Articles

Who Benefits From Carbon Offsets?

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One would hope that people who live in areas where forests are used for carbon credit offsets would benefit. Large sums of money are involved, but who gets it? Apparently, not always the local people. The popular press – newspapers and magazines – report many examples. Here are two.

Levi Sucre Romero’s guest essay in the December 1, 2022, New York Times: My Community Dosen’t Exist Just to Absolve You of Your Climate Sins, laments that large corporations offer no discernable guarantees for Indigenous rights on their land used for carbon offsets. The author talks of “carbon cowboys” – brokers who descend on Indigenous communities in Honduras, Brazil, and Columbia and talk them into signing away their rights to the carbon in their forests. Sucre Romero is a member of the Bribri Indigenous people of Costa Rica and coordinator of the Mesoamerican Alliance of People and Forests.

A revelation on the negative aspects is a colossal boondoggle in Zimbabwe reported by Heidi Blake in the October 23, 2023, The New Yorker, pages 42-55, under the title of Hot Air: The Great Cash-for-Carbon Hustle. Major corporations paid for carbon offsets in an inhabited forest region of Zimbabwe, but the credits were worthless. The forest was not protected and local people got little from the cash. A hundred million dollars vanished.

The question is, are these exceptions to the rule? The issue of carbon offset credits’ impact on indigenous communities is well worth exploring. Readers who know of carbon offset projects that have significantly benefited local communities and resulted in the promised amount of carbon storage, could report these examples in the ISTF Newsletter.

Author:
Thomas Geary
Tilghman, Maryland, USA
Contact: ThomasGeary@hotmail.com

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Forest Carbon Offsets: A New Approach

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In an October 30, 2023 press release, the University of Cambridge (UK) announced the publication of an article in the journal Nature Climate Change of research by the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits. The University states that “Our new approach has the potential to address market concerns around nature-based solutions to carbon offsetting.” This is important because “Current valuation methods for forest conservation projects have come under heavy scrutiny, leading to a crisis of confidence in carbon markets. Measuring the value of carbon storage is not easy. Recent research revealed that as little as 6% of carbon credits from voluntary REDD+ schemes result in preserved forests.” Moreover, “the length of time these forests are preserved is critical to the climate benefits achieved.”

“Our new approach has the potential to address market concerns around nature-based solutions to carbon offsetting.”

Srinivasan Keshav, Robert Sansom Professor of Computer Science at Cambridge

Below is the author abstract of the article: Balmford, A et al.: ‘Realising the social value of impermanent carbon credits.’ Nature Climate Change, October 2023. DOI: 10.1038/s41558-023-01815-0.

Abstract: Efforts to avert dangerous climate change by conserving and restoring natural habitats are hampered by concerns over the credibility of methods used to quantify their long-term impacts. Here we develop a flexible framework for estimating the net social benefit of impermanent nature-based interventions that integrates three substantial advances: (1) conceptualizing the permanence of a project’s impact as its additionality over time; (2) risk-averse estimation of the social cost of future reversals of carbon gains; and (3) post-credit monitoring to correct errors in deliberately pessimistic release forecasts. Our framework generates incentives for safeguarding already credited carbon while enabling would-be investors to make like-for-like comparisons of diverse carbon projects. Preliminary analyses suggest nature-derived credits may be competitively priced even after adjusting for impermanence.

Access to the full article is not free. To read it one must belong to an institution with a subscription to Springer Nature, subscribe yourself, or pay for a PDF of articles of interest. A personal subscription appears worthwhile if one has a strong interest in climate change research. Many articles are about forests.

Author:
Thomas Geary
Tilghman, Maryland, USA
Contact: ThomasGeary@hotmail.com

To stay up to date with more news and gain greater access to all ISTF updates, sign up for ISTF communications through our Membership Survey!

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