Maldives' carbon neutral plan is not greenwash, just imperfect progress

Proposals to cut emissions in the Maldives don't include aviation, but European emissions trading will help offset tourist CO2

Chris Goodall
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 March 2009 14.01 GMT

The low-lying islands of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean would be flooded if oceans rose by two metres, the country's president, Mohamed Nasheed, has warned.

Mark Lynas's book Six Degrees strongly affects those who read it. It is a powerful but quietly voiced assessment of how the world will change as temperatures rise. The people of the Maldives, only too aware that their low-lying coral atolls are likely to disappear before the end of the century, are particularly interested in climate change and Lynas's book has been widely read in government circles in the capital Malé.
Last month the Maldives asked him for a plan to make the country "carbon-neutral". After a few days' work, he and I sent an outline scheme to the government in time for the president to make an announcement at the London premiere of Franny Armstrong's The Age of Stupid, a powerful film about climate change.
In our draft plan we showed how energy from wind and the sun could produce enough electricity to cover current needs and provide a surplus for future growth. A power station burning coconut husks will provide backup on those relatively rare occasions when the wind and sun aren't enough. Batteries will provide short-term storage on remote islands. Petrol can be largely replaced by ethanol made from Brazilian sugar cane.
Ambitiously, we said that the Republic of Maldives could set a target of going carbon-neutral within a decade or so. But we haven't proposed a way of avoiding the use of aviation fuel. So are we guilty of greenwash, like so many of the companies that brashly proclaim carbon neutrality on their website and in their sustainability reports?
Yes, in one sense we are. More than 500,000 people take long-distance flights to the Maldives, adding over a million tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere every year. Our plan does not reduce the consumption of aviation fuel by a single litre. By setting out the steps to enable the Maldives to brand itself as a carbon-neutral destination, we could be accused of actually encouraging long-distance holidays. Eager travel agents will seize on the Maldives' plan and use it to persuade wavering customers that their air travel has no ecological side effects.
Our defence is that the emissions from air travel to the Maldives will be offset by the purchase of European emissions permits. Every European power station, many large factories and other major polluters have been granted rights to emit a certain amount of CO2. If a company wants to emit more than its allowance it has to buy certificates from other polluters who have permits to spare. The Maldives will become part of this scheme.
In effect we are admitting that air travel to the Maldives is a major source of pollution, just as if the country was a German power station or a Dutch cement works. Because the Maldives is a voluntary participant in the European scheme, it will not have any free emissions allowances. The total number of permits in the system will not rise as a result of the new entrant.
The Maldives' plan to buy allowances covering all the emissions from international flights to and from Malé therefore means that the emissions of other European polluters will have to decrease by an equal amount. This isn't a perfect solution, but it seems the best way of ensuring a flight to the Maldives doesn't add a single kilogramme to overall world emissions.
Nevertheless, many people believe that buying emissions permits is a poor compromise. They point out that the European scheme has set lax limits on the total amount of CO2 emitted by the continent's major carbon polluters. This is one of the reasons why the current price of permits is so low. However, the whole point of our scheme is that it will tighten the market, making emissions just a little bit more costly for all the major polluters across Europe.
Until the aviation industry develops sustainable biofuels, the only possible alternative to offsetting is to restrict the total number of flights to and from the Maldives. This would cripple the tourist industry and reduce the incomes of most of the inhabitants of the islands.
No scheme that places a large part of the burden of climate change mitigation on to the poorer half of the world can be appropriate. Although no one is completely happy with offsetting, even through the European emissions trading scheme, we believe it can be an effective way of helping the Maldives become carbon neutral.