Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) are awarded to entities that reduce greenhouse gases by employing approved techniques,including carbon farming,and sold to polluting companies that want to offset their emissions and reduce their carbon footprint.
About $1 billion has been paid out for 100 million ACCUs to date,with $1.6 billion worth of contracts issued to ongoing projects.
Professor Macintosh,the Associate Dean of Research at the ANU College of Law,served as the inaugural chairman of the ERF assurance committee for six years. It was his job to ensure when public money was spent on ACCUs it was being used to buy real carbon reductions.
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However,Professor Macintosh said three-quarters of the ACCUs issued come from three carbon sequestration methods and flaws in the scheme had perpetrated “a fraud on the environment,a fraud on taxpayers and a fraud on unwitting private buyers of ACCUs”.
“The available data suggests 70 to 80 per cent of the ACCUs issued to these projects are devoid of integrity - they do not represent real and additional abatement,” he said.
His studies analysed $300 million of credits issued for protecting forests,known as avoided deforestation,and found land clearing in far western NSW would have needed to have been at least 750 per cent higher than in reality to justify the payments.