Action needed to make carbon offsets from forest conservation work for climate change mitigation-Reference-Cited by-同舟云学术

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

Published:2023-08-25 Issue:6660 Volume:381 Page:873-877
ISSN:0036-8075
Container-title:Science
language:en
Short-container-title:Science

Author:

West Thales A. P.¹²^ORCID,Wunder Sven³⁴,Sills Erin O.⁵^ORCID,Börner Jan⁶⁷^ORCID,Rifai Sami W.⁸^ORCID,Neidermeier Alexandra N.¹^ORCID,Frey Gabriel P.⁶^ORCID,Kontoleon Andreas²⁹^ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Environmental Geography Group, Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

2. Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

3. European Forest Institute (EFI), Barcelona, Spain.

4. Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Lima, Peru.

5. Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA.

6. Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany.

7. Institute for Food and Resource Economics (ILR), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany.

8. ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

9. Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

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.

Publisher

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Subject

Multidisciplinary

Link

https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.ade3535

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