Tag Archives: flawed

How Flawed Carbon Credits Can Still Protect Our Forests

Posted on by
Reply
Logging site in the Amazon rainforest

Logging Site in the Amazon Rainforest

Credit: Tarcisio Schneider/Getty Images

In 1986, the CEO of an energy company felt guilty about his firm’s coal-fired power plant project in Connecticut after learning about climate change. Ultimately, his company invested in tree planting initiatives in Guatemala, aimed at incentivizing farmers to preserve intact forests while offsetting carbon emissions from coal plants.

This initiative holds the potential to create a marketplace for “voluntary” carbon credits, enabling companies to offset their emissions via investments that combat deforestation. Proponents argue land users should be financially rewarded for preserving forests, while critics claim land users often never intended to clear the forest.

But who is right? A growing body of research reveals that both sides have merit. According to a recent study, many early projects successfully reduced deforestation, yet they sold an average of nearly 11 times more carbon credits than the actual forest saved.

Historically, forests have acted as significant carbon sinks, particularly tropical forests, which absorb approximately half of humanity’s fossil fuel emissions. However, rapid deforestation continues due to agricultural expansion, especially for cattle ranching and palm oil in low-income regions.

“Forests are under severe threat, and we need financial mechanisms that can compensate for their protection,” says Dr. Tom Swinfield, leading research at the University of Cambridge. “Carbon financing is among the most viable options for forest conservation.”

Despite alarming deforestation rates, with over 40,000 square kilometers of forest lost in 2025 alone, the funding gap remains vast—requiring an additional $216 billion annually to meet the global goal of halting deforestation by 2030.

Prior to the COP30 climate summit in November, Brazil introduced the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, a fund designed to incentivize countries for each hectare of forest preserved. However, only $6.6 billion of the $125 billion target has been raised.

Carbon credits have not fulfilled their promise in addressing governmental funding shortages. A 2023 investigation by The Guardian, Die Zeit, and Sourcematerial revealed that 90% of rainforest credits issued by major credit bureaus are essentially worthless. Consequently, the market value of these discretionary loans plummeted by 60% in one year, with most values remaining suppressed.

In response, Swinfield and his team evaluated 44 projects compliant with UN guidelines under the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) framework. They found that 36 projects achieved at least a slight improvement in deforestation metrics compared to what would have occurred without intervention, while only one project saw a significant rise in deforestation.

However, only about 1/11 of all credits issued were genuinely justified. This average was skewed by eight projects that did not effectively reduce deforestation but issued numerous credits. Excluding these top nine credit sellers, approximately 25% of the credits were legitimate.

Swinfield attributes the over-issuance of credits to two main factors stemming from unintended errors. Credit developers relied on “reference areas” that had experienced greater deforestation to estimate potential future clearing rates. This approach often led to selecting reference areas closer to roads or those with rolling terrain, producing inflated future deforestation predictions.

The study highlights a project in the Peruvian Amazon that sought to provide alternative livelihood options for 18 local communities. The French firm responsible for the project utilized the nearby rainforest as a reference area, which was more vulnerable to deforestation, thus exaggerating the benefits of their project area.

“While many of these projects may have sound intentions, the methodologies used to calculate credit issuance were often flawed,” remarks Swinfield.

If project developers and credit agencies adopt the more precise methodologies highlighted in this research, excess credit issuance could be mitigated. Nonetheless, reduced credit supply leads to increased costs, requiring companies to pay more for carbon credits to maintain net-zero emissions claims, according to Dr. Julia Jones from Bangor University.

“The era where companies can offset carbon emissions cheaply is over. Achieving equitable and effective forest conservation cannot come at a low cost,” she asserts.

Currently, deforestation avoidance credits correspond to one ton of CO2 emissions prevented and are available for just a few dollars, while high-quality credits can range into the tens of dollars. In contrast, credits for technologies actively removing carbon, such as tree planting and direct air capture, start at several hundred dollars.

“We need a marketplace for high-quality carbon credits that genuinely contribute to preventing deforestation,” Jones emphasizes.

Research indicates that while deforestation avoidance credits can mitigate some emissions, they conflict with the Paris Agreement’s net-zero emissions target. As per Danny Cullenward from the University of Pennsylvania, “these credits are often acquired to offset emissions instead of actual reductions.”

For effective forest and climate preservation, companies should prioritize high-quality credits or simply contribute to forest protection, instead of merely “retiring” credits in their emissions budgets. Accurate assessment of deforestation risks is crucial for informed interventions.

“We must safeguard tropical forests and, through improved measurement strategies, pay for and quantify the benefits without relying solely on carbon credits,” he concludes. “This can be accomplished both with and without credit systems.”

Topics:

  • Carbon Emissions/
  • Amazon Rainforest

Source: www.newscientist.com

Realizing that My Perception of Time Was Flawed: 66 Days of Rediscovering Boredom Life and Style

Posted on by
Reply

I
When I can't last more than 5 minutes without needing some kind of stimulation, I wanted to make a change. Music, podcasts, movies, reels, a combination of them, or all at the same time (probably) created the soundtrack of my life. I'm not alone in this inability to sit still and pay attention without distraction. You also won't feel drained and depressed by endless scrolling. more boredom. But I don't want this state to be the default.

We want to stop using screens, music, and podcasts to fill the void when we should have downtime. I want to be able to be bored. To me, boredom is a state of being unable to suppress the desire to do something. I think you can instill a sense of tranquility by consciously not using your devices and instead using your downtime to spend time with yourself in your local spaces. In doing so, I think we can learn to slow down and be present without the need for digital distractions. It's embarrassing that you can't stand boredom. But it's not just that, I'm scared of not being able to decide where to focus my attention.


When I started the challenge, I hoped that this would lead me on a path to greater attention and awareness of the world around me. There, stopping to smell the roses is not only worth your time, but you'll notice that there are roses there. Start with I want to rebuild my attention span.

1st week

The novelty of starting something new makes me excited and optimistic.

It starts with disconnecting yourself from your phone. I deleted my social media apps and tried not to listen to anything during my commute or daily tasks.

This is certainly uncomfortable and difficult at first (you keep thinking of things to do to avoid getting bored, who would have thought!), but when you finally get down to just staring into space, it's not at all unpleasant. there is no. It's refreshing to have the time and space to have my ideas heard.

2nd week

As I walked without listening, I started noticing things that I normally wouldn't look at twice.

But this is how I feel when I hear unexpected news about my life situation. The urge to rid yourself of all negative emotions. What is the solution? Separation due to large amounts of multimedia content.

I feel guilty for backtracking before my video call with Professor James Danckert, an expert on the psychology of boredom at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Could he tell I wasn't bored enough?

However, cognitive neuroscientists explain that forcing boredom or making yourself “boredible” is bad.


Turns out I was wrong about boredom. Dankert tells me it actually is “I’m highly motivated – but I’m frustrated at the moment because I want to do things that are important to me and I can’t find an outlet for that motivation.”

Boredom is beneficial, he says, because it encourages you to explore your environment and engage in something meaningful. The difficult part is finding or rediscovering the “things” that are important to you.

So I realized that the challenge is no longer about wanting to be bored, but about learning how to tolerate the feeling of boredom, so that you have the space to pay attention to where you are and where you want to be. I decided that I could do it.

3rd week

After the conversation with Dunkert, think about what it felt like Do you like being bored and how long has it been since you had that feeling? When was the last time that anxious restlessness welled up within you? When was the last time you wandered around the living room aimlessly?


The silence I wanted to avoid wasn't as scary as I thought. It actually helps you identify what is worth paying attention and care to in your life.

I was used to jumping from stimulus to stimulus, so when I started leaning into stillness, I realized that I had more time because the world wasn't moving at 10 TikToks a minute. So, I used the time I had back to make a list of things I wanted to do over the next few weeks. At the top is the desire to return to painting.

When I sit down, my instinct is to reach for my phone, but instead I stop and think about what I actually want to do. Instead of wasting your energy on pointless scrolling, you might be able to channel this feeling into something that gives you more energy. It's finally time to hang up your photos and make your room your own.

Week 4

During my off time, I often take walks outside without my earphones.

I noticed brush staining the sidewalks and jacaranda trees sprouting bright purple in places I didn't expect them to. Was summer this close? These cues from nature remind us of how time passes in a very physical sense that goes beyond the numbers on a clock and refers to the ground we walk on.

I realized that the way I had been thinking about time was wrong. Browsing a lot of social media apps condensed it. Stopping and paying attention to what was around me was stretching my time.

Week 5

In a boredom-induced moment of reflection, I think about my friend's birthday this week and remember my bucket list. There is one item of note on the list. It's about making birthday cards.

When I was a child, I often made cards. I love making gifts for my friends and I wonder why I never made time for it. Maybe you didn't think you had enough time, maybe you weren't attentive enough to see the process from beginning to end, or maybe you lacked concentration.

Skip past newsletter promotions

I gave it to a friend as a gift and the response was better than I expected. It makes me feel full. I had a very fulfilling time.

Week 6

There were moments when I felt confident that I wasn't stuffing my phone up my nose or covering my ears. I've noticed that people around me always pull out their phones when they're waiting for something.

By aligning with the boredom and resisting its calls for attention, I am actively choosing to be present, and to be honest, this is a feeling I'm not very familiar with. But as I grew in my ability to work with myself, I realized that it deepened our friendships. Now you have more to say than just entertaining your friends with meaningless memes. I feel connected It's not just about watching the same content.

Week 7

Despite all this challenge, the desire to consume some content is always present. I remember my conversation with Dunkert. Dunkert assured me that “giving up vegetables” isn't a bad thing, but “recognizing the fact that it's what we want to do.”

So I decided to try watching slow TV instead of what I usually watch (comfortable sitcoms) to cultivate a sense of calm.

The 7-hour train journey began from Bergen to Oslo Although it was boring, I had the ability to slowly choose where to focus my attention and when to stop.

Week 8

Being outside the city makes it easier to kill boredom. So, to change my usual way of socializing, I went to a barren nature reserve with some friends.

Immersing yourself in local wildlife and surrounded by

Source: www.theguardian.com

Scientists are using flawed strategies to predict species responses to climate change, posing a dangerous risk of misinformation.

Posted on by
Reply

A new study reveals that a spatiotemporal substitution method used to predict species responses to climate change inaccurately predicts the effects of warming on ponderosa pines. This finding suggests that this method may be unreliable in predicting species’ future responses to changes in climate. Credit: SciTechDaily.com

A new study involving researchers at the University of Arizona suggests that changes are happening faster than trees can adapt. The discovery is a “warning to ecologists” studying climate change.

As the world warms and the climate changes, life will migrate, adapt, or become extinct. For decades, scientists have introduced certain methods to predict how things will happen. seed We will survive this era of great change. But new research suggests that method may be misleading or producing false results.

Flaws in prediction methods revealed

Researchers at the University of Arizona and team members from the U.S. Forest Service and Brown University found that this method (commonly referred to as spatiotemporal replacement) shows how a tree called the ponderosa pine, which is widespread in the western United States, grows. I discovered something that I couldn’t predict accurately. We have actually responded to global warming over the past few decades. This also means that other studies that rely on displacement in space and time may not accurately reflect how species will respond to climate change in coming decades.

The research team collected and measured growth rings of ponderosa pine trees from across the western United States, dating back to 1900, to determine how trees actually grow and how models predict how trees will respond to warming. We compared.

A view of ponderosa and Jeffrey pine forests from Verdi Mountain near Truckee, California.Credit: Daniel Perrette

“We found that substituting time for space produces incorrect predictions in terms of whether the response to warming will be positive or negative,” said study co-author Margaret Evans, an associate professor at the University of Arizona. ” he said. Tree ring laboratory. “With this method, ponderosa pines are supposed to benefit from warming, but they actually suffer from warming. This is dangerously misleading.”

Their research results were published on December 18th. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Daniel Perrette, a U.S. Forest Service ORISE fellow, is the lead author and received training in tree-ring analysis through the university’s summer field methods course at the University of Arizona Research Institute. The study was part of his doctoral dissertation at Brown University, and was conducted with Dov Sachs, professor of biogeography and biodiversity and co-author of the paper.

Inaccuracies in space and time substitutions

This is how space and time permutation works. All species occupy a range of favorable climatic conditions. Scientists believe that individuals growing at the hottest end of their range could serve as an example of what will happen to populations in cooler locations in a warmer future.

The research team found that ponderosa pine trees grow at a faster rate in warmer locations. Therefore, under the spatial and temporal displacement paradigm, this suggests that the situation should improve as the climate warms at the cold end of the distribution.

“But the tree-ring data doesn’t show that,” Evans said.

However, when the researchers used tree rings to assess how individual trees responded to changes in temperature, they found that ponderosa was consistently negatively affected by temperature fluctuations.

“If it’s a warmer-than-average year, they’re going to have smaller-than-average growth rings, so warming is actually bad for them, and that’s true everywhere,” she says.

The researchers believe this may be happening because trees are unable to adapt quickly enough to a rapidly changing climate.

An individual tree and all its growth rings are a record of that particular tree’s genetics exposed to different climatic conditions from one year to the next, Evans said. But how a species responds as a whole is the result of a slow pace of evolutionary adaptation to the average conditions in a particular location that are different from those elsewhere. Similar to evolution, the movement of trees that are better adapted to changing temperatures could save species, but climate change is happening too quickly, Evans said.

Rainfall effects and final thoughts

Beyond temperature, the researchers also looked at how trees responded to rainfall. They confirmed that, even across time and space, more water is better.

“These spatially-based predictions are really dangerous because spatial patterns reflect the end point after a long period in which species have had the opportunity to evolve, disperse, and ultimately sort themselves across the landscape. Because we do,” Evans said. “But that’s not how climate change works. Unfortunately, trees are in a situation where they are changing faster than they can adapt and are actually at risk of extinction. This is a warning to ecologists. .”

References: “Species responses to spatial climate change do not predict responses to climate change,” by Daniel L. Perrett, Margaret EK Evans, and Dov F. Sachs, December 18, 2023. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2304404120

Funding: Brown University Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology, Brown Institute for the Environment and Society, American Philosophical Society Lewis and Clark Expeditionary and Field Research Fund, Department of Agriculture Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, Department of Energy Oak Ridge Science Institute Education , NSF Macrosystems Biology

Source: scitechdaily.com