At last month’s COP29 climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, oil-trading giant Trafigura announced that it was injecting $100 million into the company’s Brújula Verde tree-planting project in Colombia. Working in partnership with green investment platform GenZero, the initiative aims to ultimately plant 36 million mixed-species trees across 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) in the country’s eastern plains. The company has vowed to restore biodiversity in the region within three decades while producing and selling carbon credits. But environmental experts question whether the project can deliver the promised ecological and climate benefits. A crucial sticking point is that the area it plans to turn into a forest was never a forest to begin with. Headquartered in Singapore, Trafigura is among the world’s largest traders of commodities such as metals, oil and natural gas. In recent years, the company, whose 2023 revenue exceeded $240 billion, has faced a series of corruption scandals and declining oil prices, resulting in a 73% drop in net profits in the first quarter of 2024. Increasingly, it has turned to the voluntary carbon market, championing forest carbon projects in Colombia, Pakistan and Southern Africa. In Colombia, the company has already mapped out two dozen tree farms spanning 617 hectares (1,525 acres) in the department of Vichada. The area, bordering El Tuparro National Park in the south, consists of wet and dry savanna with sparse tree cover near local rivers. While Trafigura has labeled these lands on its website as “degraded” and in need of reforestation, some experts argue…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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