CFTC Scoped Case Study: Kariba REDD+

This document attempts to provide a customized approach to evaluating the Kariba REDD+ project, backed by canonical sources, evidence existing in the public domain, and evidence existing as part of leaked internal data from private company stakeholders directly involved in the project.

Please note that for certain claims to be fully backed by evidence, there may be a need to combine public and private sources to achieve end-to-end coverage.

Each source used in this document will be clearly marked with additional context to clarify the categorical boundaries at the most granular level possible.

Primary Objective

The ideal outcome of this document is to provide a curated structure on top of a larger pool of interconnected evidence, artifacts of discovery, and supporting data points which span an attempted full coverage of the negative global impact, and critical risk factors as a direct result of Climate Finance, tailored to the specific needs of the CFTC.

Essentially this can be seen as applying a filter on the specific problem areas that could be identified, and scoping the available supporting evidence, and additional clarifications to align accordingly.

To amplify clarity while covering over two decades of a continuously evolving Voluntary Carbon Market, and project life-spans also extending past the decade level, artificially limiting the most valuable foundational information to connect evidence to relevant opportunities in the US legal and regulatory landscape to potentially motivate further investigation, add value to any ongoing efforts, or help trigger enforcement.

A stakeholder with interests as part of their respective efforts as a member of their individual agencies is ideally provided with the following intended value, assuming no prior existing knowledge, or filling in details where gaps are present.

Knowledge Requirements

To have a functional understanding of the minimal amount of domain knowledge that covers the complete landscape of what is in scope.

Added Value to Objectives

The bulk of the emphasis is to transfer evidence, relevant to the requirements of the CFTC specific scope, following the boundaries of their position in the larger US financial regulation system.

Additional efforts are made to present the evidence aligned with requirements stemming from the US legal system, in order to be eligible for evidence submission, or as a tool to escalate into obtaining additional legal instruments that increase the investigative power of the CFTC or collaborating agencies.

Case Study

Kariba REDD+ provides significant opportunities to mount solid evidence in support of certain long-standing critical objections from individuals and collectives, considering only those with direct and significant expertise to substantiate their claims or circumstantial evidence where counter-claims could not be observed approaching parity on included expertise and foundations provided with peer-reviewed data.

Additional discovery focussed specifically on the operational, verification, and self-regulation aspects of the project’s management during its lifespan to date, backed with official data, including provenance, which was produced and curated directly by the actors against which it leverages evidence of any violations, awareness and intentional reduction of transparency, or questionable business practices.

Resulting Claims Placed In Scope

• Failure to execute sufficient KYC during project development, implementation, and operational mangement, resulting in elevated risk of infiltration by bad-actors, enabling exploitation to the extend of the sum of the provided evidence in this document, causal to fundamental fragility to the project’s foundations, affecting the qualitative potential of the entire value chain of the upstream developments.
• Observable evidence of full awareness of the specific failures within all stages of the project pipeline, prioritizing reputation management in favor of obligations regarding contractual, compliance, legal governance, and applied methodology, by falsifying information before submission to become part of the official record, while owning all control over the data life-cycle up to the recorded timestamp under which it became part of the project’s commonly accepted leading source of factual information, directly undermining the essential claims of verified, validated, and continuous oversight, influencing every aspect of marketing and ultimate goal of profit generation.
• Violation of Zimbabwean Reserve Bank laws, committing an offense of Externalization, and breaching the local Anti-Money Laundering Act.

Fundamentals

• Official project name: Kariba REDD+
• Project location: Zimbabwe
• Actors involved in project operations: Carbon Green Investments, Carbon Green Africa, , South Pole,
• Official source of recorded information: The project page hosted on the Verra registry.
• Main source of additional evidence: Internal South Pole data.