Question for the Minister of Natural Resources through your Letters column

Mar 22, 2026 Letters

Dear Editor,

On 19 March, Kaieteur News carried a Department for Public Information report that Guyana has again sold jurisdictional forest-based carbon credits (https://kaieteurnewsonline.com/2026/03/19/guyana-sold-carbon-credits-to-19-airlines-under-lcds-framework/). No price has been reported, nor any transactional costs which must be carried by Guyana for the entity, which makes the estimate of how many carbon credits are available for what period, or for an independent auditor.

The same Kaieteur News report repeats the frequent government claim: ‘Guyana remains in a unique global position as a net carbon sink, meaning the country absorbs more carbon dioxide than it emits’.

Through your newspaper, I ask the Minister to explain how this claim can be made, in the face of data in the Guyana Forestry Commission report – ‘REDD+ monitoring reporting and verification (MRV) system report 2023, August 2024’ –which shows that Guyana has been a nett emitter of forest carbon every year since 1990 when records began.

I ask the Minister for Natural Resources to provide a step-by-step written explanation of how the government makes its claim that Guyana is nett positive for forest carbon and hence what are the independently-verifiable steps by which Guyana avoids the charge that its marketing of forest-based carbon credits is an outright fraud and a national disgrace.

To help the Minister consider judiciously his reply, I refer him to the Low Carbon Development Strategy 2030, pages from 121. According to estimates by Winrock International’s ART/TREES program (Architecture for REDD+ Transactions/The REDD Environmental Excellence Standard), Guyana had a standing stock of 19.5-21.8 gigatonnes of forest carbon in 2020 (1213 tonnes of CO2e/ha x 18,001,790 ha), and adds a further 154 million tonnes each year.

A moment’s reflection will show that this is only part of the story. Trees take in atmospheric gases by day and convert them by photosynthesis into sugars, a small proportion of which are later converted into leaves and wood, roots and bark. But by far the largest proportion of the sugars are used up to provide energy for the living processes, including lifting soil water into the leaves in the tree canopy. This respiratory loss of gases back to the atmosphere is like human breathing; in for photosynthesis and out for respiration. And like all other living organisms, trees grow, mature, decay and die, losing the gases during the decay process. If this dynamic equilibrium between growth and decay did not take place, and the trees were everlasting, the Earth would be covered by enormous trees, which is obviously not true. So almost all of those added 154 MtCo2e are returned to the atmosphere by natural respiration and decay. All this happens naturally, without any policy or activity on the part of government agencies.

Guyana’s forests are not expanding in area. Forest area is lost each year through clearance for agriculture and infrastructure and by wildfire. Three-quarters of the annual loss totalling more than 200,000 hectares during 1990-2023 has been due to deforestation by surface mining for gold, not to mention the large areas degraded by poorly controlled timber logging. It is this poorly-controlled annual deforestation which makes Guyana a nett emitter of forest carbon.

But surely the miners are required by Mining legislation to restore the mined-out land? Yes, the environmental Mining Regulations 2025 do require restoration, but GGMC and EPA do not enforce the requirement. Not counting small experimental plots administered by the Guyana Forestry Commission, there are only a few tens of hectares of reforestation after mining, mostly in old bauxite areas. Compare this with the deforestation loss of around 10,000 hectares per year. In other words, the re-gain in forest area is tiny compared with the annual nett loss of forest carbon.

Latest News

Question for the Minister of Natural Resources through your Letters column

Discover more from Kaieteur News

Similar Articles

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Listen to the The Glenn Lall Show

Follow on Tik Tok @Glennlall

THE BLUNT OF THE DAY

Sports

Ann’s Grove topple defending champs in 4-2 affair

VIEW ALL SPORTS

Features/Columnists

The evil empire that is out to recolonise the world

Sir. Ronald Sanders

War in Iran, Pain in the Caribbean

The GHK Lall Column

Appealing to, working at influencing, Minister Vindhya Persaud

Publisher’s Note

Weekend Cartoon

Bridge Watch

> Berbice Bridge […]