Carbon offsets fail to cut global heating due to ‘intractable’ systemic problems, study says
The failure of carbon offsets to cut planet-heating pollution is “not due to a few bad apples”, a review paper has found, but down to deep-seated systemic problems that incremental change will not solve.
“We must stop expecting carbon offsetting to work at scale,” said Stephen Lezak, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Smith School and co-author of the study, in Annual Reviews. “We have assessed 25 years of evidence and almost everything up until this point has failed.”
A meta-analysis published in Nature Communications last year found that less than 16% of the carbon credits investigated showed real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.