Penn researchers jointly published a paper with academics at the University of Oxford that found the practice of carbon offsets inefficient.
The paper — put out in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources — recommends phasing out most credits generated by carbon offsetting projects. The researchers explained the process of offsetting, which began in 1989, has become a “dangerous distraction” from genuine solutions to climate change.
Carbon offsetting — a practice that finances projects that for “reduction, avoidance, or removal of greenhouse gas emissions” — generates credits that allow entities to “compensate” for their greenhouse gas emissions.
“We must stop expecting carbon offsetting to work at scale,” Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment researcher and co-author Stephen Lezak wrote in Oxford’s announcement. “We have assessed 25 years of evidence and almost everything up until this point has failed.”
He explained that there are “systematic” and “deep-seated” issues that require more than the incremental change brought by carbon offsetting.
Previous research has found that the impact of offsetting programs is typically overestimated — sometimes by over a factor of 10. The “poor quality” of carbon offsetting is widespread because the credits depend on “inherently uncertain” factors like additionality, leakage, permanence, and double counting.
Joseph Romm, the paper’s lead author and a senior research fellow at Penn’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, expressed “hope” that their research provides “a moment of clarity” ahead of 30th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in November.
“These junk offsets—the ones not backed by permanent carbon removal and storage—are a dangerous distraction from the real solution to climate change, which is rapid and sustained emission reductions,” he wrote in the announcement.
University of Sussex’s School of Global Studies researcher and co-author Amna Alshamsi emphasized the risks of “weak accountability” and the “perpetuation of neocolonial patterns of appropriation.” She urged financing nature-based projects through alternative mechanisms such as “contribution claims,” which fund projects while still holding purchasers accountable for reducing their own emissions.
This research follows a consensus at the 29th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to launch “international compliance markets for carbon credits.” This decision contrasts with research that has proven “credit quality issues” and ineffectiveness.
