HOW COLDPLAY'S GREEN HOPES DIED IN THE ARID SOIL OF INDIA

By Amrit Dhillon in Gudibanda and Toby Harnden

The Telegraph

2006-04-30

When Coldplay released its second hit album, A Rush of Blood to the Head, the band said that part of the environmental damage caused by its production would be offset by the planting of 10,000 mango trees in southern India.

More than four years after the album's release, however, many of Coldplay's good intentions have withered in the arid soil of Gudibanda, Karnataka state, where the saplings it sponsored were planted.

The idea of saving the world while making music was proposed by Future Forests, a British company since renamed CarbonNeutral. It declared that the scheme would soak up carbon dioxide emissions and help to improve the livelihoods of local farmers.

"You can dedicate more saplings in Coldplay's forest, a specially-selected section in Karnataka, India," its website said. For £17.50, fans could invest in the scheme and receive a certificate packaged in a tube bearing the words "The Coldplay Forest".

Other musicians, including Dido, KT Tunstall and Feeder followed Coldplay's example. CarbonNeutral meanwhile, gave the task of planting the trees to a group called Women for Sustainable Development (WSD), as part of a £33,000 contract. WSD is headed by Anandi Sharan Mieli, 44, born in Switzerland of Indian origin and a Cambridge graduate. She now claims that the scheme was doomed from the outset.

In the impoverished villages of Varlakonda, Lakshmisagara and Muddireddihalli, among the dozen that Miss Mieli said had received mango saplings, no one had heard of Coldplay. Most of those who received saplings said they had not been given funding for labour, insecticide or spraying equipment to nurture them.

One woman, called Jayamma was the only person out of 130 families in Lakshmisagara, to receive saplings from Miss Meili, according to Ashwattamma, a farmer's wife. She said: "No one else got any trees. Some of us were offered saplings but we don't have any water."

Jayamma managed to get 50 of her 150 trees to survive because she had a well on her land. "I was promised 2,000 rupees (£26) every year to take care of the plants and a bag of fertiliser. But I got only the saplings," she said.

In nearby Varlakonda, about 10 families were given approximately 1,400 saplings. Of these, just 600 survived. Another farmer who took 100 saplings, said: "[Miss Meili] promised us that she'd arrange the water." But villagers said a tanker came only twice.

The land in Gudibanda is dry and rocky. Farmers depend on rainfall but the monsoon failed every year between 1995 and 2004, causing drought.

One of the few successes are the 300 mango trees owned by Narayanamma, 69, and her husband Venkatarayappa, 74. They were apparently the only couple to receive 4,000 rupees from Miss Meili. They also spent 30,000 rupees on tankers and labourers. "We were promised money for maintenance every year but got nothing," said Narayanamma.

Sitting in her spacious house in Bangalore, Miss Meili said that she had distributed 8,000 saplings and acknowledged that 40 per cent had died. The project had foundered, she said, because of inadequate funding. She accused Future Forests of having a "condescending" attitude. "They do it for their interests, not really for reducing emissions. They do it because it's good money," she said. CarbonNeutral said that it did not fund the whole programme and that WSD had a contractual responsibility to provide irrigation and support to farmers. Jonathan Shopley, the chief executive, conceded that while the project might still succeed, it had "struggled to reach its full potential".

Coldplay is supporting a similar project, which CarbonNeutral says is much more successful, in Chiapas, Mexico. If the Karnataka project does not offset the carbon emissions that Coldplay specified, then CarbonNeutral will make good the amount from other projects.

Richard Tipper, the director of the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management, which monitored the project for CarbonNeutral, said that the Karnataka project had "experienced major problems" because WSD had not raised the necessary money to administer the project and because of the long drought.

A monitoring visit in 2003 had found that "WSD had been unable to make the anticipated progress with the project and had not delivered carbon payments to farmers". He added that "practices for screening projects have developed considerably based on this experience".

Chris Latham, the spokesman for Coldplay in Britain, declined to comment but a source close to the band said: "Coldplay signed up to the scheme in good faith with Future Forests and it's in their hands. There are loads of bands involved in this kind of thing. For a band on the road all the time, it would be difficult to monitor a forest."

Rock and a hard place

'Rock stars," says Homer Simpson wonderingly. "Is there anything they don't know?" Making agreeable music was once thought to be an end in itself. Now, singers aim at nothing less than the salvation of the planet.

Coldplay had the splendid idea of planting trees to drink up the carbon emitted by their activities. Sadly, as we report today, most of the saplings sent to India's sparse soil perished from lack of care. At least they avoided the mistake made by Sting, who once gave a swathe of rainforest to its indigenous inhabitants, only for them to begin logging and mining on an unprecedented scale.

There is a lesson here, one that the millions who jump up and down at Live8 concerts should heed, namely that good intentions are not enough. The men in grey suits who, unlike musicians, have gone to the trouble of getting themselves elected to something, may know a thing or two after all.

This article is referenced from "Planting trees is not the best way to be carbon neutral".

Last updated: 2008-10-15 (ISO 8601)