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Study Exposes Forest Carbon Credit Schemes to Offset Fossil Fuels as 'Pipe Dream'
"Biodiversity, the climate, and Indigenous people or local communities are losing out on what should have been a system to drive meaningful financial flows to the forest conservation projects that so desperately need it," said one expert.
Sep 15, 2023
Echoing previous warnings from climate advocates and studies, an environmental watchdog on Friday released research from experts at the University of California which shows that trying to offset fossil fuel emissions with popular forest carbon credit projects "is a pipe dream."
As the new Berkeley Carbon Trading Project assessment—funded by Carbon Market Watch (CMW)—explains, "The voluntary carbon market generates credits, each nominally equivalent to one metric ton of carbon dioxide reduced or removed from the atmosphere, from a wide range of projects around the globe."
Critics have long argued that carbon credit schemes are "false solutions" that harm poor communities where such projects are based and enable companies worldwide to greenwash their polluting activity rather than implementing reforms or investing in action to actually combat deforestation and the climate emergency.
"Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is the project type that has the most credits on the voluntary carbon market—about a quarter of all credits to date," the assessment details. "These projects pay governments, organizations, communities, and individuals in forest landscapes (primarily tropical ones in the Global South) for activities that preserve forests and avoid forest-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions."
Over the past two decades, more than $3 billion has been poured into REDD+ and nearly half a billion carbon credits have been awarded, yet "deforestation is still continuing at an alarming rate," the report notes. Berkeley researchers' analysis of four methodologies that have generated almost all REDD+ credits—under Verra, the largest voluntary carbon market registry—revealed that estimated GHG emissions reductions were dramatically exaggerated.
"We found significant over-crediting from all of the factors we reviewed, the core causes of which are a combination of incentives and uncertainty," said Barbara Haya, who led the research. "Everyone involved in the voluntary carbon market, from the buyers and sellers of credits, to the registries who write the rules and the auditors who enforce them, all benefit from more credits."
"Large uncertainty in climate benefit calculations creates many opportunities for market participants to choose assumptions that inflate credits issued," Haya added. "Drawing on all evidence, we conclude that REDD+ is ill-suited for carbon offsetting."
As a CMW briefing published with the assessment summarizes:
- Project baselines are significantly overestimated, the research found, leading to the creation of carbon credits that represent imaginary emission reductions.
- Similarly, leakage is systematically underestimated by projects, which make use of flexibilities provided to them by the methodologies to downplay the risk of deforestation moving to areas outside of their project.
- The creation of low-quality carbon credits is further fueled by exaggerated estimates of the quantity of carbon stored within the trees that are protected by projects.
- The risk that the trees protected by REDD+ projects will die in the future is also drastically underestimated by projects, which again use methodological flexibility to misrepresent the real deforestation threat that forests will face in the future.
- Finally, the safeguards implemented by Verra are weak, do not protect communities from harm, and are not properly upheld by the validation and verification bodies.
Inigo Wyburd, a CMW policy expert on global carbon markets, said that "we welcome Verra's willingness to engage with our research and hope that it will take on board our findings and implement all of our recommendations."
"Businesses are offsetting their emissions on the cheap by buying low-quality carbon credits connected to forest protection projects in the Global South," the expert added. "When only 1 in every 13 carbon credits represents a real emissions reduction, their action is lost in the forest."
Meanwhile, as Gilles Dufrasne, CMW's policy lead on global carbon markets, highlighted, "biodiversity, the climate, and Indigenous people or local communities are losing out on what should have been a system to drive meaningful financial flows to the forest conservation projects that so desperately need it."
"Offsetting should be axed," he argued. "It cannot work in its current form, and carbon markets must evolve into something different. The focus should be on getting money to the right place, rather than getting as many credits as possible."
As Patrick Galey, senior fossil fuels investigator at Global Witness, pointed out on social media Friday, the new research was released as the African nation Liberia is preparing to sign an offsetting agreement conceding 10% of its territory to Blue Carbon, a private company in the United Arab Emirates led by a member of an Emirati royal family.
Middle East Eye reported late that month that the deal for "control of one of the most densely forested territories" on the continent "would violate a number of Liberian laws, including the 2019 land rights law." Additionally, as CMW policy expert Jonathan Crook told the outlet, "there's no clarity as to what will be done to calculate what emission reductions have taken place."
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Study Finds Carbon Offset Schemes 'Significantly Overestimating' Deforestation Claims
"These carbon credits are essentially predicting whether someone will chop down a tree, and selling that prediction," said one study author. "If you exaggerate or get it wrong, intentionally or not, you are selling hot air."
Aug 24, 2023
Most carbon offset schemes significantly overestimate their impact on reducing deforestation, with many of the carbon credits purchased by polluting corporations amounting to little more than "hot air," according to a researcher behind a study released Thursday that could portend billions of dollars in losses for speculators.
"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," explains the study, which was published in the journal Science.
However, according to the study:
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...
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.
"Carbon credits provide major polluters with some semblance of climate credentials. Yet we can see that claims of saving vast swathes of forest from the chainsaw to balance emissions are overblown," study co-author Andreas Kontoleon, from the University of Cambridge's Department of Land Economy, said in a statement.
"These carbon credits are essentially predicting whether someone will chop down a tree, and selling that prediction," he added. "If you exaggerate or get it wrong, intentionally or not, you are selling hot air."
Kontoleon added that overestimations of forest preservation have driven an increase in the number of carbon credits on the market, resulting in artificial price suppression.
"Potential buyers benefit from consistently low prices created by the flood of credits," he said. "It means that companies can tick their net-zero box at the lowest possible cost."
This could mean that carbon speculators stand to lose billions of dollars in the future as offsets become stranded assets.
"It's currently a buyer's market and buyers are, rightly, prioritizing quality. There are over a billion tons of issued but not retired credits in the market—this suggests lots of credits can be written off, and there will remain a large supply for buyers to tap into," Anton Root, head of research at AlliedOffsets, told The Guardian Thursday.
"A correction like that could help to orient the market toward fundamental supply-demand dynamics, which we don't currently tend to see, and drive up the price for credits that are deemed to be above the quality threshold," he added.
The new research follows other scientific research and journalistic investigations, including a January study by The Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial that concluded that over 90% of the rainforest carbon offsets sold by Verra, the nonprofit organization that sets the world's leading sustainability standard, "are largely worthless and could make global heating worse."
While some scientists argue that CO2 extraction, either via natural or technological means, is needed in order to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, opponents call the technology a "false climate solution."
Green groups including Extinction Rebellion and Food & Water Watch have for years warned against carbon capture and storage, which critics call a "scam" and "greenwashing."
"Carbon offset markets are widely discredited," Food & Water Watch policy director Jim Walsh said earlier this year. "Their only benefit lies in enriching the middlemen charged with selling the lie."
Despite this, the Biden administration is pushing ahead with a plan to invest $2.5 billion in a pair of major carbon capture and storage projects, which it claims will "significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation and hard-to-abate industrial operations" as part of the "effort critical to addressing the climate crisis and meeting the president's goal of a net-zero emissions economy by 2050."
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Rainforest Carbon Offsets Used by Major Corporations 'Largely Worthless': Analysis
"Companies are making false claims and then they're convincing customers that they can fly guilt-free or buy carbon-neutral products when they aren't in any way carbon-neutral," one expert lamented.
Jan 18, 2023
Over 90% of the rainforest carbon offsets sold by the nonprofit organization that sets the world's leading sustainability standard "are largely worthless and could make global heating worse," an investigation published Wednesday by three media outlets confirmed.
For nine months, The Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial analyzed scientific studies of Verra, "the world's leading carbon standard" in a voluntary global offset market worth $2 billion annually and growing. Verra's customers include major multinational corporations, and the analysis' findings cast doubts over the carbon offset credits the companies buy in order to label their products as "carbon neutral" or assure customers that they can consume their products or services without worsening the climate emergency.
"The implications of this analysis are huge," said Barbara Haya, head of the Carbon Trading Project at the University of California, Berkeley. "Companies are making false claims and then they're convincing customers that they can fly guilt-free or buy carbon-neutral products when they aren't in any way carbon-neutral."
\u201cNEW: Forest carbon offsets approved by the world\u2019s leading provider and used by Disney, Shell, Gucci and others are largely worthless and could make global heating worse, a new investigation finds.\n\nWith @hannahknuth , @herrfischer & @lukewbarratt \n\n\ud83d\udc47\ud83d\udc47\n\nhttps://t.co/KpKlXqzy0K\u201d— Patrick Greenfield (@Patrick Greenfield) 1674050676
According to The Guardian, key findings of the analysis include:
- Only a handful of Verra's rainforest projects showed evidence of deforestation reductions, according to two studies, with further analysis indicating that 94% of the credits had no benefit to the climate;
- The threat to forests had been overstated by about 400% on average for Verra projects, according to analysis of a 2022 University of Cambridge study;
- Gucci, Salesforce, BHP, Shell, easyJet, Leon, and the band Pearl Jam were among dozens of companies and organizations that have bought rainforest offsets approved by Verra for environmental claims; and
- Human rights issues are a serious concern in at least one of the offsetting projects, which involved home destructions and forced evictions in Peru.
"I have worked as an auditor on these projects in the Brazilian Amazon and when I started this analysis, I wanted to know if we could trust their predictions about deforestation," Thales West, a lead author on the studies, told The Guardian. "The evidence from the analysis... suggests we cannot. I want this system to work to protect rainforests. For that to happen, we need to acknowledge the scale of problems with the current system."
Co-author Erin Sills said: "I'd like to find that conserving forests, which conserves biodiversity, and conserves local ecosystem services, also has a real effective impact on reducing climate change. If it doesn't, it's scary, because it's a little bit less hope for reducing climate change."
Verra responded to the outlets' analysis by saying the paper's claims are based on "methods that do not account for project-specific factors that cause deforestation."
"As a result, these studies massively miscalculate the impact of REDD+ projects," the organization added, referring to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP) framework "to guide activities in the forest sector that reduces emissions from deforestation and forest degradation."
\u201cThe blue lines show what happened in similar areas at the same time. Everybody is of course entitled to their own opinion. \n\nThe chart is from Thales West's study about carbon offset projects in Brazil, which we have used for further analysis https://t.co/daFSN9GgHr\u201d— Tin Fischer (@Tin Fischer) 1674063927
Die Zeit's Tin Fischer posted a pair of tweets pushing back against Verra's comments with a chart from one of West's studies.
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