Overstated carbon emission reductions from voluntary REDD+ projects in the Brazilian Amazon.

ABSTRACT: Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) has gained international attention over the past decade, as manifested in both United Nations policy discussions and hundreds of voluntary projects launched to earn carbon-offset credits. There are ongoing discussions about whether and how projects should be integrated into national climate change mitigation efforts under the Paris Agreement. One consideration is whether these projects have generated additional impacts over and above national policies and other measures. To help inform these discussions, we compare the crediting baselines established ex-ante by voluntary REDD+ projects in the Brazilian Amazon to counterfactuals constructed ex-post based on the quasi-experimental synthetic control method. We find that the

SUBMITTER: West TAP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7533833 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature