Wildfires have exhausted nearly all of the carbon credits set aside by forestry projects in the United States to protect against the risk of tree damage over 100 years, according to a new independent study.
As a result of fires, six forestry projects in California’s carbon trading system have released between 5.7 and 6.8 million tons of carbon since 2015, the nonprofit research group CarbonPlan estimated. This represented at least 95% of the approximately 6 million offsets set aside to insure all forestry projects against the risk of fire over a period of a century.
In principle, offsets represent one tonne of carbon avoided or removed from the atmosphere. Offset projects, such as forestry schemes, contribute part of the credits to a so-called “buffer pool” which acts as an insurance mechanism, and are canceled if the carbon absorbed by the trees is released, for example when they catch fire.
“In just 10 years, wildfires have exhausted protections designed to last a century,” said study co-author Oriana Chegwidden. “The program is incredibly unlikely to be able to withstand the wildfires of the next 90 years.”
Companies in all sectors are increasingly turning to carbon credits to offset their emissions.
Last year, a particularly fierce fire season in the United States destroyed forestry projects that had generated offsets bought by companies such as BP and Microsoft.
In California, the Air Resources Board (CARB) allows the use of certain offsets in its official carbon trading system, under which polluters must purchase permits to cover their emissions.
According to California rules, carbon savings from offsets must be guaranteed for at least 100 years. To hedge against future risks, forestry projects contribute between 10 and 20% of all credits they generate into the buffer pool, of which around one-fifth relates to potential fires while others protect against risks such as diseases.
However, the CarbonPlan researchers, who have previously performed analyzes with funding from Microsoft, said they were “not aware of any explicit analysis substantiating” the number of credits that entered the buffer pool. . The risk analysis “may have been the product of educated guesswork”, they added.
After fires damaged two forestry projects in 2015 and 2018, more than 1 million buffer pool credits were canceled out of the roughly 6 million set aside to specifically protect against fires. Cancellations related to fires in 2020 and 2021 have not yet been addressed, but CarbonPlan estimated that these fires generated between 4.6 and 5.7 million tonnes of carbon, which would eliminate fire risk credits remaining in the buffer pool.
At the start of 2022, there was a total of approximately 30 million credits in the buffer pool to cover all risk categories, including fire and other perils such as disease, over a 100-year period.
The peer-reviewed article also opined that an outbreak of Sudden Oak Death, which devastated US West Coast forests, in projects with disease-susceptible trees could also wipe out buffer credits. set aside for disease and insect hazards.
The insurance mechanism was “severely underfunded”, according to the newspaper. The system ‘makes no effort to account for the almost inevitable increase in fire risk as the earth continues to warm’, while the evidence needed to model drought risk ‘was not available’ when the rules were drawn up, the researchers said.
CARB said the fact that the forest buffer zone continued to grow and was used was “proof that this is a prudent part of our program”. The analysis underlying the contribution to the buffer pool was based on “the best information available” at the time the system was developed, and CARB would assess the “new information” in its next update, a- he declared.
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