ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Overstated carbon emission reductions from voluntary REDD+ projects in the Brazilian Amazon.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers.
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44 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Unobserved confounders cannot explain over-crediting in avoided deforestation carbon projects.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Synthetic control methods enable stronger causal inference using participatory science data in cities.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Fixing carbon credits requires a new financing model.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Learning lessons from over-crediting to ensure additionality in forest carbon credits.Nature communications · 2026Article
- On the potential for strategic behavior in jurisdictional REDD.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- New scenarios of non-violent conflict in indigenous communities: The case of REDD+ in the Colombian Amazon.Environment and security · 2026Article
- Five rules for scientifically credible nature markets.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Review
- Integrating satellite data and field surveys to predict bird communities in the Peruvian Amazon.PloS one · 2026Article
- A Global Dataset of Location Data Integrity-Assessed Reforestation Efforts.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Embracing imperfection: Carbon offset markets must learn to mitigate the risk of overcrediting.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- An open-access database of nature-based carbon offset project boundaries.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Review
- Telecoupling cannot be ignored for the forest-based carbon market.Bioscience · 2025Article
- Article
- Systematic assessment of the achieved emission reductions of carbon crediting projects.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Towards net zero: Comprehensive approach for voluntary carbon trading among microgrids.Heliyon · 2024Article
- River restoration can increase carbon storage but is not yet a suitable basis for carbon credits.Bioscience · 2024Article
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4 authors.
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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 crediting baselines assume consistently higher deforestation than counterfactual forest loss in synthetic control sites. This gap is partially due to decreased deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon during the early implementation phase of the REDD+ projects considered here. This suggests that forest carbon finance must strike a balance between controlling conservation investment risk and ensuring the environmental integrity of carbon emission offsets. Relatedly, our results point to the need to better align project- and national-level carbon accounting.
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