CGIAR Climate Impact Area Webinar Series - Webinar 3: Carbon Credits: Can they be fixed?

CGIAR. 2024. CGIAR Climate Impact Area Webinar Series - Webinar 3: Carbon Credits: Can they be fixed? Video. Montpellier, France: CGIAR System Organization.

Most countries, institutions, companies and individuals will continue to generate greenhouse gas emissions through their activities even as the world decarbonises, meaning many are choosing to compensate for these ‘residual’ emissions. The most common approach for doing so is to purchase carbon credits.

The world’s forests store an estimated 861 billion tonnes of carbon—equivalent to approximately 100 years' worth of anthropogenic emissions, at current rates—and with good husbandry could potentially store up to 226 billion tonnes more. Clearly, preserving and repairing forests is a vital element of mitigating climate breakdown. But, worldwide, forests are under threat, and financial and political incentives to clear land can often defeat attempts at regulation. One answer is to transfer some of the global benefits of preservation to forest communities, paying them to preserve the forest that they would otherwise have cleared and thus preserving the forest while compensating communities for foregone income.

This is (forest) carbon offsetting – and it is failing.

Yale Environmental Economist Professor Rohini Pande will explain why in this exploratory webinar, the third in our series highlighting important areas of climate research that CGIAR does not yet work on extensively.