Protecting forests is considered one of the most effective measures against climate change. To promote this, the international REDD+ program was launched. It rewards countries with carbon credits if they preserve forests and prevent deforestation. But a new study shows that only a few of these projects are successful. Only around 19 percent actually achieved their self-imposed climate goals.
The forests are shrinking: Deforestation due to deforestation and fires is progressing rapidly, especially in the tropics. But this also means that our planet’s “green lungs” and important sinks in the climate system are disappearing. The growth of trees binds carbon dioxide from the air and thus helps to offset the climate effect of the greenhouse gases we emit. In order to give developing countries a stronger incentive to protect forests, the REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Plus) program was initiated. This international mechanism promotes sustainable management and reforestation of forests and rewards countries with money and carbon credits for doing so. There are currently more than 350 REDD+ projects worldwide.
More harm than good?
But how effective are these projects? Does the REDD+ mechanism actually contribute to forest protection? To clarify this, researchers led by Yuzhi Tang from the Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ) in China have now taken a closer look at 52 REDD+ initiatives. For their analysis, they compared the project areas in 14 tropical countries in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia with synthetic comparison scenarios without protective measures. These have similar environmental and living conditions, but do not participate in REDD+. This made it possible to understand whether the REDD+ projects were actually able to prevent deforestation and whether the CO₂ credits awarded were based on real climate protection effects.
The result: A third of the REDD+ projects had significantly less deforestation than expected. Projects in Brazil were particularly successful. But almost 20 percent of the regions even had more forest loss than the comparison areas without special protection measures. Tang and his colleagues cite the Brazilian Serra do Amolar project and a forest corridor project in Madagascar as two particularly blatant examples. “Both show the highest forest loss compared to the control areas, at more than 1,500 hectares per year,” reports the team.
Embellished numbers
Also striking: in around 35 percent of the initiatives, the stated baseline values for deforestation were significantly higher than the actual data.
However, if these initial values are set too high, it will appear in retrospect as if a particularly large amount of forest had been saved – although that is not true at all. This was particularly evident in Colombia, where the risk of deforestation was sometimes overestimated tenfold. However, this also means that more CO2 credits are awarded for such projects than were actually “earned”.
According to the study, only around 35 million of the CO2 credits issued under REDD+ by 2022 are actually based on prevented deforestation – this corresponds to only around 13 percent. “The market needs credits that deliver what they promise. We estimate that currently only about one in eight credits brings real climate benefits,” says co-author Jonathan Chase from the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) in Halle.
Despite these problems, the researchers do not consider the REDD+ program to have failed. They continue to see it as an important instrument for climate protection – but it needs to be improved. “With better baseline data, independent assessment and diverse project portfolios, trust can be restored,” says Chase. The aim is for every CO₂ credit to actually make a demonstrable contribution to climate protection in the future.
Source: German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig; Specialist article: Science, doi: 10.1126/science.adw4094