Serious Errors Impair an Assessment of Forest Carbon Projects: A Rebuttal Of West Et Al. (2023)

Abstract

Independent retrospective analyses of the effectiveness of reducing deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) projects are vital to ensure climate change benefits are being delivered. A recent study in Science by West et al. (1) appeared therefore to be a timely alert that the majority of projects operating in the 2010s failed to reduce deforestation rates. Unfortunately, their analysis suffered from major flaws in the choice of underlying data, resulting in poorly matched and unstable counterfactual scenarios. These were compounded by calculation errors, biasing the study against finding that projects significantly reduced deforestation. This flawed analysis of 24 projects unfairly condemned all 100+ REDD projects, and risks cutting off finance for protecting vulnerable tropical forests from destruction at a time when funding needs to grow rapidly.