This science-focused episode of Carbon Removal Newsroom features hosts Radhika Moolgavkar of Nori, Holly Jean Buck of the University at Buffalo, and Dr. Jane Zelikova, executive director of the Soil Carbon Solutions Center and joint faculty in crop and soil science at Colorado State University.
This week, world leaders continue climate discussions at COP26 in Glasgow, with one of the recurring conversations focusing on protecting the world’s forests. A new forest initiative called LEAF, or Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest Finance, was supported by the US and UK governments as well as some large multinational corporations like Amazon and Unilever. LEAF would allow developing nations to sell forest carbon offsets in the voluntary carbon markets— but should these count as carbon credits? Is additional carbon being stored?
We also look at forest carbon over-crediting in California, where research teams from several US Universities found that the state had over-counted forest CO2 by 30%. So who is responsible for this large quantity of excess credits?
As always, we end the episode with a good news story of the week.
Resources
Systematic over-crediting in California’s forest carbon offsets program
Full Transcript
Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Hello, everybody. Today we will be taking a deep dive into the science part of carbon removal. We will be looking at forests again because some of the most publicized announcements reported from COP26, which we talked about last week, involved trees. Do these new pledges, at least as they are described, meet the scientific rigor to be additional carbon removal, or will they end up being more like the wildly over-credited California forest carbon cap and trade market? To talk about this a little bit more in depth, I have with me Dr. Jane Zelikova, Executive Director of the Soil Carbon Solution Center and Joint Faculty in Crop and Soil Science at Colorado State University.
Hello, Jane.
Jane Zelikova: Hi.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And as always, Holly Jean Buck, Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo. Hello, Holly.
Holly Jean Buck: Hello.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And myself, Radhika Moolgavkar, Head of Supply and Methodology at NORI. Hey, Holly, before we start, I know this is not related to carbon removal, but I’ve got to know who won the mayor’s race in Buffalo? Was it the first socialist female mayor ever or did the writing candidate win?
Holly Jean Buck: It was the write-in candidate.
Radhika Moolgavkar: No. Continued guy.
Holly Jean Buck: Yep. Yep. By a pretty strong margin too, actually.
Radhika Moolgavkar: That is crazy. I hadn’t seen any reporting on it yet, so I was curious. Well, okay, Buffalo, we thought you were going to make history. I guess it did. Crazy. All right, back to the task at hand, which is talking a little bit about COP. And one of the things that was widely reported on last week was this new plan called LEAF, which is lowering emissions by accelerating forest finance. That has been supported by both the U. S. and the U. K. governments and many large multinational companies like Amazon and Unilever.
LEAF is a framework where developing nations can sell forest carbon offsets in the voluntary carbon markets. Many corporations are setting aside serious pools of money to reach net zero, and this public-private scheme is designed to channel some of that funding towards protecting vulnerable forests while also helping poorer nations reach climate goals. The organization managing the program has already received 30 proposals representing forest equal in size to half the area of the United States. Listeners who aren’t super familiar with the carbon markets, usually these carbon credits are developed through what are called project developers.
And these proposals are things project developers had put forth to then potentially create carbon credits that then will be purchased. LEAF’s list of backers is pretty impressive, but they also have their detractors, as is always the case. And many feel like it overlooks local communities by transferring carbon offset funding to national governments. And not the people who actually maintain healthy forests and live within them. A group of indigenous representatives known as the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities is promoting a different plan which would direct funding directly to local forest dwellers, paying them for the carbon storage service rather than their country’s national government.
So, you know, let’s just take a step back before we dive into whether this is fair or not fair. And I would love both of your opinions on what you just generically think of the LEAF program. Are you seeing signs that it may deliver for carbon removal what maybe the California cap and trade forest program did not? I’ll start with you Jane and then love to get your thoughts Holly too.
Jane Zelikova: Yeah, good. That’s a really good question. I think not being specifically an expert in forest carbon credits and the red system, this does appear to me like a rebranding effort of red plus with a slightly different sort of framework where private companies have put money into a system and private companies can buy credits and so can government entities. But the sort of it doesn’t appear to be any more particularly rigorous than RED and I don’t expect it to deliver outcomes that are significantly different from what the RED programming official or unofficial has been able to deliver, which is, you know, a lot of sort of failure to deliver climate benefits.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And Holly, what about you? What’s your what’s your take on it?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. So, I mean, as far as I understand, you know, what’s different between red and this, this issue that to qualify for carbon credits, governments and companies need to show an overall carbon gain in the whole country’s forests or a minimum of 2. 5 million hectares. So one of the criticisms of the scheme is that it’s accessible to Governments that are going to be able to claim big areas of forests as being like government land. So there’s like this land tenure issue kind of built into it. Like what’s the mechanism for an indigenous community or like a community carbon trust or alliance, you know, to take advantage of this.
Not really clear to me, even though in the leaf text, there’s a lot of language about, you know, supporting indigenous rights. They even acknowledge the research that shows that deforestation rates are two to three times lower in secure indigenous lands. What they say is that they say they’ll only provide finance to those countries able to implement and maintain robust safeguards, showing that consultation has occurred, benefit sharing plans are agreed in place, grievance mechanisms are working. I mean, that’s good, but We also have a history of like those things existing and not working as intended.
So I think I land somewhere similar to Jane on all this.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So, you know, I have multiple follow-up questions, but my first one, and maybe it’s because I am not a scientist, I’m still struggling with this idea of how this is even additional and can generate a carbon credit, which is something I’ve always not fully understood in this space. Because from what I understand, this is protecting forests that already exist from deforestation. So you’re not adding anything, you’re preventing something. Am I just like too, am I looking about this at a too basic level? And how would you either or both of you characterize the additionality that we’re getting from a program that conserves forests rather than creates new forests?
Jane Zelikova: I think additionality is a really critical piece of how we think about any carbon credit generated and the bar, the screening for additionality in the bar that a project has to pass should be really high and rigorous and really depends on what the counterfactual sort of what would have happened if this carbon finance wasn’t directed towards this project. In this case, you know, can, is there proof that these forests would have been cleared are managed differently without this carbon finance. It probably varies from place to place, from parcel to parcel.
So the burden of proving additionality is going to still be placed on the project developers and the people that are monitoring and verifying these projects, which again, we have a long history of not meeting those rigorous standards when it comes to additionality in forest projects. I mean, the other thing to note though, is that while there may not be Carbon removed, there are likely emissions avoided if these forests are protected. And thinking about sort of the value of protecting carbon stocks we already have versus additional removals, they sort of have different risk profiles.
So again, the burden is to show that these projects are additional. But in terms of avoided emissions versus removals, I think as far as I can tell, these projects are not differentiating between them and their carbon calculus.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, and I think that’s what I was struggling with, right? Like I completely understand the emission avoidance argument, the carbon removal slash we’re going towards net zero kind of maybe, and maybe it’s just the way they use the terms, but seems less clear to me because, you know, I’m a lawyer, we talk about counterfactuals all the time, but It’s just that, it’s a counterfactual. So you never know if it’s going to have happened or not. And I guess it really will be the devil in the details of how they choose projects and how they expect them to define what the counterfactual could have been, but for the financing.
Holly, anything else you want to add? I didn’t mean to cut you off if you were about to talk, sorry.
Holly Jean Buck: No, and I don’t know where you guys are at with this, but I’m increasingly like, You know, all this 1. 0 old school offset stuff. We need to just like burn that all down and like make removals like the new standard and that like everybody demands, everybody wants. I mean, yeah. How much can we like build on and reform these things that haven’t worked very well versus like create something new that’s better. So I think that, you know, We need to like every chance we have to separate out the stuff that’s going on with like reducing deforestation.
I’m all for reducing deforestation, but thinking about that as mitigation, telling companies you want to be focusing on removal.
Radhika Moolgavkar: As always, Holly. Encapsulated what I was trying to say much better than I could, which is that I wish we could just take the two apart and we mush offset together. And it means so many different things to everybody. And I completely agree. Like, of course, Nori also was wanting to be a disruptor. So I have my perspective. I’ve thought this for a long time, like thinking about protecting a forest is different than carbon removal and should be thought about in two different ways in two different tracks. And it doesn’t seem like at least leaf makes that sense.
Yeah.
Jane Zelikova: And there’s, and I, and I don’t want to, I think removals are really important. And for any, if we have a common understanding of that zero, which I personally don’t think we do, but in a net zero framework, that’s really, you can’t really get, do the math if you’re not doing removals, but there is immense value in protecting the stocks we have. So like, don’t, I don’t want to over Sell the removals because we don’t reach any kind of climate goals without protecting the stocks we already have. And we do have to have a mechanism for that.
I personally don’t believe it’s carbon offsetting and we need to develop other really robust mechanisms for conservation and protection of the stocks that we have. Carbon offsets have not been that and we’ve tried that for 15 years. And how long can you beat your head against the wall before you sort of do something different?
Radhika Moolgavkar: From your mouth to the carbon removal God’s ears, right?
Unknown speaker: And the emission of goddesses ears. Yeah, goddesses ears. To the green goddesses ears.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Holly, one thing you touched on and I would love to get more of your thoughts on is this treatment or lack of treatment or lack of inclusion of potentially indigenous folks for people who maintain and manage these forests and how you think a program A better design program could have been put forth, which made sure that these people’s representation was properly and adequately compensated.
Holly Jean Buck: I think that this is really tough because it really comes down to what sort of governance is in place in the country. And this kind of links with what Jane just said. I mean, I totally agree that protecting forests and the stocks we have is critical. And what do you do if you have, you know, ideally we would have like a regulatory solution to that in my view, like, you know, just a law-based one, but not every country is going to have that. And so can international actors use these systems to kind of try to influence countries?
Maybe, I mean, maybe there’s some value in trying to do that if the governance isn’t there within the country to do it, right? And then, so coming to this, Question of inclusion of forest communities and indigenous people. It’s hard because a company you know will be working with a carbon project. The buyers aren’t going to be on the ground seeing what’s going on. And so you have all these checkbox exercises with the free prior and informed consent, the FPIC. And there’s been a lot of research Done by social scientists on the ground that have like witnessed these just kind of be checkbox exercises.
There’s kind of elite capture within these areas where kind of the benefits tend to flow to certain people who hold more power in that landscape. There’s deep gender imbalances a lot of the time. And I don’t know how you, like, I don’t think there’s like one blanket solution to fixing that. I think it’s just very tailored to every local context and without a lot more resources involved. I don’t know how that would be improved.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Do you think, you know, we verify that carbon is kept in the ground. Could you use the mechanisms around verification to ensure that It’s an audit of how you are socially treating the people within the community and meeting the rules or the goals that you’ve set forth in your project. I mean, is that one potential really short-term solution to get these, get a better?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, that’s something that happens to varying degrees. There’s different sort of standards about Community, climate, biodiversity, whatever the standards are, there’s a lot of them. And I think people have tried to do that. So then the question is, why doesn’t it always work? I think that there’s just corruption on the ground in various forms.
Jane Zelikova: Another thing just to note, and like, I think the LEAF sort of minimum viable product project size is speaks to this really well, which is that A lot of verification that happens isn’t sort of a physical verification. No soil sample is selected. No tree is measured. No community is visited. They’re often desk verification exercises. Maybe they’re done with some remote sensing or some sort of a quantitative approach, but most verification isn’t rigorous. And at the same time, you need to have people on the ground to know what’s really happening in those communities over more than just one day’s visit.
And so then you think about these like huge project size as kind of a minimum bar to enter. This is like the age you need to be to play. This is the size of the project that you can participate, which means that small projects, small communities, the rigor and the burden of having to verify those projects is like too onerous for the $10 a tonne Yeah, I can’t help but keep thinking about the fact that they’re touting this a public-private partnership and all of these billions and millions of dollars being spent sent towards the Spent towards net zero.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And we all know these companies have these ESG goals. They also, from the parlance of my old job at King County, have ESJ goals, which are equity and social justice goals. And I don’t see why they couldn’t take some of the money that they’re spending to put people on the ground on a regular basis and verify it. Because while I agree with you, we don’t do it as well on the scientific side and in terms of soil sampling and measurements, It’s more difficult in some ways to do that well than it is to put people on the ground every six months and ask the right questions and do a little investigatory work.
It just takes money.
Jane Zelikova: It doesn’t take a ton of skill, like in terms of- You’re trying to squeeze a lot into a $10 a tonne price.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I’m not saying that it should come from the carbon credit folks. I’m saying it should come from these businesses that are funding the public-private partnership, that they should be taking more dollars from other areas to make sure that the equity piece is also met.
Jane Zelikova: I mean, this is the broader thing of like companies, universities having very ambitious public institutions. Equity and justice goals that are no resources are put towards and no action really takes place. So this is like a broader kind of issue across the whole space that especially over the last couple of years, it’s really a lot of commitments and very little follow through.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. But a girl can dream. A girl can dream. Holly, anything else you might want to add or talk about before we move on to California for a little bit?
Holly Jean Buck: No, I mean, it’s just such a great idea. Social sciences are underfunded. There’s a lot of capacity to be built in the developing world when it comes to these topics in general. Why would these companies not pool their resources, make a fund that would fund scholarships for PhD students, postdocs, researchers in these countries, And have it be like, we’re funding this, but we’re not funding your particular thing to like buy your insight or whatever, just like kind of a neutral fund to do research and figure out what works. It’s like, I’m so sick of these companies putting all this money into like tech or credits or whatever, and then like Not putting a commensurate amount of money into what makes it actually work on the ground because it’s going to fail in the climate goals if it doesn’t work on the social side.
And yet they never think to invest in that. So that’s my rant for today.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, just to follow up on that, Holly, I think part of it is the tech world is just not as Immersed in these things as other parts, you know, they work and live and breathe engineering. It’s sort of what we’ve talked about in terms of other parts of the environmental movements and the idea that engineering is going to fix everything. I think there’s just this feeling that engineering can fix anything. If you just do it technically perfectly, it will always work. And so I think it’s a huge cultural element. Mind shift that has to happen within these companies that you don’t have one without the other.
Good engineering doesn’t fix anything without good social acceptance and discipline. Anyway, my little rant for the day. Moving on, the reason we’ve talked about this a little bit, but more in terms of the policy side. We’re going to come back and talk to you about an older paper, not an older paper, like old, but from earlier this year, where basically it was found that the forest carbon offset programs, kind of like the one discussed during COP, which is why we’re coming back to it, have existed for decades, but are far from perfect.
A team of researchers from several U. S. universities found that the California’s program to offset CO2 emissions with forest carbon overestimated how much carbon is stored in forests within the state. And it wasn’t really a tiny discrepancy. The study found that it overcounted forest CO2 by 30%, amounting to nearly 30 million tonnes into Jane’s earlier point. Accounting is important if you’re trying to truly do zero emissions. And really it was a systemic issue because the rules of the offsetting system meant the system did not achieve its emission reductions goals and that other programs could face similar challenges.
So Jane, you know, what did the badly at all research find was going on within California’s forest carbon offset program and briefly describe how kind of that overcrediting happened?
Jane Zelikova: Sure. Yeah. And so the, yeah, the preprint for this study came out in April, but the paper was officially peer reviewed and published last week. So it is a little hot off the press.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Right. Sorry about that.
Jane Zelikova: We’re in a new world where preprints can precede publication, which is great. I think that’s actually a good thing. So in this study, what the authors did, which I think is really cool, is they quantitatively described How a particular policy decision in the California Air Resources Board kind of emissions reductions and trading scheme set up a forest carbon offset program that is essentially over credited by one in three credits. And the way that happened is the way that the program set regional averages for different forest types. Setting really large regions and then averaging expected carbon stocks across many different species and forest types in that region meant that there are some areas in that region, if you set it large enough, that are going to be, you know, have specific forest composition that’s going to be different than the average.
And then some areas, you know, different in a positive way. I came more carbon stored and then some areas different in sort of less carbon potential for storage. And so when these kind of regional averages were published with the program, folks that are participating in the forest carbon offset program could, you know, if they had the option to could place their particular projects in areas where the forest composition was going to mean they were going to reach A number, a carbon stock number that was greater than the average. And any number that’s greater than the average can yield a carbon credit.
And so when people, when Grayson and colleagues looked at this systematically at every project that received carbon offset, forestry carbon offset credits with the CARB program, they found, you know, this was a really widespread phenomenon that lots of projects were placed specifically in areas that were not representative of the regional infrastructure. And so it’s a very different mechanism for how the over-crediting happened. It’s not additionality. It’s not these other ways that we often think about carbon offsets not working. It’s this other specific sort of policy decision that led to a very kind of a robust over-crediting problem.
And in some cases, the project developers exploited this erroneous sort of regional average issue on purpose. And in some cases, probably not. But regardless, you know, it’s billions of dollars of carbon finance that has not yielded any climate benefits.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I don’t know if either of you know, I didn’t see this in the paper, why that decision was made? Was the scale that they chose for scientific uncertainty reasons? Does anybody know how they came to that decision to create such broad regions? No?
Jane Zelikova: So... The paper doesn’t necessarily address that point, right? Because the point is really about how CARB came up with this emissions trading scheme in the first place, and then how sort of offsets were defined and developed. And I know that for California, that process had a lot of input from industry. And in some cases, some people may say industry sort of like led the effort. And in those cases, it’s not always going to be like the best outcome. So I don’t, the paper doesn’t specifically address it. There was really great coverage of this paper in ProPublica.
And so if folks are really interested, we could put it in the show notes and people can read up on it and its history.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, as far as I remember, the ProPublica article didn’t really touch on that either. I don’t know if that’s just lost to history at this point, but it’d be, the reason I ask is you wonder how you avoid it in the future and what mitigating steps you need to have to prevent a similar policy outcome.
Jane Zelikova: I think one of the things that they say in the paper and any other write-ups that I’ve seen from the folks that author the paper is that there are the Washington and sort of Oregon systems and others that are looking at the California system as a template should be really wary of these issues along with many others and how you set something up plays a really large role in how it’s going to be implemented.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, not to editorialize, but it was disappointing being a Washington State resident that they are I was hoping to use the California model. I was hoping to do above and better, not the same, but we will see what they come up with. Holly, so, you know, the program was designed to incentivize forest managers to use practices that increased forest carbon storage. The research found that the program also encourages the generation of offset benefits that aren’t removing CO2 from the atmosphere. In your mind, who’s responsible for such a large quantity of excess credits?
And, you know, is it the right sort of mechanism for forest managers to put in better forest quality practices?
Holly Jean Buck: I don’t know. I mean, I think to some extent, people are going to play the game based on the rules that the California Air Resources Board set out. And so it’s kind of interesting. You can read the back and forth, like the CARB put out a statement responding to ProPublica in this article, and then they responded back. And, you know, it’s kind of a lively debate that still doesn’t answer your question about like, Who’s responsible for what choices? So some of the things I find interesting about this, CARB and their response, they say math can’t hide that this is really about an ongoing disagreement between longstanding critics of the cap and trade program with how a regulatory agency defined and implemented additionality through a multi-year public process.
They’re very defensive about like They say, you know, this is a non-peer-reviewed paper. Of course, now it is peer-reviewed. So like, that’s cool. And what I really like about it is just that there was a group, you know, of academics and nonprofit people that were like, okay, we’re going to like really look at the data and hold this accountable. And I’m just so glad that they did that. And I think we need more people like they’re funded to kind of Check because how else are we going to make this stuff work if we don’t have kind of those independent entities watching over stuff?
Radhika Moolgavkar: So for both of you, if you were in Washington state or Oregon and you were like, okay, I’m designing from the ground up a new program. I’ve been given statutory authority. It’s time to go out and do it. You know, can you give me four to five points on what you think a robust forest carbon credit program would require to actually be meaningful? Maybe that’s not a fair question, but I’m still going to throw it out there for you too. Holly, I’ll let you start.
Holly Jean Buck: Well, I guess I’m still on this question of the process and who was included. And CARB says the process was multi-year and inclusive, extensive public stakeholder and scientific input. I’m actually, I mean, I’m sure they did that because they do stuff like that, right? So on one hand, you have the input, but then the modeling choices... What happens in the code of actually like how these things are aggregated, like on the software level, like those engineers, like how do we make those choices also legible and transparent? Cause you might have, you know, public meetings or whatever that they did on this, but it still doesn’t get to like the level of the software.
And so I guess if I was setting up a scheme, I would be focusing on both those dimensions of inclusion.
Jane Zelikova: Oh, gosh, I love that, Holly. I mean, I would probably just say no, don’t do that at all. No offsets. And actually, environmental justice communities across California were largely in opposition to this whole offsetting situation. And a lot of environmental justice and climate justice groups generally stand in opposition to carbon offsetting. So, you know, and those sort of concerns at that time were ignored. It’s sort of en vogue now to Invoke environmental justice and climate justice, but certainly when it comes to actually building things, how often are those communities and organizations listened to?
And it’s different to be included at the table versus given the power to set the agenda and set the terms of how things are going to get carried out. Yeah, so I guess I agree with Holly that inclusion needs to meet multiple benchmarks. And just because something is like an algorithm, you know, the thing that’s happening in our society’s algorithms are treated as truth and we shouldn’t be doing that. And a lot of these are black box sort of models and algorithms that are not peer reviewed, are not held to public scrutiny in the same way that a public hearing might hold a particular project to scrutiny.
So, yeah. Then that’s where we start to have problems and we don’t have any independent bodies who are specifically tasked with holding these programs to account.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. Well, you know, the theme of the day probably was transparency because what our listeners don’t know is even before we started this conversation, we were talking about some transparency issues in other parts of our work, but I don’t want to end this on a negative note. So Jane, I was going to give it over to you to tell us some good news, something great that happened in the sustainability world this month.
Unknown speaker: Okay.
Jane Zelikova: Yeah. You know, I was thinking a lot about this as I was eating leftover Halloween candy, because I didn’t know I was on deck this week. And I, we had a whole bag of like Snickers left, which by the way, I don’t understand what’s happening right now, but KitKat was the leading candy. Picked out of our giant like bin of candy and then Twix was second and then Snickers was left over. And I’m like, who are these children? What is happening? That Kit Kat is the leading candy. I, this is a hill I’m willing to die on.
That is, that is incorrect kids. It should be Snickers, then Twix, then Kit Kat. Those are your choices. Just saying. So the good news, and so as I was eating all this candy, I had a lot of guilt about all the wrappers because they’re like little guys. And so then you’re basically generating a lot of wrappers if you’re eating a lot of candy like I was. But the good news is that these companies that are making these candies like Mars are kind of woke to the idea that the wrapper situation is bad and they’re generating a lot of trash.
So there are these like compostable And biodegradable wrappers being developed. And the idea is that in the next couple of years, we’re going to have Halloween candy with biodegradable, compostable, and even maybe recyclable wrappers. So that’s the good news for those of us who’ve been feeling guilty post Halloween.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I love that. I’m super excited for the compostable wrappers, but a hundred percent agree with you that Snickers, Twix, then Kit Kat. I mean, what are they thinking? My kids give me most of their Snickers. So obviously it’s a statewide US wide problem.
Jane Zelikova: And who are these kids that are saying candy corn is good? Like, I just, I want to take them to the side and explain why that’s not, that’s incorrect.
Holly Jean Buck: Also, how is all the candy the same as it was in like 1985? Like there’s been no innovation. So I’m very, I’m very happy to hear this like wrapper innovation. At least that’s something.
Radhika Moolgavkar: No need, I guess. Right. As good Snickers is still a good Snickers 20, 30, 40 years later. Well, thank you everyone for listening this week. Thank you, Holly and Jane for joining me as always. And we look forward to seeing you all or talking to you all next week. Thanks a lot. Bye.
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