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Updated: Jul 18, 2025

Author Spotlight: On-Site Biochar Production for Woody Debris Incineration in Forestry
Published on: January 5, 2024
Action needed to make carbon offsets from forest conservation work for climate change mitigation
Thales A P West1,2, Sven Wunder3,4, Erin O Sills5
1Environmental Geography Group, Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Abstract:
Carbon offsets from voluntary avoided-deforestation projects are generated on the basis of performance in relation to ex ante deforestation baselines. We examined the effects of 26 such project sites in six countries on three continents using synthetic control methods for causal inference. We found that most projects have not significantly reduced deforestation. For projects that did, reductions were substantially lower than claimed. This reflects differences between the project ex ante baselines and ex post counterfactuals according to observed deforestation in control areas. Methodologies used to construct deforestation baselines for carbon offset interventions need urgent revisions to correctly attribute reduced deforestation to the projects, thus maintaining both incentives for forest conservation and the integrity of global carbon accounting.
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