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  • COMMENT

Carbon credits are failing to help with climate change — here’s why

The idea that emissions can be offset through projects that claim to avoid releases or to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is fatally flawed.
By
  1. Andrew Macintosh

    1. Andrew Macintosh is a professor of environmental law and policy at the Centre for Environmental Markets, Australian National University, Acton, Australia.

  2. Gregory Trencher

    1. Gregory Trencher is a professor of decarbonization governance at the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan.

  3. Benedict Probst

    1. Benedict Probst is a senior research fellow in the Net Zero Lab, Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Germany.

  4. Shanta Barley

    1. Shanta Barley is a climate scientist at the University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.

  5. Danny Cullenward

    1. Danny Cullenward is a climate economist and lawyer at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA.

  6. Thales A. P. West

    1. Thales A. P. West is a specialist in carbon offsets and impact evaluation at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

  7. Don Butler

    1. Don Butler is an ecologist and biogeographer at the Centre for Environmental Markets, Australian National University, Acton, Australia.

  8. Johan Rockström

    1. Johan Rockström is director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and professor in Earth-system science at the University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.

Reforestation of an area destroyed by fires with tree guards protecting saplings near an old tree and mountains in the background.

Tree guards protect saplings in a reforestation project in Chile. Credit: Ashley Cooper/Nature Picture Library

Achieving the global temperature targets set in the Paris climate agreement requires deep, rapid cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, and therefore the swift phase-out of fossil fuels. Many factors stand in the way. One of the most pernicious is carbon offsets.

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Nature 646, 543-546 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-03313-z

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Supplementary Information

  1. Supplementary figure and table
  2. Supplementary table in editable format

Competing Interests

A.M. is a non-executive director of Paraway Pastoral Company Ltd. Paraway Pastoral Company Ltd has offset projects under Australia’s carbon offset scheme. S.B is chief climate scientist at Fortescue, a global metal mining company headquartered in Australia with facilities covered by the Australian Safeguard Mechanism. D.C. is a member of California’s Independent Emissions Market Advisory Committee and the UNFCCC Paris Agreement Article 6.4 mechanism’s Methodological Expert Panel. The views in this commentary are expressed in his personal capacity and do not represent either body.

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