Carbon credits are failing to help with climate change — here’s why
Article Meta
Article Date: 14 October 2025
Article URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03313-z
Article Image: https://media.nature.com/w767/magazine-assets/d41586-025-03313-z/d41586-025-03313-z_51551862.jpg
Summary
This Nature comment argues that carbon-offsetting schemes are fundamentally flawed and, in many cases, do not deliver the emissions reductions they claim. The piece explains why offsets frequently fail on three core criteria — realness, additionality and permanence — and shows how these failures not only produce ‘hot air’ credits but also weaken carbon-pricing mechanisms by depressing prices and delaying fossil-fuel phase-out. The authors survey evidence from multiple analyses and conclude by urging decision makers to exclude offsets from carbon-pricing schemes.
Key Points
- Offsets often do not represent actual emissions reductions because outcomes are compared to hypothetical ‘business-as-usual’ scenarios, which can be manipulated.
- Additionality is hard to verify: only project developers typically know if credit revenue is essential to a project’s existence, creating informational asymmetry.
- Measurement errors and natural variability (e.g. soil carbon, forests) make it difficult to quantify true carbon benefits reliably.
- Permanence is a major issue: many credited removals are temporary (protected for decades rather than centuries), so stored carbon can be re-released by fires, drought or land-use change.
- Market incentives favour cheap, low-quality credits; large corporate buyers prioritise cost over integrity, and registries/administrators are incentivised to grow supply rather than enforce strict standards.
- Scientific reviews and meta-analyses find a large share of projects fail to deliver claimed reductions — one study showed under 16% of sampled projects met their stated abatement.
- Low-integrity offsets depress carbon prices in emissions trading and tax systems, reducing incentives for real emissions cuts and undermining the effectiveness of carbon-pricing policy.
- The authors call for excluding offsets from domestic carbon-pricing schemes to prevent distortion and protect decarbonisation efforts.
Content Summary
The commentary opens by stating that meeting Paris temperature targets requires rapid, deep emissions cuts, and that offsets are a pernicious obstacle. It outlines the three core integrity criteria for credible offsets: real (actual) reductions, additionality (would not have happened otherwise) and permanence (long-term removal).
The article details how calculating benefits relies on counterfactual scenarios, inviting over-crediting. It highlights informational imbalances — developers know project dependence on credit revenue, regulators often do not — and explains measurement challenges for variable carbon pools like soils and forests. The authors note that many schemes only guarantee sinks for a few decades, far short of the timescales needed to neutralise CO2 in the atmosphere.
Misaligned market incentives are discussed: buyers chase low-cost credits, registries and programmes rely on credit volumes for income, and governments allow offsets to lower compliance costs. The piece summarises empirical evidence showing widespread integrity failings across avoided deforestation, renewable-energy, clean-cookstove and removal projects.
Finally, the authors explain how bad offsets harm the climate by enabling false claims and by lowering carbon prices, which weakens emissions-reduction incentives. They recommend excluding offsets from carbon-pricing schemes to avoid these harms.
Context and Relevance
This article is highly relevant to policymakers, regulators, corporate sustainability teams and anyone tracking climate policy. As Article 6 of the Paris Agreement and aviation offsetting mechanisms become operational and as offsets are folded into domestic pricing schemes worldwide, the paper’s warnings matter: relying on low-integrity credits risks delaying the necessary phase-out of fossil fuels and misdirecting finance away from real mitigation.
It connects to broader debates about net-zero claims, voluntary carbon markets, and the integrity of climate accounting. The piece adds weight to calls for stricter standards, better monitoring and, crucially, removing offsets from compliance mechanisms where they can distort prices and incentives.
Author style
Punchy — the authors lay out a direct, evidence-backed critique and end with a clear policy ask (exclude offsets from carbon-pricing). If you work on climate policy or corporate decarbonisation, this is a sharp, consequential read that presses why the details of accounting and market design actually matter.
Why should I read this?
Short answer: because it cuts through the greenwash. If you want to know why buying carbon credits isn’t the same as cutting emissions — and why that difference could wreck carbon prices and slow real cuts — this saves you time by laying out the evidence and a practical policy fix in plain terms.