Annual Review of Environment and Resources – Romm et al. (2025): Are Carbon Offsets Fixable?
Joseph Romm, Stephen Lezak and Amna Alshamsi, IN: Annual Review of Environment and Resources, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-112823-064813
This article provides a systematic review of the literature on carbon offsets. A growing number of studies have found that the most widely used offset programs continue to greatly overestimate their probable climate impact often by a factor of five to ten or more. Credit quality has remained a problem since the inception of carbon credits, despite repeated efforts to address the core challenges of additionality, leakage, double counting, environmental injustice, verification, and permanence.