On June 30th 2021, Carbon Market Watch (CMW) launched the report “Two Shades of Green: How hot air forest credits are being used to avoid carbon taxes in Colombia”. The Colombian government adopted a carbon tax of approximately US$5/tCO2e covering fossil fuels in 2016. Companies can avoid paying the tax by purchasing carbon offsets from projects inside Colombia. This has boosted the Colombian carbon market, which includes projects aiming to lower deforestation, so-called “REDD+” projects. At the same time, the Colombian government receives international finance for its regional (jurisdictional) REDD+ initiatives in the Amazon region, and has therefore adopted rules to ensure that voluntary projects do not sell an excessive number of carbon credits. According to the report, large-scale forest protection schemes in the Colombian Amazon may be dramatically overstating their impact on preventing deforestation. It warns that millions of carbon credits have likely been generated with no benefit to the climate. It finds the issue of “hot air” carbon credits from forest protection schemes in Colombia could be the “tip of the iceberg”, with 75 similar projects permitted to sell credits under the country’s domestic tax system. About 5m credits have been bought from the projects considered in the report, nearly all by Primax Colombia SAS, a fossil fuel company covered by the carbon tax. CMW has called on Verra, a US nonprofit which administers the world’s leading carbon credit standard used by one of the projects analysed in the report, to suspend the scheme from their registry. Verra stated that "the CMW report relies on faulty logic, premature and uninformed statements, and a profound misunderstanding of how the Government of Colombia is managing REDD+ in the context of its carbon tax".