Half a million hectares of rainforest in the Democratic Republic of Congo are cut down every year. The fight against deforestation has given rise to carbon credit businesses. But local communities say promises that they would benefit are being broken.
00:05A company called Jadora built them for the villagers in this area of the Isangi Forest
00:10as part of a carbon credit scheme.
00:13In return, the locals were to stop cutting down trees.
00:20They told us that even without exploiting the forest,
00:23we could earn a living through fish farming and livestock farming.
00:26Look at these fish ponds. They're a complete mess.
00:29We've got pigs walking around.
00:31Is this the way you do projects with people?
00:35Jadora built the fish ponds here,
00:37but didn't help the locals find a market for the products, complains Buena.
00:42In the end, the locals gave up.
00:45Buena is the head of the Parents Association of the Local School.
00:50The community waited for more than a decade for its construction,
00:54and even that hasn't lived up to the promise.
00:59Just look at the state of the building.
01:03It's not in good shape.
01:04They built it, but it's still unfinished.
01:07It doesn't even have the basics of proper floors, ceilings or toilets.
01:16More schools were promised and never even half built.
01:19This was Jadora's company compound in one of the villages.
01:24The company's owner, Daniel Blattner, is from a U.S. business family that's been operating in the DRC for decades.
01:32He ran a logging company, exporting tropical timber,
01:36but switched to carbon credits, which many consider more profitable.
01:40Here's how it works.
01:43The project owner calculates how many trees are not cut down thanks to the project.
01:48The carbon dioxide, therefore not released into the atmosphere, is counted as carbon credits.
01:54Those credits can then be sold to companies to offset the emissions their business creates, at least on paper.
02:02Public data shows that the project in Isangi claims to have prevented around 1.3 million tons of carbon being released into the atmosphere between 2009 and 2013.
02:15Prices for those carbon credits vary, often between 2 to 4 dollars per ton.
02:21Buyers of those credits include the Switzerland arm of Lidl Supermarket, Swedish publishing house Bonnier Books, German consultancy Roland Berger, and U.S. financial services company Bloomberg.
02:36Local communities are supposed to be supported in changing their lives to help preserve the forest and benefit from the profits.
02:45People in Isangi wonder why they didn't get a better share.
02:48Georges Kanda is growing rice where they were once trees.
02:57The forest was huge.
02:59From the main road to this place, there were no fields.
03:02It was just forest, forest, forest.
03:07When the logging company closed, it left no formal jobs for a growing population.
03:12The activities Jadora set up to compensate were simply not enough to stop local slash-and-burn farming.
03:23The idea wasn't bad.
03:26But the problem was that not everyone found work in their company.
03:30Look at me, for example.
03:31I wasn't hired.
03:34But I wasn't going to stay there complaining.
03:36I had to go back to cutting down trees to survive.
03:45The Jadora project ended last year after the Congolese government questioned the legality of the company's land titles.
03:53The company's local contact person could not answer our questions, neither could the former manager in Kinshasa.
04:00Daniel Blattner did not respond to our interview requests and emails.
04:05Projects like this around the world are monitored and certified by a private buddy, Vera.
04:12They told us the first four years of this project showed a reduction in deforestation.
04:18But they added that it was not able to verify the last nine years
04:22and that they knew that local people were disappointed with how things were going.
