Barbara Haya combines research and outreach with a focus on the effectiveness of carbon offset programs. She directs the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, which examines the outcomes of California's and voluntary offset programs and performs outreach to ensure the Project's research results inform offset program design.
Barbara holds a PhD from UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group, where she studied the outcomes of the Kyoto Protocol’s offset program, the Clean Development Mechanism, and worked closely with NGOs at the international climate change negotiations in support of offset program reform. Prior to returning to UC Berkeley, she worked with the Union of Concerned Scientists and then Stanford Law School contributing analysis on the design and implementation of California’s global warming law.
Contact
About
Areas of Expertise
- Climate Change
- Environment
- Energy, Renewable and Clean Energy
- Program Evaluation
- Carbon Offsetting
Curriculum Vitae
Research
Research Affiliations
- Berkeley Carbon Trading Project: Director
- Center for Environmental Public Policy: Research Fellow
- California Institute for Energy and Environment: Research Fellow
Current Projects
- Berkeley Carbon Trading Project
- Developing University of California's Carbon Offset Procurement Strategy
- Voluntary Registry Offsets Database
Working Papers
The California Air Resources Board’s US Forest offset protocol underestimates leakage
Working Paper (May 2019)
Analysis of projects generating 80% of total offset credits issued by ARB under its U.S. Forest projects offset protocol shows that 82% of the credits generated by these projects likely do not represent true emissions reductions, due to the protocol’s leakage accounting methods. The total quantity of over-crediting across these 36 projects equals approximately 80 million tons of CO2. For context, the U.S. Forest Protocol has generated 80% of the offset credits in California’s cap-and- trade program; the estimated over-crediting is equal to one third of the total expected effect of California’s cap-and-trade program on emissions during 2021-2030.
Hydropower in the CDM: Examining Additionality and Criteria for Sustainability
Working Paper: ERG-11-001 (November 2011)
Measuring Emissions Against an Alternative Future: Fundamental Flaws in the Structure of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism
Working Paper: ERG09-01 (December 2009)
Selected Publications
Instead of Carbon Offsets, We Need ‘Contributions’ to Forests
Libby Blanchard, William R.L. Anderegg, Barbara K. Haya. (2024, January 31) Stanford Social Innovation Review. Written in collaboration with the Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy at the University of Utah. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/forest-contributions-carbon-offsets
Because of problems created by the incentive structure for carbon offsets as a mode of climate mitigation, companies should switch to a “contributions” framing to preserve a crucial flow of climate investment.
Pervasive over-crediting from cookstoves offset methodologies
Annelise Gill-Wiehl, Daniel M. Kammen & Barbara K. Haya. (2024). Nature Sustainainability. DOI: 10.1038/s41893-023-01259-6
Cookstove carbon offset projects can progress multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including climate, energy, health, gender, poverty and deforestation. However, project emission reductions must be accurately or conservatively estimated to avoid undermining climate action and long-term SDG financing. Here we conduct a comprehensive, quantitative, quality assessment of offsets by comparing five cookstove methodologies with published literature and our own analysis. We find misalignment, in order of importance, with fraction of non-renewable biomass, firewood–charcoal conversion, stove adoption, stove usage, fuel consumption, stacking (using multiple stoves), rebound and emission factors. Additionality, leakage, permanence and overlapping claims require more research. We estimate that our project sample is over-credited 9.2 times. Gold Standard’s metered methodology, which directly monitors fuel use, is most aligned with our estimates (1.5 times over-credited) and has the largest potential for emission abatement and health benefit. We provide recommendations to align methodologies with current science and SDG progress.
You can find a summary of our findings, specific guidance for credit buyers and project developers, along with a list of quality cookstoves offset projects here: https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research-and-impact/centers/cepp/projects/berkeley-carbon-trading-project/cookstoves
Little evidence of management change in California’s forest offset program
Jared Stapp, Christoph Nolte, Matthew Potts, Matthias Baumann, Barbara K. Haya, Van Butsic. (2023). Communications Earth & Environment. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00984-2
Carbon offsets are widely promoted as a strategy to lower the cost of emission reductions, but recent findings suggest that offsets may not causally reduce emissions by the amount claimed. In a compliance market, offsets increase net emissions if they do not reflect real emission reductions beyond the baseline scenario. Few studies have examined the additionality of forest carbon offsets within California’s U.S. Forest Projects compliance offset protocol, one of the largest forest offset programs in the world. Here we examine additionality in California’s offset protocol. Since 2012, most of California’s offset credits (84%) have been awarded to improved forest management projects. Using a database of improved forest management project characteristics, locations, and remotely sensed forest disturbance data indicative of management activity, we find that projects have been primarily allocated to forests with high carbon stocks (127% higher than regional averages) and low historical disturbance (28% less disturbance than regional averages since 1985). A matching and panel regression analysis failed to show additionality, as project creation did not significantly lower disturbance rates 3 and 5 years after project implementation relative to similar non-project lands. These results indicate that California’s forest offset protocol may contribute to an increasingly large carbon debt.
Quality Assessment of REDD+ Carbon Credit Projects
Barbara K. Haya, Kelsey Alford-Jones, William R. L. Anderegg, Betsy Beymer-Farris, Libby Blanchard, Barbara Bomfim, Dylan Chin, Samuel Evans, Marie Hogan, Jennifer A. Holm, Kathleen McAfee, Ivy So, Thales A. P. West, Lauren Withey. (2023, September 15). Berkeley Carbon Trading Project. https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research-and-impact/centers/cepp/projects/berkeley-carbon-trading-project/redd
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is the project type with the most credits on the voluntary carbon market—about a quarter of all credits to date. REDD+ projects pay governments, organizations, communities, and individuals in forest landscapes (primarily tropical ones in the Global South) for activities that preserve forests and avoid forest-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
This study brings together an interdisciplinary team of political and natural ecologists and ecosystem modelers to comprehensively assess the quality of these credits. We assess their effectiveness at reducing deforestation, generating high-quality carbon credits, and protecting forest communities focusing on five key program elements: baselines, leakage, forest carbon accounting, durability, and safeguards.
As with other major offset project types, we found that current REDD+ methodologies likely generate credits that represent a small fraction of their claimed climate benefit. Estimates of emissions reductions were exaggerated across all quantification factors we reviewed when compared to the published literature and our independent quantitative assessment. Safeguard policies, presented as ensuring “no net harm” to forest communities, in practice have been treated as voluntary guidance.
When considering all evidence together, our overall conclusion is that REDD+ is ill-suited to the generation of carbon credits for use as offsets. We suggest a number of other measures that private actors can take or support that together can help to reduce tropical deforestation.
Comprehensive review of carbon quantification by improved forest management offset protocols
Barbara K. Haya, Samuel Evans, Letty Brown, Jacob Bukoski, Van Butsic, Bodie Cabiyo, Rory Jacobson, Amber Kerr, Matthew Potts and Daniel L. Sanchez. (2023). Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. DOI: 10.3389/ffgc.2023.958879
Improved forest management (IFM) has the potential to remove and store large quantities of carbon from the atmosphere. Around the world, 293 IFM offset projects have produced 11% of offset credits by voluntary offset registries to date, channeling substantial climate mitigation funds into forest management projects. This paper summarizes the state of the scientific literature for key carbon offset quality criteria—additionality, baselines, leakage, durability, and forest carbon accounting—and discusses how well currently used IFM protocols align with this literature. Our analysis identifies important areas where the protocols deviate from scientific understanding related to baselines, leakage, risk of reversal, and the accounting of carbon in forests and harvested wood products, risking significant over-estimation of carbon offset credits. We recommend specific improvements to the protocols that would likely result in more accurate estimates of program impact, and identify areas in need of more research. Most importantly, more conservative baselines can substantially reduce, but not resolve, over-crediting risk from multiple factors.
In the News
Media Citations
ASK NYT CLIMATE: Are Flight Offsets Worth It? A lot of them don’t work and some might even be harmful. But there are things you can do if you really have to fly.
New York Times, May 6, 2024
Can Forests Be More Profitable Than Beef? Cattle ranches have ruled the Amazon for decades. Now, new companies are selling something else: the ability of trees to lock away planet-warming carbon.
New York Times, May 2, 2024
Can Taylor Swift Offset the Climate Impact of Her Private Jets? It’s Complicated
Bloomberg, April 10, 2024
Can Carbon Offsets Save a Fragile Band of Belize’s Tropical Rainforest?
Inside Climate News, March 10, 2024
How Apple made its first ‘carbon neutral’ product
CNBC, October 6, 2023
Videos & Podcasts
TILclimate Podcast: About Carbon Offsets
by the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, November 17, 2022
FinReg Pod: Problem with Carbon Offsets
with Lee Reiners, Executive Director, Global Financial Markets Center, Duke University, March 2, 2022
Climate One Podcast: Clearing the Air on Climate Offsets
The Commonwealth Club, July 2, 2021
The Pie: Are Carbon Offsets Bogus?
University of Chicago Becker Friedman Institute & WBEZChicago, April 22, 2021
BBC World News: Do Carbon Offsets Work?
July 7, 2021
PRX Radio - Outside/In: The Forest for the Carbon
November 19, 2020
Climate One Podcast: Carbon Offsets: Privileged Pollution?
The Commonwealth Club, August 30, 2019
Last updated on 05/07/2024