Carbon credits put ‘forest communities at risk’ and needs to be replaced, suggests new research by UC Berkeley Carbon Trading Project.
Berkeley Carbon Trading project director Barbara Haya said: “Our research shows that the project type with the most credits on the voluntary carbon market, avoided deforestation, generates highly inflated credits that put forest communities at risk.
“An entirely different approach is needed to reduce deforestation and cut emissions,” she added.
As reported by the Guardian, the researchers assessed five factors of Verra’s REDD+ credits, which represent roughly a quarter of carbon offsets issued globally: their durability, forest carbon accounting, community safeguards, deforestation leakage and baselines.
The report concluded that carbon credits generated highly inflated environmental impacts and some projects fail to provide safeguards for vulnerable forest communities.
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The report suggests that they are unsuitable for companies to use them for carbon offsetting claims as they’re not equivalent to fossil fuel emissions. Instead, companies and businesses should focus on reducing deforestation and support indigenous communities conserve forests.
In response, Verra said it welcomed the scrutiny of the scientific and environmental community on its work, saying that many of the issues highlighted in the report would be dealt with in the new methodology for generating carbon credits, which it will be publishing in the next few weeks. It has published a technical response to the study.
“We are committed to transparency, and have built an ecosystem of processes and relationships to develop consensus standards and methodologies that support climate action,” Verra said in a statement.
“It is important to note that the vast majority of findings and recommendations from this research align with extensive and systematic work to update the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) Program that has been carried out by Verra over the last two years,” it added.
