Action needed to make carbon offsets from forest conservation work for climate change mitigation

Science

Written By: Thales A. P. West, Sven Wunder, Erin O. Sills, Jan Borner, Sami W. Rifai, Alexandra N. Neidermeier, Gabriel P. Frey & Andreas Kontoleon

Published: August 24th, 2023

Photo Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Editor's summary

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) projects are intended to decrease carbon emissions from forests to offset other carbon emissions and are often claimed as credits to be used in calculating carbon emission budgets. West et al. compared the actual effects of these projects with measurable baseline values and found that most of them have not reduced deforestation significantly, and those that did had benefits substantially lower than claimed (see the Perspective by Jones and Lewis). Thus, most REDD projects are less beneficial than is often claimed.

— H. Jesse Smith

Abstract

Carbon offsets from voluntary avoided-deforestation projects are generated on the basis of performance in relation to ex ante deforestation baselines. We examined the effects of 26 such project sites in six countries on three continents using synthetic control methods for causal inference. We found that most projects have not significantly reduced deforestation. For projects that did, reductions were substantially lower than claimed. This reflects differences between the project ex ante baselines and ex post counterfactuals according to observed deforestation in control areas. Methodologies used to construct deforestation baselines for carbon offset interventions need urgent revisions to correctly attribute reduced deforestation to the projects, thus maintaining both incentives for forest conservation and the integrity of global carbon accounting.

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