More junk offsets: Carbon registries are systemically over-crediting "improved forest management" offset projects

Worldwide, almost 300 improved forest management offset projects have generated a total of 28% of forest-based offsets and 11% of all offsets on voluntary registries to date. A new research paper published in Frontiers in Forest and Global Change reveals that the registries are systemically over-crediting these projects, flooding the market with yet more junk offsets.

Lead researcher Barbara Haya of the University of California, Berkeley told Bloomberg that, “Across the board, they fall far short from good practice in carbon accounting. It’s pervasive.”

Three registries are responsible for the vast majority of improvement forest management offsets: Winrock International’s American Carbon Registry (ACR); the Climate Action Reserve (CAR); and Verra’s Verified Carbon Standard (VCS). Almost all (94%) improved forest management (IFM) offsets were issued in the US.

Haya and colleagues give an overview of the questions asked by the carbon registries to determine whether offsets represent real emissions reductions:

• additionality - “would the project activities have occurred without the offset income?”

• counterfactual baselines - “what would have happened without the offset income?”

• leakage - “does the project cause increased emissions outside of project accounting boundaries?”

• permanence - “is the risk that stored carbon will be released back into the atmosphere managed and accounted for?”

• carbon accounting - “are the methods for monitoring and calculating carbon stocks, fluxes, and process emissions accurate and conservative?”

The authors note that the project’s baseline determines how many carbon offsets can be issued from a project. “The ‘true” baseline (counterfactual) is inherently uncertain, because one a project takes place, the baseline cannot be observed,” they write. “For IFM projects, it is hard to distinguish additionality from baselines.”

Haya and colleagues found that most of the offsets from improved forest management were generated from a fictional tale of aggressive logging practices. These counterfactual baselines didn’t align with past practices in the area of the logging concessions. As a result, project developers generated offsets for business as usual, rather than the claimed improvement.

Improved forest management can include things like allowing trees to grow longer between harvests, reducing the number of trees cut per hectare, or reducing the impact of logging infrastructure such as roads. But the researchers found that project developers often generated credits where no changes were made.

One problem is that the organisations setting carbon standards earn a commission on each carbon credit generated, “a business model that incentivizes leniency over conservativeness,” Bloomberg notes. It’s a classic conflict of interest - the more carbon offsets generated from a project, the more money the standards setting organisations make.

Haya told Bloomberg that companies cannot rely on improved forest management offsets to make claims of carbon neutrality, or in order to make claims that they are helping to address the climate crisis. Delta Airlines is one of the biggest buyers of improved forest management offsets which the company markets as part of its plan to go “carbon neutral”.

Haya told Bloomberg that,

“It makes the global community think that we’re doing more than we’re really doing at this brief moment we have to dramatically reduce our emissions to prevent runaway climate change.”

An early draft of the paper in Frontiers in Forest and Global Change was funded by Land Life and Google. Land Life is the tree planting and offsetting firm that set fire to 14,000 hectares in northeastern Spain during a severe drought last year. Land Life also partnered with oil companies Shell and Lundin Energy on tree-planting projects.

The paper makes a series of recommendations for “improving” how the number of carbon offsets are calculated from improved forest management projects.

But the reality is that we cannot possibly offset our way out of the climate crisis.

We need to urgently reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels. Offsets exist for the express purpose of allowing fossil fuel emissions to continue, while greenwashing the pollution.

As Haya told Bloomberg,

“Offsetting is a misnomer — you can't ‘offset’ your emissions. We need alternative ways of supporting climate mitigation because the current offset market is deeply not working.”