I interviewed Pushpendra Rana about his recent paper "Why carbon offsets may fail in complex systems: A causal inference perspective".

The paper, co-written with Forrest Fleischman and Amit Sharma argues that the problems with carbon offsets cannot be fixed.

In the interview, Rana goes into detail about "a structural tension at the heart of carbon offset markets":

"A carbon offset credit is meant to represent a precise quantity of climate benefit, for example one tonne of CO₂ that was not emitted or removed from the atmosphere. To justify issuing that credit, a project must show that the benefit occurred because of the project and would not have happened otherwise. In other words, the project must establish a credible counterfactual.

"The challenge is that many forest carbon projects operate in complex social ecological systems where many factors simultaneously influence forest outcomes, including economic change, migration, markets, governance, weather, fire, and land use decisions. Having worked inside forest landscapes for many years, I have seen firsthand how forest outcomes emerge from the interaction of these forces. In such systems, it becomes extremely difficult to confidently isolate the effect of a single intervention."