Nature – Balmford et al. (2023): Realizing the social value of impermanent carbon credits
Andrew Balmford, Srinivasan Keshav, Frank Venmans, David Coomes, Ben Groom, Anil Madhavapeddy, Tom Swinfield IN: Nature Climate Change, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01815-0
Here the authors develop a flexible framework for estimating the net social benefit of impermanent nature-based interventions that integrates three substantial advances: (1) conceptualizing the permanence of a project’s impact as its additionality over time; (2) risk-averse estimation of the social cost of future reversals of carbon gains; and (3) post-credit monitoring to correct errors in deliberately pessimistic release forecasts. The framework generates incentives for safeguarding already credited carbon while enabling would-be investors to make like-for-like comparisons of diverse carbon projects.