Fixing forest carbon credits

Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) affiliate researcher Rohini Pande's article in Science explores the challenges posed by the current carbon credit system and the potential solutions for forest preservation.

Rohini writes: 'Implementing better-designed forest preservation projects that can provide credible [voluntary carbon credits] VCCs does not of course prevent the fundamental paradox of voluntary offsets: they can be, and are, used to enable citizens in rich countries to justify continued high-carbon-emitting activities and to enable companies in these countries—particularly fossil-fuel companies—to justify continuing to sell high-carbon-emitting products and services. At this stage of the climate crisis, we need both to preserve and restore forests and to put a hard stop to unnecessary high-carbon-emitting activity, using offsets only to compensate for unavoidable carbon emissions. So economists also need to be thinking about how to implement effective regulation to prevent these wasted emissions."

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