Abstract
Efforts to avert dangerous climate change by conserving and restoring natural habitats are hampered by concerns over the credibility of methods used to quantify their long-term impacts. Here we develop a flexible framework for estimating the net social benefit of impermanent nature-based interventions that integrates three substantial advances: (1) conceptualizing the permanence of a project’s impact as its additionality over time; (2) risk-averse estimation of the social cost of future reversals of carbon gains; and (3) post-credit monitoring to correct errors in deliberately pessimistic release forecasts. Our framework generates incentives for safeguarding already credited carbon while enabling would-be investors to make like-for-like comparisons of diverse carbon projects. Preliminary analyses suggest nature-derived credits may be competitively priced even after adjusting for impermanence.
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Data availability
All data are available in the main text or the supplementary materials. For more information on PACT see www.cambridgepact.org.
Code availability
The code for producing carbon release schedules and calculating EP is available on request.
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Acknowledgements
This work was developed with support from the Royal Society, ESRC, NERC, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, Frank Jackson Trust, Dragon Capital and the Tezos Foundation. We thank B. Balmford, G. Cerullo, A. Eyres, H. Hunnable, S. Jaffer, E. Quigley, E.-P. Rau and C. Wheeler for their help and ideas.
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All the authors conceived the initial idea. A.B., S.K., F.V., B.G. and T.S. developed the method. T.S. created the figures. A.B., S.K. and T.S. wrote the manuscript and all co-authors revised it.
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A.B. is a trustee of the World Land Trust, a non-governmental organization that supports forest-based carbon projects. The Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits (4C) has no commercial interest in carbon credits.
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Nature Climate Change thanks Per Kristian Rørstad, Susan Cook-Patton and Lucas Joppa for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Balmford, A., Keshav, S., Venmans, F. et al. Realizing the social value of impermanent carbon credits. Nat. Clim. Chang. 13, 1172–1178 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01815-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01815-0
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