They found that the majority of credits did not represent a positive impact on the climate, that projects had routinely underplayed the risk of displacing deforestation elsewhere, and that auditors often failed to enforce Verra’s own rules on generating credits. The researchers assessed five quality factors of Verra’s rainforest carbon credit system, known as Redd+ projects: their durability, forest carbon accounting, community safeguards, deforestation leakage and baselines, finding widespread shortcomings in all areas. Through offsetting, companies and people say their own emissions have been cancelled out by paying for greenhouse gas removal or reductions elsewhere, often in developing countries.īut a new assessment by a team of 14 UC Berkeley researchers, funded by the NGO Carbon Market Watch, found that the current system of generating rainforest protection carbon credits was not fit for purpose and was open to exploitation. Halting the destruction of the world’s rainforests is an urgent task for meeting UN climate and biodiversity targets, and supporters of carbon markets say they could direct billions to climate change and biodiversity mitigation if they work as intended.
It generates highly inflated environmental impacts and some projects fail to provide safeguards for vulnerable forest communities, according to the report, making them unsuitable for companies to use for carbon offsetting claims as they are not equivalent to fossil fuel emissions.
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