Carbon offsetting – where companies or governments atone for their carbon emissions by buying credits to fund projects that are supposed to remove emissions from the atmosphere – has a bad reputation.

In the past few years, wildfires in the US have torn through hundreds of thousands of forested acres associated with carbon credits and sold to companies including Microsoft. Earlier this month, many scoffed when Taylor Swift tried to shrug off the emissions from her private jet travel by paying for offsets.

Sadly, low-integrity offset projects are the norm, not the exception. A 2023 investigation reviewed a broad swathe of rainforest protection projects and found that “94% of the credits had no benefit to the climate”. The issuer of carbon credits at the heart of the investigation has disputed its findings, but also announced it is introducing a new, “more consistent” methodology.

Consider deforestation. The vast majority of dubious credits on the market today are issued by companies who pledge to protect forests from timber harvesting. These firms may use faulty baseline accounting........

© The Conversation