Serious Errors Impair an Assessment of Forest Carbon Projects: A Rebuttal Of West Et Al. (2023)

Edward Mitchard, Harry Carstairs, Riccardo Cosenza, Sassan S. Saatchi, Jason Funk, Paula Nieto Quintano, Thom Brade, Iain M. McNicol, Patrick Meir, Murray B. Collins and Eric Nowak
Additional contact information
Edward Mitchard: University of Edinburgh and Space Intelligence
Harry Carstairs: Space Intelligence
Riccardo Cosenza: Università della Svizzera Italiana
Sassan S. Saatchi: California Institute of Technology, University of California, Los Angeles and CTrees
Jason Funk: Conservation International
Paula Nieto Quintano: Space Intelligence
Thom Brade: Space Intelligence
Iain M. McNicol: University of Edinburgh and Space Intelligence
Patrick Meir: University of Edinburgh
Murray B. Collins: Space Intelligence
Eric Nowak: Università della Svizzera Italiana, Swiss Finance Institute and VCS Advisory Group

No 23-120, Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series from Swiss Finance Institute

Abstract: Independent retrospective analyses of the effectiveness of reducing deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) projects are vital to ensure climate change benefits are being delivered. A recent study in Science by West et al. (1) appeared therefore to be a timely alert that the majority of projects operating in the 2010s failed to reduce deforestation rates. Unfortunately, their analysis suffered from major flaws in the choice of underlying data, resulting in poorly matched and unstable counterfactual scenarios. These were compounded by calculation errors, biasing the study against finding that projects significantly reduced deforestation. This flawed analysis of 24 projects unfairly condemned all 100+ REDD projects, and risks cutting off finance for protecting vulnerable tropical forests from destruction at a time when funding needs to grow rapidly.

Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2023-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-ppm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4661972 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:chf:rpseri:rp23120

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series from Swiss Finance Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ridima Mittal ().