This is the wrap-up article for our five-part series on forest carbon credits and the voluntary market. Read Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four and Part Five. Mongabay recently published a five-part series on the carbon trade and its use as a tool to address climate change. The exchange of carbon credits, typically used to offset emissions, bore unprecedented criticism in 2023. A lot of the ire focused on credits from REDD+ projects. (REDD+ is short for “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.”) Detractors have long charged that offsetting with these and other credits often allows wealthy individuals, companies and countries to continue polluting. At the same time, critics argue, the strategy forces less-industrialized, tropical forest countries to shoulder the conservation and restoration work that’s supposed to result in those emissions reductions. Then, in 2023, research emerged that questioned whether those reductions — and the cuts in deforestation underpinning them — are happening on the scale claimed. Dissections of the voluntary carbon trade revealed that a lot of money has changed hands but with little transparency around its direct impacts. And concerns around carbon accounting methods arose around whether the trade has translated into progress toward winnowing away the amount of carbon in the atmosphere that’s led to surging temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. The greater scrutiny has unearthed other issues, such as abuse of community members by REDD+ project staff. More broadly, Indigenous and community leaders, some of whom actively support the voluntary carbon trade as…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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