Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as offsets deemed ‘worthless’ - eviltoast
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    The credits are often generated on the basis they are contributing to climate change mitigation such as stopping tropical deforestation, tree planting and creating renewable energy projects in developing countries.

    A new study in the journal Science has found that millions of forest carbon credits approved by Verra, the world’s leading certifier, are largely worthless and could make global heating worse if used for offsetting.

    The research by scientists and economists at the University of Cambridge and VU Amsterdam was one of the three studies used in a January investigation into rainforest offsets by the Guardian, Die Zeit and Source Material.

    The analysis, published on Thursday, found that 18 big forest offsetting projects had produced millions of carbon credits based on calculations that greatly inflated their conservation impact.

    The findings follow a 2020 study of 12 projects in the Brazilian Amazon by the same group, which found they had a negligible impact on stopping deforestation despite generating credits on the basis they were preventing large areas from being destroyed.

    One of the things that is going to give us much greater certainty is article 6 of the Paris agreement, which will define Paris-compliant carbon credits for the private sector alongside sovereign actors.


    The original article contains 973 words, the summary contains 202 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!