Monica Piccinini
26 October 2025
As leaders gather in Belém for COP30 this November, carbon markets are back in the spotlight. Once celebrated as a key tool for reducing emissions, carbon credits are now under increasing scrutiny, with critics questioning whether they provide genuine climate benefits or simply give polluters a free pass.
For years, we’ve been told that buying carbon credits could cancel out our pollution and help protect the planet. Pay a little extra for your flight, offset your business emissions, and somewhere a rainforest would stay standing. It sounds like a simple fix for a complicated problem, a way to carry on as usual while someone else planted or protected trees for us.
But a new research, led by Dr Thales A. P. West, a tenured assistant professor at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, has blown that idea apart.
The paper states that many REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) voluntary carbon offset schemes are built “on hope, not proof”.
Published in the Global Change Biology journal and written by leading scientists from across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, the research finds that most carbon offsets don’t work. In fact, many are based on shaky assumptions, exaggerated data, and a convenient kind of wishful thinking.
Another article recently published in Nature states that:
Offsets undermine decarbonisation by enabling companies and countries to claim that emissions have been reduced when they have not. This results in more emissions, delays the phase-out of fossil fuels and diverts scarce resources to false solutions.
A market built on hope, not proof
The voluntary carbon market (VCM) was designed to help people and companies offset their emissions by paying for projects that prevent deforestation and forest degradation. Each credit, worth one tonne of avoided carbon dioxide, could be traded, bought, and sold like a stock.
At the heart of the problem lies the “baseline”, the imagined scenario of what would have happened without the project, how much forest would have been destroyed. The worse the imagined future, the more credits a project can sell.
And that’s where the problem starts. Some projects exaggerated those threats, claiming they were saving forests that were never really in danger. Some built computer models so weak they were “no better than guessing”, the research reveals. Others were set in remote areas where nobody was planning to cut trees in the first place.
So, while companies brag about being “carbon neutral”, some of those credits may not represent any real climate benefit at all.
Dr West says that while some developers act in good faith, the system itself is set up to fail:
Not every project developer is inflating baselines. Some genuinely want to do the right thing, but they’re forced to follow Verra’s approved methodologies. Even with the best intentions, if you follow the “wrong recipe”, you will probably not get the right result.
These frameworks just aren’t fit for measuring project performance or impact. The tools exist to do it properly, but they add uncertainty and risk, and that’s bad for business. The uncomfortable truth is that accuracy may not be profitable.
Offsets become greenwashing
From airlines to tech giants to luxury brands, offsets have become a moral license to keep polluting, with a green halo attached.
The people certifying and selling the credits often have a financial stake in keeping the system alive. Everyone benefits from big numbers, except the planet.
The paper exposes how this system, which was meant to channel money into conservation, is filled with conflicts of interest.
Certification bodies, paid by the very projects they audit, have every incentive to keep the credits flowing. Rating agencies compete for business by offering favourable evaluations.
Developers often withhold crucial data hiding behind commercial secrecy. Even some auditors, the research reveals, have “relied on self-reporting by project staff” instead of independent verification.
Dr West argues that without structural independence, integrity is impossible:
Some people believe government oversight could help but look at the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under the Kyoto Protocol – there are many well-known cases where corruption was rampant. Bringing in more organisations won’t fix it if the incentives stay the same.
A simple step would be for developers to pay the certifying body, which then randomly assigns an auditor. There should also be firm standards for auditor competence and team size. Right now, one person might inspect a project in two days while another team spends a week. That kind of inconsistency can compromise the quality of certification.
Forests still falling
The researchers revisit the Suruí project in Brazil, once celebrated as a model of Indigenous-led conservation. It was built on solid science, used local knowledge, and even gained international recognition.
Despite its promise, the project collapsed under pressure from illegal miners and cattle farmers. The lesson, reveals the paper, is clear: even the best-designed offset can’t stop deforestation if the wider system – politics, law enforcement, and land rights – is broken.
This month, Brazil’s federal public prosecutor’s office (MPF) filed a lawsuit asking to immediately stop a carbon credit project in protected areas of Amazonas where Indigenous and traditional communities live. The MPF says the project, launched by the Amazonas State Department of the Environment (Sema), is moving forward without consulting the local communities, breaking the rules of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 169.
These are not isolated stories. From Cambodia to Kenya, projects have been undermined by corruption, land disputes, or government decisions to build dams and roads through “protected” zones. Others have restricted local people’s access to forests, cutting off livelihoods.
Too often, communities see little of the money that flows through these schemes. For instance, in Zimbabwe, the government decreed that half of all carbon revenue must go to the state, with only a fraction reaching local villages. The “benefits” are usually captured by community “elites”.
Dr West says the system rewards profit-driven consultancies rather than grassroots groups with genuine ties to the land:
Some NGOs have worked with local communities for decades, long before carbon credits existed, but many developers are international consulting firms chasing profit. If they can strike a deal to keep 90% of the revenue and hand 10% to the community, they probably will.
Governments should step in with clear rules to guarantee fair shares. Without that, communities are left to negotiate from a position of weakness, without the knowledge or representation to protect their interests.
The problem that never goes away
The researchers also highlight what they call “leakage”. Protecting one forest simply pushes deforestation somewhere else. A logging ban in one area, for example, can just shift logging to the next valley.
Most projects assume leakage is small, often just 1%, but studies suggest it could be ten times higher.
Then there’s the problem of “non-permanence”, when forests burn, rot, or are cut after a project ends. Fires in California and the Amazon have already wiped-out vast stretches of land whose carbon credits are still circulating in global markets.
Under current rules, many buyers are essentially “renting” temporary reductions that could vanish tomorrow. Once a project ends, there’s often no legal responsibility for anyone to replace those lost credits.
Dr West says the market’s safeguards are far too weak:
If companies buy credits from forest projects, the forest must be there. If it disappears, the credits disappear too. The problem is that even certified and audited calculations may still lack credibility – certification alone doesn’t necessarily guarantee anything.
Verra’s insurance buffer was meant to cover losses, but research shows it’s far too small and based on shaky risk models. Most projects last only a few decades; once they expire, their credits could eventually expire too. Yet no one wants to talk about that because it’s inconvenient. The voluntary market has simply chosen to not take the issue of permanence seriously.
A system built to look good
The UN’s earlier carbon market under the Kyoto Protocol rejected forest protection credits precisely because they were too hard to measure and too easy to manipulate. Two decades later, the voluntary market revived them, but this time with better branding and slick marketing.
Now, as governments consider including such projects under the Paris Agreement, the researchers warn against repeating the same mistakes.
Companies want easy answers, consumers like the comfort of “carbon neutral” products, and carbon credits make the story possible, even if it isn’t true.
Prospects
The scientists behind the research aren’t against protecting forests, they just want honesty about what these projects can and can’t do. Real conservation is vital for biodiversity, climate stability, and the livelihoods of millions.
But pretending that selling carbon credits for these efforts can “cancel out” fossil fuel emissions is dangerous and delusional. Real climate action means cutting emissions at the source, not outsourcing guilt to a forest thousands of miles away.
Some projects could make a genuine difference, such as forest management, reduced-impact logging, or restoring native ecosystems rather than planting monoculture tree farms. But these are slower and less profitable, which means the market mostly ignores them.
The authors call for true transparency, public data, and independent audits that aren’t paid by the very people being audited. They warn that without major reform, REDD+ risks repeating the injustices it claims to solve.
Until then, every dollar spent on bad credits is money not spent on real solutions.
Time for truth
As climate pledges tighten and pressure mounts, companies are rushing to buy offsets, but some courts are now ruling that calling a product “carbon neutral” based on such credits is misleading.
For years, carbon credits offered an easy story, that we could keep burning, flying, and spending like no tomorrow, while forests quietly cleaned up our mess, but that story is ending.
As COP30 prepares to put carbon markets centre stage, the debate over their future is intensifying.
Dr West says it’s time for an honest reckoning, either fix the system or face the truth about its limits:
Some of my co-authors think the market is beyond repair; others believe it can potentially be fixed if we finally confront its flaws. We’ve never really tried to make it work properly. Only by admitting what’s wrong and applying rigorous science can we find out if it’s salvageable.
But the current system runs on conflicts of interest. The people defending it either don’t understand it or profit from keeping it broken. Unless there is a change in attitude among companies, governments, and organisations such as the UN, the market is likely to continue prioritising convenience over integrity.
Featured image: Fahroni / Alamy
Monica Piccinini 