Orbuch: Avoided deforestation carbon credits have near-zero net impact due to leakage
Ryan Orbuch · Growing the Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) market · May 5, 2022 · at 24:30
Lowercarbon Capital partner Ryan Orbuch discusses additionality and verification flaws in nature-based carbon offset credits.
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“Avoided deforestation, for example, is like a classically cheap and conceptually compelling credit especially in, you know, say the Amazon that's I mean, basically impossible to prove the counterfactual because there's often significant amounts of leakage, and leakage means, in this case, as you know, like, okay, cool, you can, like, draw a box around a square and say, like, we promised to not cut down trees in this square, and then, like, send me nice satellite photos of the square every year, and, like, I believe you that you won't cut down trees in the square, but you haven't done anything about the demand for pasture land, or the demand for plantation land, or other arable land, or, you know, urban expansion, or whatever, so just, like, some proportionally similarly sized different square is the Gonna then get deforested because you preserved that square, and the net carbon effect is basically zero.”
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