Forest offsets with carbon leakage safeguards are preferred but could still be flawed

THE Singapore government is prepared to accept forest conservation carbon offsets that consider deforestation across an entire jurisdiction as it addresses carbon leakage risk, but a study has uncovered that this project type is not without its flaws.

While the jurisdictional approach might be favoured over carbon credits generated from projects that consider deforestation on a project level – where deforestation can simply “move” from within a project to an unmonitored area – it could still lead to an overgeneration of credits, researchers found.

Overgeneration is when credits that do not represent genuine carbon reductions are created. Such credits had been referred to as “phantom” credits.