To meet their climate commitments, some companies buy carbon credits through a project focused on saving tropical forests in an African country from being cut down. Theoretically, if we manage to keep these trees standing, we will have avoided generating emissions that these companies can be computed to offset, in the same amount, others that they have produced. However, when independent researchers analyze this project with satellite images, they discover that these forest masses are not actually threatened, since the deforestation factors in the area are not those claimed by the promoters. This is a real case given as an example of what is happening in a general way with voluntary emissions offsets by researcher William RL Anderegg, promoter of a letter signed by 34 scientists last week in the scientific journal Nature which denounces the lack of rigor of carbon credits used to fight climate change, especially those related to forest management.
“There is a fairly large body of scientific studies showing that many of the current carbon offsets do not work for the climate. “They are not achieving real climate mitigation, especially those based on nature,” he comments in an interview. on-line Anderegg, director of the Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy at the University of Utah (USA). “There are projects that work reasonably well, but based on the studies we have seen in the scientific literature, they are probably less than 5% or 10%. So the vast majority, more than 90%, “They don’t work for the climate.”
The most effective action to fight against warming by companies is the direct reduction of their own emissions, through measures such as the use of renewable energy, savings and efficiency, improvements in transportation… However, companies can also meet their commitments to achieve net zero emissions or climate neutrality by purchasing carbon credits from third parties. It is about offsetting one’s own emissions with the projects of others that supposedly absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere by planting trees or avoiding the generation of emissions, through the installation of renewable energies or stopping deforestation (these The latter are known as REDD+).
However, as the signatories of the letter point out, “most current voluntary carbon offsets are neither robust nor capable of neutralizing fossil fuel emissions.” According to these specialists in forest carbon cycle, climate policies and carbon markets, numerous studies “have detected important and widespread problems in many carbon credit protocols and programs.”
The letter of Nature comes after the board of directors of one of the main independent organizations dedicated to advising and validating the climate commitments of companies, Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), opened the door last month to the use of these carbon credits to achieve the most difficult objectives to meet, those that are focused on the indirect emissions of companies in their value chain (called scope 3). In a communication from April 9this organization notes: “While there is a healthy ongoing debate on this issue, SBTi recognizes that, when adequately supported by policies, standards and procedures based on scientific evidence, the use of environmental certificates for emissions reduction purposes is 3 could work as an additional tool to address climate change.”
Subsequently, SBTi has assured that this does not represent a change in its current standards. However, this has not stopped the strong rejection of scientists working in this field, who did not expect such a move from an organization that has as partners the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), the United Nations Global Compact, the coalition We Mean Business, the World Resources Institute (WRI) or the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
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“This organization, Science-Based Targets initiative, is the largest corporate target-setting group, helping thousands of companies around the world set their climate goals to reach net zero. Until now, it has had a very solid scientific basis and has not allowed carbon offsets, but now it has taken a step that distances them from the best science and that is why we ask them to reconsider it,” Anderegg emphasizes. “This was a decision made by the board of directors, but there were many objections and criticisms from the staff working at SBTi. The organization has a scientific advisory group and a technical council, neither of which were consulted, and they are very upset about it,” he continues.
Scientific criteria
Another of the scientists who signed the letter, Maurizio Mencucini, an expert in plant and ecosystem ecology at the Spanish research center CREAF, emphasizes that it is possible to obtain reliable carbon credits with scientific criteria through forestry actions, but also emphasizes that this is not at all what is happening. As detailed, “you have to demonstrate what the starting level of carbon sink in the area is, you have to demonstrate that the amount of sink is increasing over time and you have to demonstrate that this is additional, that it would not have happened without the money that you give (which must be verified by comparing it with what happens in other external areas).”
“But also,” he continues, “it is necessary to verify that the prohibition of felling trees does not cause deforestation in other places, certain criteria of permanence over time must be met, in the next hundred years something bad is surely going to happen, a fire, a storm, which is going to destroy part of what was done, this can be estimated scientifically, and we must also take into account the local communities.”
Mencucini notes: “I participated in a project in Kenya paid for by a major insurance company that has worked well, a small pilot experiment to get local communities to no longer use their coastal mangrove forests.” “Evidently,” highlights the CREAF researcher, “the problems appear when we go from a small-scale experiment controlled by university students to a much larger scale where large companies invest millions of euros.”
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