applied to carbon projects and natural capital as well. In fact, it is by default because it’s happening on public land. I think there are a couple of key differences and that’s around some of the tensions that we’ve heard around the time and the comments about investment periods and the time that we’re talking about in terms of ecological processes and the return from some of these things. I guess that also relates to the time it takes for community engagement to build and develop. The other thing is scale. A small piece of land where you could have a community shop or some of the houses as we saw on Rùm is quite different from managing a whole landscape for natural capital outcomes and that actually necessitates, potentially, a different type of conversation. I’ll hand over at that point I think.
Ailsa: Thanks very much. I’ve actually spoken quite a lot over the last couple of days and I won’t speak too much now. I think it has been a really fascinating couple of days. I actually came to this quite late and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect as I’d not been involved in the project too much previously. I think there are a few points that have come out to me, in particular, and I think the first is this whole social licence to operate (SLO). It’s about the language that we use and the language that we allow to be used. People are using and saying, ‘I have a social licence to operate because I’ve raised money through crowdfunding.’ To me, that’s not a social licence to operate from a community perspective. We say a social licence to operate is that the people that live on or near that land have some say over what happens on that land. I think there’s a lot of work for organisations like us to do to challenge that sort of language. Miriam made the great point about community wealth building and that there are organisations saying they’re building community wealth and actually when you look at the principles, it’s quite a long way from that. I think there is work for us to do
there. There’s definitely a huge amount of community-washing as well as green-washing going on and we need to be really conscious of that and, again, challenge it. We had some great conversations yesterday and at dinner last night about whether we’re starting in the right place. Why are we spending all this time and energy trying to get private investors to behave properly? Should we not be starting from the place of spending all that time and energy on scaling up what we already know works and delivers the things that we want to see? I think we’re probably on that and we need to be pragmatic but, again, I think we should be asking those questions and we should be making those challenges and saying, ‘Is this the right place to be in? Should we be financialising our land assets and accepting that just as a model?’ It comes back to Alastair’s point about dùthaichs and who owns the land. Is it Standard Life, is it Aviva or is it the people that live on it who should benefit from it? I know that’s part of this whole conversation but I think sometimes, we do need to take a step back and say, ‘Is this the place to start from? Do we need to think a bit more broadly about this and challenge some of these assumptions?’ From a pragmatic perspective, given we are where we are, I think there is lots we can do already. I think we’re seeing the power of communities taking control. We’ve seen it recently on Rùm. We’ve talked a lot about Eigg over the last couple of days but I could give you 480 examples across Scotland and rising where communities are actually saying, ‘No, we want to do something different. No, we’re not happy with this. No, we want to save this service. No, we don’t want to see that development.’ Actually, this is happening and so I always feel quite confident and when I go out to see communities, I’m hugely inspired by everyday people who don’t have the skills, capacity and resources that all of us in this room have. There’s a great project, Viewpark, just outside Glasgow where the community fought for quite a long time to get hold of a really important bit of green space. Grace there, and her husband, led it and when you talk to them, they say, ‘Well, you know, I’m just the gas man,’ and ‘I’m just a housewife,’ but actually, these are the people that are really making change happen. That’s what gives me great confidence and inspiration that actually, things will happen and it’s our job to listen to those people and to put the processes, policies and legislation in place. The land reform legislation will offer us a lot of opportunities for that. The community wealth-building legislation will and the reform of taxation that Hamish has mentioned. I think things like the Trees for Life model is a great model. We should be really talking about those models and saying they do exist. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We know politicians like new and shiny things. They like innovation but actually, sometimes, the answers are already there and they’re there in the people that are already doing it. I think that would be my reflection on the last couple of days that some of these answers already exist. Thank you.
Matt: Thank you, Ailsa, and thank you to the other panellists. I’m going to ask one of my trusty helpers here to just dish this microphone out. Have we got any questions, please? So we’ve got Alastair?
Alastair: To pick up on what Ailsa just said about whether we should be accepting this financialising model. Hamish, could I ask you to clarify the situation with the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) released? I understand from one of your commissioners who communicated with me this morning that they have not been able to find it on the SNH website. I understand from you that a statement has been released on your website. So could you put us right on this so that we are all on the same
page in terms of where the Land Commission stands with respect to a £2 billion PFI and pledges of public money going in that direction?
Hamish: Yeah, I’m happy to address that, Alastair, and you’re absolutely right to challenge us, as public bodies, and keep us true on these things. I’m very happy to just set out what it’s about and a bit of background if you’re unaware. I think this refers to the NatureScot announcement of a partnership with some financial institutions around a potential £2 billion pipeline of funding coming into land-use change and natural capital investment, woodland and peatland as I understand it. In terms of the Land Commission’s role in this, it’s the same as our role in relation to many other things in that we have agreed to provide advice in relation to land reform, land rights and responsibilities, particularly community engagement and community benefit. The MOU that came out, unfortunately, had us a member of a project board which is the decision-making role of the project overall which was actually incorrect. NatureScot has since amended that and if you look on their website, it’s corrected and it’s clear how the project is running. Yeah, I’m very happy to confirm that, as a public body, we are, of course, going to be able to provide advice to that with particular regard to these issues that we’re talking about like community benefit and community engagement. I think it’s really important that we are able to provide advice, not just to them but, indeed, to many other people that are active in this space at the moment. While I absolutely understand some of the wider concerns about whether we should be starting from here, actually, we are here and as the Land Commission, I think it would feel wrong for us to sit back and say, ‘Well, it’s too tricky.’ I think we have to be in there actually trying to shape what’s happening around us at the moment and trying to embed some very clear expectations on these things because actually, some of these early initiatives will set the benchmark for what’s expected and so we really do need to make sure that there’s clarity of expectation around community involvement and community benefit and the underlying values of the land rights and responsibilities that should drive some of this.
Male audience speaker: Thank you very much. I guess, as a policymaker, I find myself sitting in the middle of this debate and our job of providing advice to ministers is to try and balance objectives and offer the best advice and options that we can. We’ve heard a lot about community ownership as a preferred or a better model for a lot of this and we’ve heard a lot about success stories but I wonder what the flip side of that is. Are there initiatives that have gone less well and what can we learn from these initiatives? What capacity building and support might communities need to engage with this opportunity more effectively?
Sarah: Thanks for that. Of course, we always talk about the success stories but there are communities that have struggled. I would say that no community has ever gone bust. When you think these are all small businesses and compare it to the rate where small businesses go bust, was it 50% in five years or something? So there’s something in that model that local people really want to make it work. I think there is lots more that can be done, and I’m bound to say this, but organisations like HIE (Highlands and Islands Enterprise) and South of Scotland Enterprise (SOSE) do a huge amount in providing that capacity-building support and also when things are starting to get a bit dicky, they’ll come in and help out not always necessarily with money but with advice and other resources. From a CLS perspective, we do a lot of peer-to-peer mentoring. If we know that a project needs specific advice or a
community needs specific advice, then we can put them in touch with another community that has done something differently. I think that the capacity building that HIE and SOSE do (HIE do much more of it than SOSE does) is absolutely critical because we know that if you have just one member of staff on £30,000 a year, they achieve huge amounts and some of the figures that Zoe mentioned from the Lochaber, Skye and Wester Ross study, it’s hugely impressive. I think it’s about capacity building. I think we do have resources in place. We’ve got the Scottish Land Fund which is due to rise to £20 million over the course of this parliament. We’ve got the Housing Fund. There’s the Investing in Communities Fund and Regeneration Capital Grant Fund. The Scottish Government is really good at providing support for projects but I think what is missing is the scaling up of that type of capacity-building work. Zoe also talked about community planning work, so enabling communities to think… what quite often happens is a threat comes along and then communities have to respond to it and it’s so much better, obviously, if they’ve got the opportunity and time to think in advance. So some of the things that we’re pushing for in the land reform consultation is allowing communities to be able to say, ‘We’ve got a real need for housing and it would be really great if that land ever comes up for sale we could buy it,’ but actually making that process more simple or they are able to say, ‘Actually, we really can’t afford to lose our shop,’ or ‘We don’t want to lose this. These are the things that are important to us that make our community thrive in a more sustainable way.’ I think it is around capacity building and it’s also around enabling communities to do that planning. Neither of those are huge amounts of money. The general scale of what we’re talking about in carbon credits, they’re absolutely minute but they’d make a massive difference.
Matt: I think we had a question. We had Fraser… but it was Anna and we will come to you, Fraser.
Anna: I’m Anna Lehmann from Wildlife Works. We take money from asset managers and from some of the more greedy capitalists I think in this place but we do put it down to wildlife conservation projects. For us, wildlife needs to work for people and only then it’s really working. There have been so many things I heard today and yesterday and I feel really humbled to be part of these conversations. I maybe have a few more comments more than questions but there’s something I’d love to share. We work internationally and I’m not so familiar with the cases in Scotland but I see so many similarities. Every project is different but with regard to land ownership, we do have cases from around Kenya or even Brazil and Colombia where the situation is quite similar. One thing I would say is to keep regulating investors. This is really critical for us as project developers and investors ourselves and we want to have good competitors and we’re really worried that they just rush out and try to make a quick buck. This is not what we’re about. There are a few ways this can happen. Kenya is working on the Benefit Sharing Bill at the moment. I heard the Community Wealth Bill is coming but really, give us guidance. How we should work with communities and what that work should look like in the Scottish context will be hugely important. Keep educating investors. Do not give up on this. I’ve been so frustrated with the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTI) as one initiative that tries to regulate what net-zero targets look like for corporates and they require that Scope 1 emissions (direct emissions) can only be offset by Scope 1 removals. That’s basically a drive towards buying more land. It’s about engaging in those conversations and looking at what regulates those drivers of demand really and making sure they don’t buy assets. We see a push on land grabs in other countries to help
with those SBTI targets. This is maybe more of a reflection here but carbon ownership and land ownership are often separated in various countries. I don’t know what the options here are in Scotland legally but we see it being decoupled in a number of countries like Colombia where territories have land ownership rights but they don’t sometimes have ownership of the trees, the wood, the water or the carbon as that’s regulated differently. It’s negative for them but maybe here, it could be something positive where carbon ownership, in a sense, could be a Scottish asset achieving the Scottish climate target and then allocating that also to communities as a way to help make it a little bit fairer. Apologies but they’re just a couple of thoughts to share. Thank you.
Matt: Thank you, Anna. Over to the panel, please, and then we’ll take Fraser’s question.
Hamish: Thanks and it was enormously interesting talking with you yesterday, Anna, about some of the parallels with Kenya and I think it is fascinating how striking the parallels are actually and I’m away to go and look up the Benefit Sharing Bill after this. The point you raised about carbon, ownership and rights is really important actually. We’re in a default position at the moment where carbon is being traded basically on a contract basis. It’s not really defined as a property right in any sense as I understand it. I mean this is Jill’s territory more than mine but we are kind of in a default situation where carbon is being traded as a contract and it is the contract to provide something that is being committed to. So I think it’s entirely open to us in Scotland to think how we do want to structure these things and I would link that, I think, to a wider discussion that it would be helpful in Scotland for us to look more widely at land rights and governance and maybe disentangling them. We’ve become very used to all rights and land being bundled together in a single package that we then call ownership. Actually, we could look at the way land rights are distributed quite differently and we could look at mixed governance models that bring together private, public, community interests and NGOs in more imaginative ways as well. For me, I think that’s where some of the interesting opportunity lies at the moment.
Ailsa: I think disassociating the rights is a really interesting approach and from a Crown Estate Scotland perspective, we own all the naturally-occuring gold and silver in any property in Scotland. We do disassociate rights from land in Scotland. I think the other point, which we touched on briefly yesterday, is about the sale of carbon on Eigg and we disassociate it from the land and we didn’t allow any securities or conservation burdens. We said, ‘It’s agreement. We will provide X tons of carbon and, potentially, we can provide that X tons of carbon from anywhere.’ At the moment, the Woodland Carbon Code links it to a piece of land but I think there is an opportunity to move away from that a bit and think a bit more broadly about what it is that you are providing in these ecosystem services and I don’t think we’ve done that yet.
Matt: Thank you. Sarah.
Sarah: I think the key point in all of this is that, at the moment, we have these frameworks of the Woodland Carbon Code and the Peatland Code but how the benefits are shared and how the risks are shared is down to individually negotiated contracts between lots of different parties. There are very few people that a) have visibility of those agreements or b) an understanding of all the different elements and implications of them. I think that’s a
really tricky thing at the moment. There are so many different models. It’s kind of a blank sheet of paper for how you apply these and we need to take the time to properly understand the long-term implications of those and get it right.
Matt: Fantastic. Fraser, a final question.
Fraser: Thank you. I guess I have a slight provocation as much as a question really and that is I want to bookmark the nature of a disagreement that is at the heart of both today and yesterday. I think Hamish, very helpfully, was frank about there being a healthy scepticism at work in the room. We heard from Alison and Alastair who registered a certain kind of dissent, to use a very Scottish Presbyterian term. I want to raise this question about the line ‘we are where we are’ because what that line does, it seems to me, is implicitly accept the organising terms of the debate. I think a lot of that is about the very nature of natural capital or the conception of natural capital. This session right now is about trying to understand what community benefit can derive from nature-based solutions. One of the really interesting things about Tavis’ paper this morning was the clarity of your definitions of natural capital. Tavis was talking about natural capital being an intervention in the social and ecological order but I would go further than that and say that actually, natural capital is itself a specific conception of the relationship between the natural and social world. It’s one that is itself culturally and historically specific and produces certain sorts of outcomes. I don’t like to use the word neoliberal but it is a kind of neoliberal formulation of an environmental problem. I think if you framed the problem differently or if you frame the problem as, say, focused on labour rather than capital, we get a very different set of parameters. If you framed the problem based on dùthaichs or other Gaelic cosmologies, you really end up with something quite different. So I guess the question then is if we return to that question of language; that language permits certain kinds of discussion. There was that point made by the economic sociologist, Donald MacKenzie, who said that economics doesn’t just describe a field of transactions. It’s not a camera. It is itself an engine. So in accepting the organising terms of the debate which is founded on natural capital or nature-based solutions, we are perhaps… my question I guess is are we just actually creating and sustaining the very market that some of us have misgivings about?
Matt: Thank you. Would anybody like to tackle that particular thorny question? [Laughter]
Hamish: Yeah, provocation accepted and probably largely agreed [laughter]. I think also it’s clear that we probably have multiple conceptions going on at the same time here. For example, we also have a pretty clear framing in Scotland in terms of land rights and responsibilities and so why don’t we apply that framing to this discussion as well? That might help us find our way through some of this. I think the reality is that we probably do have different framings and there are pretty clearly some tensions between those but we are where we are. We’re not in a bad place at all in terms of land reform and clarity of purpose around land reform, land rights and responsibilities and so I think we can apply that frame to some of these challenges, it may help us find our way through it.
Matt: Sarah.
Sarah: I agree with a lot of what you said and in our conversations last night as well but I think sitting in an operational delivery place and trying to deliver some of these projects and work this all out on the ground, we do face some really tricky realities. As a starting point around land rights and responsibilities, they are challenges in both senses but they are also financial realities and we are constricted in terms of what we can do. So in trying to figure out how we can mobilise financial unlocking of all of these other opportunities, I’m not sure whether it’s necessarily the right or the only way but they are the tools that we have at our disposal at the moment and we’ve got to figure out how to make the best of them.
Matt: Yeah, and quite the provocation before lunch and I probably bear some responsibility and the project team. The answer to carbon offsetting is presented in the project title but what’s the question and why are we beginning at that point? This keeps on coming up time and time again. Is this the right way forward? In the conversations over dinner last night, the reality is this is happening and if we don’t get in front of it, then what missed opportunities may our communities face but I think we must be mindful of that question and the language that you reference can either open or close certain types of debate. Now I’m going to take the chair’s privilege and end there because I can see sandwiches behind but I would encourage you all to continue where we’ve left off. So I’d like you just to join me in a big thank you and a round of applause for the panel. Thank you.
[Round of applause]
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Matt: I hope you enjoyed listening to that panel discussion. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the discussion but, as a starter for ten, here are some of my reflections.
So beginning with community benefits, I thought a really useful way of approaching this was to consider them as deliberate, i.e. these are targeted benefits. They’re not accidental. They’re something we’re going after and also, these are negotiated and agreed upon. They are the product of participatory engagement with the community. It’s also important to consider these community benefits as community-oriented and place-based; meaning they are benefits to the local community versus, say, the wider public. This, of course, demands a clearer sense of what local and, indeed, the community entails from the very outset. However, it’s also important to consider where benefits might flow beyond the local community and benefit the wider region, nation or beyond. We can think of this in terms of carbon or biodiversity gains but also jobs and general economic uplift. Turning to community engagement, I thought it was really interesting to hear there about the importance of long-term, informal community engagement prior to more formal forms of participation and partnership. Like any relationship that we humans share, we must get to know one another first before taking the next steps. Also, how landowners engage with communities with regard to offset projects should be sensitive to the community’s needs as well as the community’s capacity and capabilities that they have in order to engage with such projects. They may have the capacity but not the capability and conversely, they may have the capability but not the capacity. Finally, community-washing is an issue that we heard about many times during that panel discussion and the broader event. This is where the community engagement may be superficial in the bid to demonstrate support for a
project. Associated with this is a term we often heard too which was a landowner’s social licence to operate. So, for me, this begs the question what is the threshold for this licence to operate and, indeed, who grants it? We must be very careful when assigning this right to development, especially in the absence of demonstrable consent from the community. Turning to the broader policy and market landscape, I think the first thing to say is it’s not all about carbon. Perhaps we’re trying to load too much onto the Carbon Codes and actually, we must dig a little deeper to understand how to formulate these carbon-offset projects and markets in a way that benefits communities and, in particular, we must focus on our land system. We really need to get this land system right: ownership, power, control and benefit. At the root of all of this is who owns the land. Another interesting part of this discussion was pulling apart this point that we hear time and time again: we are where we are and taking a pragmatic standpoint. This implicitly accepts some of the organising terms of the debate about the conception of natural capital and the persistence and foundational importance of capitalism. Using certain types of language more broadly permits certain kinds of discussions. So let’s ask ourselves are we starting in the right place? In this context was the issue of finance. We heard the panel explore whether really we should be building these project and market offerings in a way to entice private sector investment or whether, alternatively, we could mobilise models that rely primarily or even exclusively on public and community finance. Conversely, however, we also heard questions more broadly across the two days about where and when public money should be invested and whether, actually, targeting this at landowners in order for them to develop and implement these projects sees a further concentration of wealth and power in the hands of those that already have it. So my final reflection was something that we heard during the Q&A. We must not focus solely on the successful cases of community participation with regards to carbon offsetting much more broadly, whether that’s issues of land reform or energy but we must also consider where it hasn’t worked. This is particularly to spotlight and learn from and it must be dealt with sensitively and respectfully with regard to both the landowner, the community and other stakeholders involved. But to ignore lessons of where engagement could have been improved would miss a very important half of the story.
So, thank you for listening to a really, really important discussion. You have, as ever, been listening to Local Zero. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and colleagues and stay tuned for more episodes taken from this conference. Finally, a plea from me; please remember to check out our website, LocalZeroPod.com, where you can listen to our entire back catalogue and search for past episodes by keywords or topics but until then, thank you for listening and goodbye.
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