Large and persistent social risks to forest carbon projects
- 1Duke University
Abstract
Despite the popularity of carbon credits as a tool to offset greenhouse gas emissions, there are growing concerns over whether their climate mitigation claims are robust. Most attention has focused on natural risks to forest carbon projects, such as wildfire, while social risks (e.g., those driven by fraud, mismanagement, and land conflicts) remain largely unquantified. Here we analyze 244 forest-based carbon projects to assess the vulnerability of the voluntary carbon market to social risks and find that projects systematically underestimate their risk of failure. Even under optimistic assumptions, projects are roughly twice as likely to fail within 25 years as their self-assessed risk implies over a 100-year horizon. Projecting these trends forward, we show that credits issued to failed projects could exceed the reserves registries hold to mitigate these risks within 1-2 decades. Overall, our results suggest stronger mechanisms and reserves are needed to ensure carbon credits deliver the promised climate benefits.
Related
- Trajectory of the Landes forest (1850-2022): a carbon sink subject to changing social and ecological dynamics
- Potential exposure risk of global timber production, carbon stocking, and biodiversity to forest pests
- Decadal sink-source shifts of forest aboveground carbon since 1988
- Persistent but variable effect of experimental laboratory burns on microbial community resistance, resilience, and function across contrasting boreal forest soils
- Spatiotemporal analysis of biomass carbon and forest dynamics through remote sensing data in Alemsaga Forest, Ethiopia
BibTeX
@misc{levine2026large,
title = {{Large and persistent social risks to forest carbon projects}},
author = {J. I. Levine and L. Blanchard and D. Cullenward and W. R. L. Anderegg},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.64898/2026.10.05.756721},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.05.756721v1},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Large and persistent social risks to forest carbon projects
AU - J. I. Levine
AU - L. Blanchard
AU - D. Cullenward
AU - W. R. L. Anderegg
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/05
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.10.05.756721
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.05.756721v1
AB - Despite the popularity of carbon credits as a tool to offset greenhouse gas emissions, there are growing concerns over whether their climate mitigation claims are robust. Most attention has focused on natural risks to forest carbon projects, such as wildfire, while social risks (e.g., those driven by fraud, mismanagement, and land conflicts) remain largely unquantified. Here we analyze 244 forest-based carbon projects to assess the vulnerability of the voluntary carbon market to social risks and find that projects systematically underestimate their risk of failure. Even under optimistic assumptions, projects are roughly twice as likely to fail within 25 years as their self-assessed risk implies over a 100-year horizon. Projecting these trends forward, we show that credits issued to failed projects could exceed the reserves registries hold to mitigate these risks within 1-2 decades. Overall, our results suggest stronger mechanisms and reserves are needed to ensure carbon credits deliver the promised climate benefits.
ER -