“Various types of carbon credits are ineffective,” says the Science Based Targets initiative
“Various types of carbon credits are ineffective,” says the Science Based Targets initiative
SBTi’s synthesis report on the effectiveness of carbon credits is a “bombshell rebuke to offsets”.
In April 2024, the Board of Trustees of the Science Based Targets initiative announced that carbon offsets could be used to meet Scope 3 emissions reduction targets under the SBTi system. The announcement came as a shock to the staff at SBTi who had not even been consulted before the statement was released.
Three days later, SBTi’s Board clarified that no decision had yet been on including carbon offsets. The Board stated that,
In July, a discussion paper with a draft proposal from SBTi about potential changes to Scope 3 will be published which will feed into the standard draft (drafting phase).
On 2 July 2024, Luiz Amaral announced that he was resigning as CEO of SBTi, for “personal reasons” that “require my full attention at this time, prompting my decision to step down”.
Holger Hoffmann-Riem from the Swiss NGO Go for Impact, who is a member of SBTi’s Technical Advisory Group, told Reuters that,
“For SBTi to regain its credibility, we need a fresh start, with a new board, a new governance structure, and a new CEO.”
No one from SBTi’s Board of Trustees has resigned.
Amaral announced his resignation on the same day that more than 80 civil society organisations, including Oxfam, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Global Witness, Client Earth, and Carbon Market Watch, called for SBTi to exclude the use of carbon offsets:
SBTi’s review “comprehensively trashes carbon credits”
On 30 July 2024, SBTi published two technical reports that are part of the process of revising SBTi’s Corporate Net Zero Standard.
One of the reports is a synthesis of evidence submitted to SBTi on the effectiveness of carbon offsets.
“The SBTi just published an evidence review that pretty comprehensively trashes carbon credits,” Simon Evans of Carbon Brief commented on LinkedIn.
Joe Romm, Senior Research Fellow at University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, described the synthesis report as “SBTi’s bombshell rebuke to offsets.”
The synthesis report states that, “various types of carbon credits are ineffective in delivering their intended mitigation outcomes”.
The evidence suggests that there could be clear risks to corporate use of carbon credits for the purpose of offsetting. This includes potential unintended effects of hindering the net-zero transformation and/or reducing climate finance.
The report also states that,
The evidence highlights the risk of claims which seek to convey that the purchase and retirement of carbon credits by companies somehow “offsets”, “counterbalances” or “compensates for” unabated value chain emissions.
And it states that,
The vast majority of evidence submissions (84%) argue that treating carbon credits as fungible with other sources, sinks, or reductions of emissions is inadvisable, illogical, or damaging to global mitigation goals, with the other submissions not providing a strong view. Around half of the evidence submissions explicitly support the use of contribution claims over offsetting/compensation/counterbalancing claims.
In a statement, Gilles Dufrasne, lead expert on global carbon markets at Carbon Market Watch and a member of SBTi’s Technical Advisory Group, says that,
“This paper sets the record straight for SBTi, and is proof that SBTi staff are performing high-quality, unbiased work. It is a clear rebuttal of the Board’s April statement, where specific individuals tried to bulldoze through a proposal that did not have any internal support from SBTi staff or advisers.”
“Inherent uncertainty” associated with REDD credits
The synthesis report is particularly critical of REDD offsets (the references cited in this quotation are listed below1):
One notable finding is that there are papers in this theme with directly opposing findings on the effectiveness of REDD+, based on different methodologies for analysis, with Roopsind et al. (2019), Everland (2023) and Pauly et al. (2023) supporting its effectiveness and several others raising concerns on its effectiveness, e.g. Probst et al. (2023), Haya et al. (2023), West et al. (2020), West et al. (2023); Calyx Global (2023), Berk and Lungungu (2020), and Rainforest Foundation UK (2023). This highlights the complexity in determining the effectiveness of REDD+ specifically. This is perhaps unsurprising, since REDD+ credits are generated based on a counterfactual baseline scenario of future deforestation, meaning there is inherent uncertainty associated with this type of credit.
SBTi will produce a draft standard by the end of 2024. The Financial Times reports Alberto Carrillo Pineda, SBTi’s Chief Technical Officer, as saying that the technical papers will be “codified into proposed requirements, and presented to SBTi’s technical council for review”.
The revised Corporate Net-Zero Standard will not be finalised before late 2025.
“Carbon credits of any sort should not be used to compensate for fossil emissions”
In a statement put out by the Climate Land Ambition and Rights Alliance (CLARA), Doreen Stabinsky, College of the Atlantic, and a member of SBTi’s Technical Council, said that,
“The evaluation of evidence of carbon credit effectiveness reinforces what many academics have been saying for decades: carbon credits of any sort should not be used to compensate for fossil emissions. In the words of the report: treating carbon credits as fungible with other sources, sinks, or reductions of emissions is inadvisable, illogical, or damaging to global mitigation goals. We have all been distracted over the past few years with carbon credit scandal after carbon credit scandal and the market apologists who claim that all will be fine if we just increase the ‘integrity’ of credits. The message of the report is clear: carbon credits are fundamentally incompatible with action in line with the Paris Agreement, no matter how much integrity they have.”
Berk, N, Lungungu, P. 2020. REDD-MINUS: The rhetoric and reality of the Mai Ndombe REDD+ Programme. Rainforest Foundation UK. https://www.rainforestfoundationuk.org/media.ashx/redd-minus.pdf
Calyx Global. 2023. Science vs. Everland: Who is correct on REDD? https://calyxglobal.com/blog-post?q=39
Everland. 2023. New analysis reveals just how effective REDD+ is. https://everland.earth/news/new-analysis-finds-that-redd-project-baselines-accurately -reflect-observed-jurisdictional-forest-loss-globally/
Haya, B.K., Alford-Jones, K., Anderegg, W.R., Beymer-Farris, B., Blanchard, L., Bomfim, B., 2023. Quality assessment of REDD+ carbon credit projects.
Pauly, M., Crosse, W., McCarron, J., Raashid, A., Tosteson, J., Mitchard, E. 2023. REDD+ project baselines accurately correspond with observed forest loss globally. https://sciencebasedtargets.org/resources/files/Call-for-Evidence/284_Pauly-et-al._2 023_REDD-project-baselines-accurately-correspond-with-observed-forest-loss-global ly.pdf Perspectives
Probst, B., Toetzke, M., Kontoleon, A., Diaz Anadon, L., Hoffmann, V.H., 2023. Systematic review of the actual emissions reductions of carbon offset projects across all major sectors. https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000620307
Rainforest Foundation UK. 2023. New analysis finds leading global carbon offset schemes are failing forests, people and the climate. https://www.rainforestfoundationuk.org/new-analysis-finds-leading-global-carbon-offs et-schemes-are-failing-forests-people-and-the-climate/
Roopsind, A., Sohngen, B., Brandt, J., 2019. Evidence that a national REDD+ program reduces tree cover loss and carbon emissions in a high forest cover, low deforestation country. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 116, 24492–24499. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1904027116 SBTi. 2021.
West, T.A.P., Börner, J., Sills, E.O., Kontoleon, A., 2020. Overstated carbon emission reductions from voluntary REDD+ projects in the Brazilian Amazon. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 117, 24188–24194. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2004334117
West, T.A.P., Wunder, S., Sills, E.O., Börner, J., Rifai, S.W., Neidermeier, A.N., Frey, G.P., Kontoleon, A., 2023. Action needed to make carbon offsets from forest conservation work for climate change mitigation. Science 381, 873–877. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ade3535
Exactly right! What I’ve been saying for years, and Chris for decades - It is all a sham, a shell game, and the net results of all carbon credits are recorded in the Keeling Curve (not!).The next scam to follow is “green bonds” for biodiversity. More monetizing of Nature with little actual effectiveness - quoting from a Financial Times article https://on.ft.com/3yroJYb “In the case of green bonds, only a minuscule share of the money raised is spent on nature conservation, in part because few such projects generate cash flows from which to repay investors.” So the return for investors flows from carbon taxes or general revenue; a clever investor-subsidy trick, while no meaningful environmental action takes place.