2023-08-25 13:43:32
Tropical Moist Forest – UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
MADRID, 25 Ago. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Most carbon offset programs significantly overestimate the levels of deforestation they prevent, according to a study published in Science.
This means that many of the “carbon credits” purchased by companies to balance emissions they are not linked to the preservation of forests in the real world as claimed.
An international team of scientists and economists led by the University of Cambridge and VU Amsterdam found that millions of carbon credits “are based on crude calculations that inflate the conservation successes” of voluntary REDD+ projects.
REDD+ is a generic acronym for ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries’. Currently, credits from voluntary “avoided deforestation” projects are issued based on predictions of tree loss that would have occurred without the REDD scheme+.
Consequently, the study notes, many tons of greenhouse gas emissions considered “offset” by otherwise non-existent trees have, in fact, only increased our planetary carbon debt, the researchers say.
REDD+ schemes generate carbon credits by investing in protecting sections of the world’s most important forests, from the Congo to the Amazon Basin. These credits represent the carbon that will no longer be released through deforestation.
Organizations and individuals can then offset their own carbon footprint by purchasing credits equal to a set amount of emissions.
Carbon credit markets have exploded in recent years. More than 150 million credits originated from voluntary REDD+ projects in 2021, for a value of 1,300 million dollars. Some companies use carbon offsetting to claim they have moved toward “net zero” while doing little to reduce greenhouse gases, the researchers say.
The team behind the study argues that the burgeoning trade in carbon credits may already be a kind of “lemon market”: where buyers have no way of distinguishing quality, so some sellers flood the market with bad products, leading to a breakdown of confidence and ultimately the collapse of the market.
“Carbon credits give major polluters some semblance of climate credentials. However, we can see that claims of saving vast tracts of forest from the chainsaw to balance emissions are overblown,” he said it’s a statement the study’s lead author, Professor Andreas Kontoleon, from Cambridge’s Department of Land Economics.
“These carbon credits essentially predict whether someone will cut down a tree and they sell that prediction.“.
Kontoleon notes that overestimates of forest conservation have allowed the number of carbon credits on the market to continue to rise, which in turn drives down prices.
“Potential buyers benefit from the consistently low prices created by the flood of credit. It means companies can check their net zero emissions box at the lowest possible cost“, said.
The researchers say the calculations – which take historical deforestation averages or trends, sometimes going back more than a decade, over a wide region that typically includes the REDD+ site – are often too simplistic.
The latest study looked in detail at 18 REDD+ projects in five tropical countries: Peru, Colombia, Cambodia, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Although a total of 26 REDD+ project sites were investigated, only 18 had sufficient “baseline” deforestation data available to allow useful comparative analysis.
The research team took a “counterfactual” approach. They identified areas of existing forest within a given region that closely resemble each individual REDD+ project, from matching levels of forest cover and soil fertility to similar mining and deforestation records.
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