Carbon-offset schemes aren’t prepared for forests to burn

Many carbon lag regimes based on the forest certified by the largest carbon register in the world, will see, can be useless due to forest fires or other disturbances releasing the carbon that they store in the atmosphere.

A carbon -based carbon offset project is to protect or replant forests to generate carbon credits, which can then be sold to companies or individuals to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions. These projects are supposed to reserve “buffer pools” of unsold carbon credits such as a form of insurance against future carbon losses, as when trees are destroyed by forest fires, insects or storms. But an analysis of these buffer pools shows that the carbon gap patterns probably do not put enough side.

“The figures are not really based on a science, as long as anyone can say,” said William Andegg at the University of Utah. A spokesperson for VERA defended the organization’s approach, saying that decisions on the size of buffer pools are “based on a solid risk assessment based on science” and that projects that plunge into the stamp must reconstruct what they take.

Tampons swimming pools are particularly a problem when forest carbon credits are sold to compensate for carbon emissions from fossil fuels on fire, which remain in the atmosphere for centuries to millennia. “If you are going to try to lock this carbon in a pile of trees, you will need to guarantee that carbon remains there for a very long time,” explains AndeRegg.

In theory, a sufficiently large supply pool that guarantees by protecting enough carbon to compensate for those who could be lost for decades of disturbances. But the previous work of Andègère and his colleagues have found that the forest carbon projects certified by VERA have only reserved 2% of the credits, on average, as an assurance against natural risks.

To determine if it is a sufficient amount, Anderegg and his colleagues used an ecological model to estimate the size of the stamp which would be necessary to adequately balance the risk of natural disturbances in various types of tropical forest. They compared their results with the buffer pools now required for the certification of see.

They found that the requirements of see will be far too small to guarantee permanent carbon storage in almost all scenarios. In some cases, they are more than 11 times smaller than what would be necessary. “For these natural risks, [the buffer] Must be at least double, perhaps more than double, to be adequate, ”explains AndeRegg.

The spokesperson for Verra claims that little of the 76 million carbon credits currently in the buffer pool have been used, which indicates that “the buffer has not been” overwhelmed “by inversions to date”. “Its effectiveness is demonstrated by the way in which the pool of stamps has been maintained over time, even in the middle of the risk of reversal,” said the spokesperson.

Tampons pools are not only consideration to see. For example, a carbon shift program managed by the state of California has seen forest fires in recent years eating large pieces of its buffer swimming pool, which was to last a century.

This problem should only develop when global warming intensifies the loss of forest carbon. “If you want to guarantee the permanence of more than 100 years, you must make sure that your stamp is large enough to cope with a lot of climate change,” explains Anderegg.