![]() “Rather than just valuing what forests are actually there, which are actively providing a carbon sink or store right now, we have to surmise which forests would still be here versus which ones are the bonus forests that were spared from the theoretical axe.” “It’s impossible to prove a counterfactual,” she said. Soares-Filho said, in his experience, projects have a tendency to inflate threats to the forest and current modelling approaches result in “phantom carbon credits”.Īlexandra Morel, an ecosystem scientist at the University of Dundee who was involved in setting up one of the 10 projects in question, believes it was difficult to judge if the emission reductions claimed by projects were real. Land use software that he designed, Dinamica EGO, is frequently used by projects to predict where deforestation would have taken place. Models are a sign to help devise policy and evaluate policy choices.” He said that the methodologies “are not robust enough” which means “there is room for projects to generate credits that have no impact on the climate whatsoever”.Īrild Angelsen, a professor of economics at Norwegian University of Life Sciences and a specialist in Redd+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation), said that although Verra methodologies for claiming credits were a serious attempt to measure emission reductions from reducing deforestation, they were not currently robust enough.īritaldo Soares-Filho, a deforestation modelling expert and professor at the institute of geosciences at the Federal University of Minas Gerais told the Guardian that under the current system, calculating genuine emission reductions relied on being able to accurately predict the future. ![]() Thales West, a scientist and former project auditor, led a study on schemes in the Brazilian Amazon that found that projects had routinely overstated their emissions reductions. The findings have been fiercely criticised by Verra, who maintain the methods they endorse have contributed to the fight against climate change and deforestation, and transformed local economies for the better. Although there has been work to address this fundamental issue, we found that concerns remained. We found their predictions were often inconsistent with previous levels of deforestation in the area and in some cases, the threat to the trees may have been overstated.īeyond that, there are concerns about the inherent problem of looking into the future and predicting which trees would and would not have been felled, and of proving additionality – that the project itself made a difference to the outcome – which have dogged the offset system from its outset. The reductions are then sold on as credits. Projects estimate the emissions they have prevented by predicting how much deforestation and land clearing would have occurred without them. ![]() We looked at 10 forest protection schemes that airlines were using before the pandemic which had been accredited by Verra, a US nonprofit which administers the world’s leading carbon credit standard, VCS (Verified Carbon Standard). But a joint investigation into the offsetting schemes used by some of the world’s largest airlines carried out by the Guardian and Unearthed, Greenpeace’s investigative arm, found that although many forest projects were doing valuable conservation work, the credits that they generated by preventing environmental destruction appear to be based on a flawed and much-criticised system, even though these credits were being used to back up claims of “carbon-neutral flying” and net-zero commitments.
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