On May 2nd, the BBC broadcast a Panorama documentary entitled Big Brands’ Green Claims Uncovered. The program features the Keo Seima REDD+ project – co-implemented by the Cambodian Ministry of Environment and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) – and rightly documents the intense and escalating deforestation pressures impacting local communities outside the boundaries of the Keo Seima REDD+ project area. This advancing threat has been a feature of the landscape for over a decade, and both underscores the risk forests are under in Cambodia and the project’s success in leveraging financial resources to prevent such catastrophic deforestation from spreading within the Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary.
The program’s central critique that the project has generated fewer emission reductions than claimed is based on the analysis of one research group and should not be viewed as scientific consensus. As the program states, a new research paper that finds significant flaws in the work of West et al. (https://lnkd.in/eMF3-jVt) is currently making its way through academic review. Generalized analyses conducted remotely and with less accurate global datasets cannot capture the true complexities of deforestation dynamics specific to a project site.
It is regrettable that additional voices from the scientific community were not heard within the program along with the innovations being made to make the carbon markets more robust. WCS remains committed to transparency and open dialogue to further improve and accurately represent our conservation efforts.
Additional information about Keo Seima can be found here: https://lnkd.in/eU9z-_HU