Serious errors impair an assessment of forest carbon projects: A rebuttal of West et al. (2023)

TL;DR

This paper critiques a recent study claiming most forest carbon projects failed, arguing that flawed data and errors led to an unfair negative assessment, which could hinder vital climate change mitigation efforts.

Contribution

It exposes major methodological flaws in West et al.'s (2023) analysis, emphasizing the importance of accurate data and calculations in evaluating REDD project effectiveness.

Findings

The critique identifies data mismatches and calculation errors in the original study.

It argues that the flawed analysis unjustly condemns successful REDD projects.

The paper highlights the risk of reduced funding for forest conservation due to misinterpretation.

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.