A tree that does not fall in the forest continues to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping protect humanity from climate change.
If you understand this problem, you will understand one of the main debates at the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties, or COP26, a meeting to combat global warming taking place in Glasgow from Oct.
For example, Switzerland recently reached agreements with Georgia, Ghana, Peru and Senegal in which it will effectively pay those countries to reduce their emissions and then claim the reductions for itself to help meet its national target for emissions reductions under the Paris Agreement of 2015.
The San Francisco-based environmental group CarbonPlan said this year that forest protection efforts in California were over-credited by about $400 million.
Negotiators in Glasgow will be wrestling with how to implement Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, the last part of the accord to be finalized.
One way Article 6 could fail is if it allows so-called double counting.
Let’s say a country decided to build a wind farm instead of a coal plant because the economics were better.
Carsten Warnecke, a founding partner of the NewClimate Institute in Cologne, Germany, told me he’s lost faith in global trading of emissions credits as a solution to climate change.
“If there are large financial flows across borders, you’re creating constituents in developing countries that depend on financial flows and will lie and cheat and do everything they can to maintain these flows,” says Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University.
Zack Parisa, a founder and the chief executive of Natural Capital Exchange, a forest carbon marketplace based in San Francisco, says his company has developed standards and technology to guarantee that forest protection credits are legitimate.
Emitters can buy credits or allowances to cover their excess emissions and can sell credits or allowances to make some money if they’re comfortably below their ceilings.
She said that she and others have spent the past 18 months developing rules for the voluntary carbon market as part of an organization called the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets.
I was an engineer for over 30 years, and I agree that systems thinking and systems engineering are required to adequately address complex systems. One of the problems with applying these practices is that they are complex in and of themselves, and too often management systems are not aligned to reward this area of expertise.