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Carbon offset projects that claim to curb deforestation are vastly overestimating their impact, according to new research published Thursday in the journal Science.
As a way to reduce the impact of greenhouse gas emissions by allowing polluters and consumers to purchase offsets or credits that allow them to continue emitting emissions instead of funding projects that reduce emissions elsewhere. The offset has become a high-profile model for corporate climate action. .
However, a systematic evaluation of 26 carbon offset projects claiming to slow potential deforestation in six countries on three continents found that the majority did not actually slow deforestation. , the successful projects turned out to be significantly less effective than claimed.
“The main message is [carbon offset] Authentication alone is not enough,” said Thales West, lead author of the study, an interdisciplinary ecologist and assistant professor at the Free University of Amsterdam and a research fellow at the Cambridge Center for Environment, Energy and Natural Resources. . “If you rely 100 percent on offsets, you probably won’t do anything positive in terms of climate change mitigation.”
This research focuses on voluntary REDD+, projects that reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. These are independent projects operating independently in a voluntary carbon offset market outside the REDD+ framework of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change on National and Local Projects. The authors call for an “urgent revision” of the certification methods used to attribute deforestation avoidance to these projects, pointing to serious flaws in current practice.
over the past few decades, Carbon offsets are becoming increasingly popular, especially in high-income countries, where consumers understand that by paying a small surcharge on flights and rental cars, that extra payment goes to support tree plantations. can help you feel less guilty about climate change. for example. Large and high emitting companies such as: delta, jet blue, disney, general motors and shell They have all bought and sold huge amounts of carbon offsets in the name of climate action. This is an attractive business model for companies looking to go “green” without making major changes to their operations. Buy carbon offsets to offset your emissions. Or at least it seems so.
Since carbon offsets hit the market, there has been a great deal of debate about whether they are an effective model for climate mitigation. A Cambridge study reveals a fundamental problem: many carbon offsets aimed at reducing deforestation are not as effective as claimed. And in many cases they may not be doing anything.
Julia Jones, Ph.D., a conservation scientist at Bangor University who specializes in conservation impact assessments, said the study was particularly compelling because of its unique approach and set it apart from other studies in the field. said there is.
“Their study is by far the largest and uses the most robust methods to date,” said Jones, who was not involved in the study.
The study examined 26 projects in six countries: Cambodia, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Peru, Tanzania, and Zambia. The researchers found that out of 26 projects that sold offsets, only 8 showed evidence of reducing deforestation, even those that could reduce deforestation, even those that the projects claimed. We found that we could not achieve the reduction amount.
Of the 26 projects, only 18 had enough public information to determine the number of offsets they expected to generate. From project implementation to 2020, these 18 projects were expected to generate up to 89 million carbon offsets to be sold on the global carbon market. But the researchers estimate that only 5.4 million, or 6.1 percent, of the 89 million deals are related to actual carbon emissions reductions.
West said companies buying and selling third-party certified carbon offsets may not be aware that they are misleading their customers, simply believing the certification is legitimate. He said he might just be there. But the process of evaluating a project’s effectiveness toward certification is deeply flawed, he said.
West said most projects survey historical deforestation within an area to predict a baseline deforestation rate—the amount of deforestation that would have occurred without the project’s intervention. It is said that there is The problem is that it’s all hypothetical.
“They aren’t really doing good science,” he says.
West and his colleagues took a different approach. They created a weighted average of regions similar to the project area but without the project and used that as a ‘synthetic control’. We then compared deforestation in the integrated management area and the project area during the period when the project was in place. If projects are successful in reducing deforestation, those project areas should have less deforestation than synthetic controls. Instead, West and his colleagues discovered that this is usually not the case.
Mr Jones emphasized that the takeaway from this study is not that investment in forest protection should be cut, but that we need to invest more in effective projects to reduce deforestation. Voluntary carbon markets have become an important source of funding for forest conservation activities and this funding needs to continue, she said.
“It is impossible to tackle climate change without stopping both deforestation and forest degradation of tropical forests now,” Jones said. “It’s really an urgent priority.”