A global carbon credit program risks rewarding the wrong behavior

A United Nations-backed framework for protecting tropical forests could allow governments to collect income from carbon credits without advancing forest conservation. The weakness lies in how the program calculates baselines, which is the expected rate of deforestation without intervention. There is no evidence that enrolled jurisdictions—countries, states, and provinces—have acted on that opportunity, but the incentive structure favors those who do, according to a study by Yale researchers appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The framework also penalizes the jurisdictions that are in most need of intervention.

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