The carbon market paradox: Steve Zwick on why financing forests is more complicated than it looks

Carbon markets sit at the awkward junction of science, finance, and politics, where the appetite for simple stories collides with a system built on probabilities. Few reporters have spent more time in that junction than Steve Zwick. He came to climate through the trading pits of Chicago, where he watched how information asymmetries reward insiders and mislead the public. That early lesson became a through line in his journalism and in his current work dissecting forest carbon and REDD+, the mechanism meant to make standing forests more valuable than felled ones.

“The great tragedy of climate finance,” he has said, “is that those who understand it most have their noses to the grindstone, while those who understand it least have their mouths to the megaphone.”

Zwick’s route was circuitous but coherent. He covered European business for TIME and Fortune, produced and hosted Deutsche Welle’s “Money Talks,” and later helped build Ecosystem Marketplace into a reference point for environmental finance. He has advised NGOs, companies, and governments, and worked at Verra—an organization that develops and manages carbon credit standards—on special projects. Since 2016, he has hosted the Bionic Planet podcast to chip away at the very asymmetries that first bothered him on the trading floor. In 2025, he co-founded Carbon Paradox and co-authored The Carbon Paradox with Renat Heuberger and Marco Hirsbrunner. Both efforts argue that carbon credits can finance meaningful mitigation, especially in the Global South, but only if their tradeoffs are faced openly rather than spun away.

If that sounds like advocacy, Zwick bristles.

“First off, I’d question the premise that I’m a strong proponent of REDD+,” he told Mongabay in September. “What I am is a strong proponent of accurate narrative.”

Much of his frustration is aimed at how the media processes uncertainty. He recalls the period after the Bali climate talks, when conservation groups admitted early missteps and updated approaches. For him, that was science doing its job. In public discourse, however, iterative correction often reads as confession and collapse. The result is a debate that ricochets between exposés and rebuttals while the slower work of method improvement plods on.

Method, to Zwick, is the point.

“Baselines are structured reference points against which we measure change,” he says. “They’re not crystal balls.”

The literature he cites is filled with guardrails and revisions by design: Conservative accounting of benefits, periodic resetting as data improve, independent checks on auditors, and a bias toward under-crediting where evidence is thin. None of that removes uncertainty, and he does not pretend it does. His claim is more modest: Across time and at scale, the system converges, and its climate impact exceeds the sum of its documented credits more often than not. He also argues that avoidance is undervalued.

“It’s up to 50 times more impactful to avoid emissions from deforestation than to try and suck them out of the atmosphere once they’ve escaped.”

Leakage—pushing deforestation from one place to another—illustrates his pragmatism. REDD+, he says, can account for it credibly; preventing it requires demand-side reform in commodity markets. In other words, carbon finance is a necessary piece of a larger policy mosaic, not a silver bullet. He is similarly sharp about scale. The voluntary carbon market is tiny relative to oil and agribusiness, yet it attracts forensic scrutiny that extractive sectors often evade. For Zwick, that asymmetry skews public perception of risk and reward.

Justice is another consistent point for Zwick. He frames forest carbon as payment for a measurable service that protects a global commons, not as charity. He points to community-led work in East Africa and to Indigenous leaders he has learned from, arguing that “best practice” starts with open knowledge and ends with communities making informed choices. Outsiders who parachute in to speak on their behalf, he warns, often flatten real diversity of views on the ground.

Zwick is hard on journalists, including himself. Carbon markets, he says, operate on probabilities, and reporters should treat findings as ranges, not verdicts.

“Results should be understood as probabilities, not certainties,” he argues, and responsible coverage should explain assumptions and situate outliers. The biggest risks he sees are political and narrative: a polarized fight that sidelines a tool which, though imperfect, mobilizes money quickly for forests and rural livelihoods. Success by 2035, in his view, would mean a world where most emissions are cut at the source and carbon markets have shrunk to residual use. Between now and then, the work is less about declaring heroes and villains than about refining methods, correcting course in public, and keeping faith with communities whose forests stabilize the climate the rest of us have unsettled.

An interview with Steve Zwick

Mongabay: The Carbon Paradox is structured around paradoxes—ethics, additionality, leakage, etc. Which paradox do you personally find most difficult to resolve, and why?

Steve Zwick: For me, the most difficult paradox to resolve is one Danny Kahneman always wrote about: the Uncertainty Paradox.

We only mention it in passing—it’s not one of our core 25—but it says we should embrace uncertainty to make better decisions, yet we’re wired to resist it.

We crave clear answers, clean story arcs, and neat solutions, even when the world doesn’t work that way.

Bertrand Russell put it bluntly a century ago. He said the real danger was that “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” That dynamic, he argued, helped fuel the rise of fascism.

Climate change is a “wicked problem,” meaning it doesn’t have simple solutions, and deforestation may be the wickedest piece of that problem.

The paradoxes we wrestle with in the book don’t flow from the solutions—they flow from the complexity of the problem itself.

You know as well as I do that none of the paradoxes are new or hidden. They’ve been front and center since the dawn of climate finance in the 1970s.

The problems come when they’re portrayed as something dark and nefarious: secrets to be “exposed” rather than fundamental challenges to be explained.

This fuels a never-ending game of whack-a-mole rather than constructive public discourse.

I’ve been writing about this tension for years, and when Renat showed me how he and the other South Pole founders had broken these uncertainties into 25 distinct paradoxes, I had one reaction: Damn—why didn’t I think of that?

I was in the middle of another book of my own, but when he showed me his outline for a fictionalized account, I asked to join the project.

Mongabay: The book weaves narrative and fiction-like elements with policy detail. Why did you choose that approach, and what do you hope it achieves that a traditional policy book could not?

Steve Zwick: We chose a narrative style because there is too much technical detail for a casual reader to absorb, and traditional policy books are too abstract and theoretical, even for experts.

By framing the book as a bildungsroman—a coming-of-age story told through young characters—we hoped to make the complex universe of carbon markets accessible without oversimplifying.

It’s not about answering every question, but about giving readers a sense of the terrain.

By walking alongside the characters, we hope a reader will get the contours, the landmarks, the feel of the place. After reading the book, they should be ready for more nuanced, sophisticated discussions.

Mongabay: At several points, the book highlights the tension between prevention and response—between building dikes and funding relief. How do you see carbon markets shifting that balance?

Steve Zwick: That tension is very real—and it’s at the heart of how carbon finance was originally designed.

Carbon markets emerged because traditional aid and philanthropy were too short-term, too political, and too unpredictable.

The whole idea was to emphasize that companies with emissions have a climate debt, and then to funnel the payment of that debt into transformational change.

REDD+ and the newer sustainable farming methodologies are about restructuring rural economies so that forests are worth more alive than dead, and farmers can de-risk the shift to climate-smart agriculture.

Paradoxically, a lot of the debate around “integrity” has pushed attention toward short-term, reactive measures. They may look good on paper, but they don’t add up economically. We see the same in politics, where leaders sometimes respond to wicked problems with quick, simplistic fixes—“send in the troops”—instead of addressing root causes.

Mongabay: The characters struggle with the question: “Can we really put a price on nature?” What’s your answer today, after writing this book?

Steve Zwick: I side with the characters: if we don’t put a price on nature, we’re essentially saying it’s worth zero.

But I also realize money doesn’t capture everything, and I like how Jane Goodall has phrased it. She’s talked about the value of markets, but she always emphasizes the spiritual act of walking through a forest and feeling its presence.

For me, these values aren’t contradictory. Markets are one way of assigning value, while culture and spirituality are another. Both are essential.

Our book doesn’t claim to have the final answer, but it does try to frame the debate: unless nature has tangible value in the systems that drive decisions, it will continue to be undervalued and destroyed.

Mongabay: You’ve long been a strong proponent of REDD+. Critics argue many projects over-promise or fail to deliver measurable results. How do you distinguish between legitimate projects and greenwashing?

Steve Zwick: First off, I’d question the premise that I’m a strong proponent of REDD+. What I am is a strong proponent of accurate narrative.

If you google me, you’ll find the Heartland Institute and Heritage Foundation labeled me a “warmist” and a “climate alarmist” because I called them out for systematically lying about the realities of climate science. If you read what they were responding to, you’ll see I never said climate models were perfect. I focused on their disregard for how science works and how we make decisions based on incomplete information.

Unfortunately, because we didn’t act, we now have more complete information about the scenario we wanted to avoid. It shows those models were conservative.

My trajectory into REDD+ followed a similar path, and the turning point came after the Bali climate talks.

Conservation groups like CI, EDF, and TNC hosted a side event where they laid out, candidly, what they had gotten wrong and how their approach had evolved, but critics turned this process of honest inquiry against itself. The Heinrich Böll Foundation later framed a lot of those findings as an “exposé,” and anti-market blogs amplified the claims.

It was disheartening to see people who claimed to be environmentalists using the same playbook that the oil companies had used, and which Naomi Oreskes later laid bare in Merchants of Doubt.

That was a light-bulb moment: one side was acknowledging uncertainty to improve, while another was exploiting it to discredit the whole approach.

The paradoxes have always been part of the internal narrative, and I’ve also been critical of how communicators in this space – in a misguided attempt to “keep it simple, stupid” (KISS) – discouraged people from discussing them openly.

I’ve had some heated disagreements on that front, and this book is, in many ways, an end run around the “strategic communications” establishment.

I’m still a journalist at heart, and I’m anal about accurate narrative. I believe we should be mainstreaming the legitimate areas of debate, not pitching a product.

I’m not dodging the greenwashing question, but it’s wrapped up in the paradoxes we discuss — the transparency paradox, the perfection paradox, and really all of them. One core paradox is the voluntary paradox: companies taking real steps to voluntarily address climate change are often attacked as greenwashers, while companies that lay low or make vague, feel-good claims skate by.

Mongabay: The book discusses the “baseline paradox.” What gives you confidence that baseline methodologies are strong enough today to ensure real additionality?

Steve Zwick: My confidence may not be the same as someone else’s, so let’s start with what a baseline is: a reference point we use to measure change, not a crystal ball that predicts the future.

Think of it like buying a bag of potatoes — you don’t expect every potato to weigh exactly one pound. Or in a drug trial, not every patient reacts the same way. But when you look at the whole system, it works. Baselines are the same — they work in aggregate, even if they’re not perfect down to the last detail.

When REDD+ began, baselines drew on the IPCC’s 2000 Special Report on Land Use, which looked at different ways of estimating deforestation risk — scenarios, data modeling, and hybrids. Each had strengths and weaknesses, and this is a corollary of the Standards Paradox: There will always be a degree of subjectivity, but there is also a need for a standardized approach.

The solution was to create an iterative process of expert review and public consultation for identifying the sweet spot where most – but not all – experts aligned.

That became the Voluntary Carbon Standard (now Verra’s VCS), and today the ICVCM is playing a similar role: bringing experts together, finding points of agreement, and updating as new information comes in.

From the start, people worried about gaming and error, so safeguards were built in. Baselines set for 30 years had to be revisited after 10, with better data and improved methods.

And when in doubt, the system leaned conservative — excluding benefits if the science wasn’t clear, like methane in tree bark or natural regeneration both inside and outside project boundaries.

Over time, we’ve learned that actual climate benefits are far larger than what was credited, even when the deforestation risk turned out to be overestimated.

I had a front-row seat to the genesis of REDD+ at early meetings in Cologne and Bonn.

They were trying to find ways of encouraging voluntary action above and beyond what the law required, as well as testing new methodologies, making the system accessible to forest communities, and making it something buyers would get behind. They had Shell and Greenpeace at the same table, and they were setting a threshold standard that was scientifically credible, investable, and practical on the ground.

I’d argue it worked, but it’s important to note that they were also trying to line up dominoes for governments once they got their act together. No one thought we’d still be in this 20 years later.

As a journalist, I was drawn to chronicling how these people were addressing the wickedest component of the wickedest challenge of our day, but the story found no takers.

The record shows they succeeded in their objectives, but governments failed to step up, and the system they created was held to an imaginary standard of perfection.

With more data and artificial intelligence, baselines are getting stronger all the time, but will there ever be perfect agreement on a counterfactual? No — by definition, that’s impossible. But that doesn’t mean the system is broken.

So, to answer your question: I trust the system over time and at scale, but it’s a paradox because of inherent uncertainties. I can understand why others don’t.

A related paradox is the Avoidance Paradox: it’s up to 50 times more impactful to avoid emissions from deforestation than to try and suck them out of the atmosphere once they’ve escaped, but those avoidances or reductions will always be subject to second-guessing.

Mongabay: Leakage—shifting deforestation from one place to another—remains a sticking point. In your view, has REDD+ developed tools to deal with leakage credibly?

Steve Zwick: That depends on what we mean by “dealing with.”

REDD+ has credible tools for accounting for leakage, but prevention requires tackling the demand side of the economy.

And that’s the bigger point: carbon finance isn’t a magic bullet. It’s one piece in a global mosaic of interlocking solutions. REDD+ contributes to that mosaic in part by accounting for leakage, while broader policies, corporate commitments, and demand-side reforms confront the systemic drivers.

In that sense, REDD+ is “dealing with” leakage within its parameters but not solving the whole thing all at once.

We actually have unsolved leakage in the book, and it’s similar to activities I covered with Climate Focus and that you at Mongabay covered with the Gecko Project. We both wrote about palm oil conglomerates using networks of “shadow companies” to dodge their no-deforestation commitments.

Some NGOs have seized on these cases to dismiss zero-deforestation pledges altogether, claiming they prove market mechanisms don’t work. I see it differently. When companies restructure or create shadow entities, it doesn’t mean the pressure failed—it means the pressure is real enough to force adaptation. That’s the signal of progress: you’ve found the weak joints in the system, and you know where the next reforms must land.

This doesn’t mean we give up or vilify the whole system. It means we keep tightening it,

Mongabay: Some say REDD+ gives polluters a “license to pollute.” How do you respond to that critique?

Steve Zwick: A “license to pollute” would apply to a compliance mechanism. In compliance markets, like cap-and-trade, there’s a steadily lowering cap on emissions. Trading under that cap is designed to funnel resources into the most cost-effective mitigation activities, which actually accelerates reductions.

In the book, we show that even as far back as 1977, scientists recognized two things: first, fossil fuels must ultimately be eliminated; second, offsetting can speed up the transition by directing finance toward the most efficient mitigation opportunities.

REDD+ plays that role by funding low-cost, high-impact reductions today while the broader shift away from fossil fuels continues.

Mongabay: One argument REDD+ supporters often make is that the bar for these projects seems higher than for other activities — oil extraction or large-scale agriculture can proceed with fewer checks, yet REDD+ projects are scrutinized for every baseline, leakage, or permanence assumption. Do you think that double standard is real, and what does it say about how we value climate solutions?

Steve Zwick: Yes, the double standard is real, and it’s central to The Carbon Paradox.

One paradox is the “Size Paradox,” which shows that the voluntary carbon market is quite small compared to big oil and other industries. Even the chewing gum industry is many times the size of the voluntary carbon market, yet the VCM, which exists to fix a major problem, gets picked apart ad infinitum – and often without context – because it’s small and has no one to speak on its behalf.

Part of the problem lies in how we in the media tell stories. We often amplify critiques without context, turning technical debates into sweeping judgments. The Guardian and Die Zeit are Exhibit A.

A few years ago, they ran stories clustered around the headline: “Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless, analysis shows.”

But the “analysis” showed nothing of the kind.

All it “showed” is that REDD+ baselines don’t align with synthetic controls, which everyone already knew, but the real question is: what does it mean? Are we going to assume that synthetic controls are magically correct?

The frustrating part—and I wrote about this long before those articles came out, is that the research raised valid questions. The problem is that it manifested in public discourse as a takedown rather than a stocktaking. It landed just as the first projects were coming up for re-evaluation. Verra had already launched a broad consultation to capture lessons for the next round, added secondary reviews to check the quality of auditors, and signaled that many baselines would likely be revised downward.

At the same time, Verra was also moving too slowly and trying to satisfy too many masters.

There was a very real story taking shape, but an accurate headline would have been: “Ten years in, the great carbon market stocktaking has begun.” But as Danny Kahneman reminded us, people don’t deal well with uncertainty, and once outcomes are known, hindsight makes them look inevitable. That combination drives easy narratives of success or failure, when the harder and more honest story is one of trial, error, and adjustment.

I hope the book will end that sort of silliness and let us focus on real issues.

Mongabay: The “ethics paradox” chapter raises the dilemma of pricing forests in countries that historically contributed the least to climate change. How do you reconcile the justice dimension with the market framing?

Steve Zwick: My views have been formed by indigenous leaders who you know as well—people like Almir Suruí in Brazil, Juan Carlos Jintiach in Ecuador, and Peter Kilesi in Kenya. They’ve argued that carbon finance isn’t charity; it’s payment for maintaining the global atmospheric commons.

In the early days, too much of the money went into outside development and project implementation. That’s changing. In Kenya, James Mwangi often describes the evolution as projects first done to communities, then for communities, and now increasingly by communities. The issue at this point is that prices are too low, which I see as real injustice.

On my last trip there, I had a great conversation with Vincent Mainga, who works on projects in the west of the country. His eyes lit up when he described the moment a project truly succeeds—when, as he put it, “the community takes ownership.” His current project is helping 18,000 farmers transition to agroforestry. It boosts their yields while allowing them to sustain their traditional way of life.

That resonates with me personally—my wife is from that region, and I know how deeply people value their small farms. To me, that’s what justice looks like in practice: communities not just participating in markets, but shaping them to support both livelihoods and the atmosphere we all share.

Mongabay: Communities are central to REDD+ success, yet reports often highlight exclusion or conflicts. What do you see as best practice for ensuring local people truly benefit?

Steve Zwick: In the book, we talk about the “Communities Paradox.” It’s the reminder that indigenous communities are, above all else, communities. They’re diverse. People don’t always agree, and it’s easy for an outlier voice to be presented as if it represents everyone.

Take Kenya, for example. I spent a lot of time with a project in the Northern Rangelands that Survival International had attacked with some pretty wild claims. If you want to hear directly from the people on the ground, I’d point you to episodes 117 and 118 of Bionic Planet, where they tell their own story.

To me, best practice comes down to this: share knowledge openly, then let communities make their own decisions. What doesn’t work is outsiders parachuting in and claiming to speak on their behalf.

Mongabay: In the book, Wanga Namira talks about having to “beg” donors. Do you see voluntary carbon markets as a way out of dependency, or just a new form of reliance on external actors?

Steve Zwick: In any market economy, we are all reliant on external actors; that’s the nature of trade. The shift to a carbon market framework, as articulated by leaders like Almir Surui, changes the dynamic from one of begging for aid to one of commerce. The community provides a measurable ecosystem service, and the buyers pay for that service via a claim.

Mongabay: You’re known to push back hard against reporting you feel is unfair or incomplete. What do you think most journalists miss about REDD+ and carbon markets?

Steve Zwick: Most journalists miss that carbon markets operate on probabilities, not certainties. As Kyle Pope of the Columbia Journalism Review put it in 2020: “Stories that contain subtlety, that evolve, that don’t have an ending – those aren’t our strength. Racism, systemic poverty, the long-term effects of outdated policy – these are subjects that we’ve consistently failed to get our arms around.” The same holds for carbon markets.

Proponents haven’t helped. Too often, scientists and policy wonks bury people in jargon instead of showing how these probabilities, tracked over time, consistently deliver measurable climate benefits—often greater than what was paid for. Add to that the cacophony of groups pushing their own niche solutions without painting the big picture, and you’re left with confusion.

When people do try to paint the big picture, they either boil things down to platitudes or drown readers in technical minutiae. Reporters, caught in the middle, end up listening to those with the simplest narratives, or covering disputes without the tools to put them in context.

That’s the gap we tried to fill—offering a book that’s engaging enough to read for pleasure, but still rigorous enough to bring readers into the weeds where the real debates happen.

Mongabay: Some might say your confrontational style with journalists reflects a deep frustration. Do you feel that more nuanced or positive stories about REDD+ are being drowned out?

I’ve never really thought of myself as confrontational, but on climate issues, I suppose I am—starting with my early clashes with the Heartland Institute, Alex Jones, and their ilk.

For me, it’s not about chasing “positive” versus “negative” stories; it’s about distinguishing accurate from inaccurate, or complete from incomplete. In that sense, yes—nuance is getting drowned out.

I don’t think journalists should go hunting for good-news stories, but neither should they pin every bad thing that happens in a project area on carbon. That kind of selective blame is the stuff of demagogues.

If I get frustrated with reporters, it’s because I’ve gone through this learning curve myself. I started as an outsider, and in some of my early reporting, I treated people as experts who I now see were charlatans. If a source gives me 30 “facts” and 26 don’t check out, I don’t cling to the four that remain—I move on.

Inaccurate stories are actually killing transparency. People in this space are very eager to discuss shortcomings, but distorted narratives create a bunker mentality. People hesitate to voice legitimate concerns in open forums because they know their words will be twisted. Then you get communications consultants telling experts to stay quiet, and soon the only people talking are the yahoos.

In Kenya, I had a conversation with Stella Napuna, an indigenous leader who worked in the Northern Rangelands. She raised what I’d call legitimate critiques—not sinister, but thoughtful disagreements. Yet because of the misinformation Survival International was spreading, she felt she couldn’t have a rational discussion about them.

I’ve been guilty of missteps myself, but with this book I’m hoping to give readers the context they need to engage in deeper, more honest discussions.

Mongabay: If you were mentoring a young climate reporter today, what advice would you give them about covering carbon markets responsibly?

Steve Zwick: First, I’d tell them to start with some grounding—read our book, then dig into the history of carbon markets. From there, I’d suggest building a toolkit: take a course in Bayesian logic and causal inference, learn about land-change modeling, and read thinkers like Lee McIntyre or Jonathan Rauch on how knowledge is constructed. These skills are essential for recognizing both the potential and the limits of the mechanisms we’re developing.

A lot of reporters in this space do have an ecology background, and I’d point them to a 2023 reproducibility trial that involved 246 ecologists and evolutionary biologists. All were given the same data sets and the same research questions, but they produced a wide spread of results. At first glance it looked chaotic, but patterns did emerge: findings clustered within a range of plausible outcomes.

That’s what the IPCC found in 2000; it’s what the ICVCM is built on; and it’s the biggest lesson for climate reporting. The responsible reporter is the one who explains the assumptions behind a study, shows where expert consensus lies, and resists the temptation to chase an outlier simply because it makes a stronger headline.

At the same time, however, outliers need a voice – as long as it’s in context. The science on REDD+ is nowhere near as settled as the science on climate change itself. That’s the Carbon Paradox.

Mongabay: The book ends on a note of “rebirth of the dream.” What would success for carbon markets look like in 2035, and what are the biggest risks that could derail that vision?

Steve Zwick: By 2035, true success would mean carbon markets are no longer needed for most emissions. They should exist only for addressing the hardest-to-abate, residual emissions. Between now and then, however, they play a vital role: channeling finance into forests, landscapes, and communities that can deliver the deepest and fastest climate benefits.

The biggest risk isn’t methodological—it’s political and narrative. If markets are undermined by polarized debate, misinformation, or ideological capture, we could lose a tool that—while imperfect—has already delivered real impact. The dream is to keep refining this tool, use it wisely, and eventually render it almost obsolete because we’ve succeeded in transforming the larger economy.