The Plantar project was one of the first to be supported by the World Bank Prototype Carbon Fund (PCF). Some aspects of the project have since entered the Clean Development Mechanism, but the battle continues to keep more of this plantation scheme out of the CDM.

Despite numerous recent efforts to keep Plantar’s Project (2569) on "Reforestation as Renewable Source of Wood Supplies for Industrial Use in Brazil" out of the Clean Development Mechanism, the project still awaits CDM approval in a dubious game played between the CDM Executive Board (EB) and the project validator.

Following the latest registration request, civil society organisations sent a letter to the CDM Executive Board in February 2010 urging the EB to reject the project. The Project Design Document (PDD) submitted in relation to the project had not allowed a sufficient period of public comment.

TÜV SÜD, the validation company, only made the PDD available on the UNFCCC website for the period of 30 days from May 28 to June 26, 2008 and received no comments. After considerable pressure, TÜV SÜD created “an additional period of 45 days (from March 01, 2010 to April 14, 2010)... provided for stakeholders to submit comments on the project, which will be considered by the DOE.”

However, the new public comment period was not initially announced on the UNFCCC website. Despite efforts from TÜV SÜD to bury comments and restrict resistance to the Plantar project, several letters urging the CDM EB to reject the project were submitted, yet these were only considered after the CDM EB met to pass the new Plantar submission. The next step will be the new validation report which still remains to be seen. 

For more background on Plantar see the case study in Chapter 4 of Carbon Trading: how it works and why it fails:

Burned – Plantar SA case study by Carbon Trade Watch
 
Plantar SA is a pig-iron and plantation company whose CDM project in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, was one of the first to be supported by the World Bank Prototype Carbon Fund (PCF), which anticipated the purchase of over 1.5 million CERs (around US$ 25 million, assuming credits are sold at US$ 15) in ‘emissions reductions’ by 2012. Plantar and the World Bank promoted the project as a model operation that would plant trees, enhance workers’ safety and foster environmental education projects for children. As documented in “Carbon Trading: a critical conversation on climate change, privatisation and power”, however, the company’s activities in the area of the project have illegally dispossessed many people of their land, destroyed jobs and livelihoods, dried up and polluted local water supplies, depleted soils and the biodiversity of the native cerrado savannah biome, threatened the health of local people, and exploited labour under appalling conditions. The proposed carbon-saving project helps sustain the environmentally damaging model of monoculture plantations and iron production that is responsible for this, while doing nothing to improve the climate.

Read more here in English and Spanish