A new study in Nature reveals that forest carbon protocols significantly underestimate the risk of carbon reversal. Researchers found that climate-driven disturbances, particularly wildfires in California and the Intermountain West, are creating losses that current mitigation programs cannot cover. The analysis shows that the buffer pools used to insure against unintended carbon losses in the largest US forest programs are undercapitalized by an average factor of 6.3. This gap suggests that many nature-based offsets may not provide the long-term climate benefits they claim.
