Publications

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.  

Plummeting costs and technical performance improvements of offshore wind have dramatically enhanced the prospects for near-term power sector decarbonization. The high resource quality of offshore wind in the United States, coupled with rapidly falling technology costs, makes it possible for offshore wind to provide 10-25% of total electricity generation in the U.S. power system in 2050 without substantially impacting wholesale electricity costs. This report, 2035 Report 3.0, examines the prospect of achieving 90% clean electricity by 2035 and 95% clean electricity by 2050. Three scenarios — Low, Medium, and High Ambition — detail the electricity system impacts of increased offshore wind growth providing 10-25% of total generation.

Global carbon emissions must be halved by 2030 to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change (UN IPCC, 2023). While the United States continues to make progress on national decarbonization trends, with increases in clean energy produc- tion delivering cuts in power sector emissions, 2022 still saw a slight rise in the nation’s overall greenhouse gas emissions (Rhodium Group, 2023). For the U.S. to achieve net zero emissions, in which the nation emits no more carbon into the atmosphere than can be removed, the U.S. must significant- ly ramp up clean energy production while electrifying other sectors of the economy, such as buildings, transportation, and industry — likely causing U.S. electricity demand to triple by 2050. 

Around the globe, nations have begun to grasp the opportunity on the waters. The global pipeline of offshore wind projects that have been announced or are in pre-construction phases now stands at over 700 GW (GEM, 2023). The European Union will endeavor to build nearly 400 GW of offshore wind by 2050, while China installed 20 GW in the last two years alone (European Commission, 2023; GWEC, 2023). While the Biden Administration has a target to deploy 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030 and 110 GW by 2050, increasing offshore wind ambition beyond these current goals could accelerate the nation’s transition to net zero emissions.

Despite substantially decreasing the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19, COVID-19 booster vaccination rates remain low around the world. A key question for public health agencies is how to increase booster vaccination rates, particularly among high-risk groups. We conducted a large preregistered randomized controlled trial (with 57,893 study subjects) in a county health system in northern California to test the impact of personal reminder messages and small financial incentives of $25 on booster vaccination rates. We found that reminders increased booster vaccination rates within 2 wk by 0.86 percentage points (P = 0.000) or nearly 33% off the control mean of 2.65%. Monetary incentives had no additional impact on vaccination rates. The results highlight the potential of low-cost targeted messages, but not small financial incentives, to increase booster vaccination rates.

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.

Violence against women is a problem worldwide, with economic costs ranging from 1% to 4% of global gross domestic product. During the coronavirus disease 2019 lockdowns, the United Nations coined the term the Shadow Pandemic to describe the increase in global violence against women. Here, using variation in the intensity of government-mandated lockdowns in India, we show that domestic violence complaints increase significantly in districts with the strictest lockdown rules. We find similarly large increases in cybercrime complaints. However, rape and sexual assault complaints decrease in districts with the strictest lockdowns, consistent with decreased female mobility in public spaces, public transport and workplaces where they might be at greater risk for rape and sexual assault. Medium-term analysis shows that increases in domestic violence complaints persist 1 year later, while other complaints related to rape, sexual assault and cybercrimes return to pre-lockdown levels.

We examine the impacts of a sanitation program designed to eliminate open defecation in at-scale randomized field experiments in four countries: India, Indonesia, Mali, and Tanzania. The programs – all variants of the widely-used Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach - increase village private sanitation coverage in all four locations by 7–39 percentage points. We use the experimentally-induced variation in access to sanitation to identify the causal relationship between village sanitation coverage and child height. We find evidence of threshold effects where increases in child health of 0.3 standard deviations are realized once village sanitation coverage reaches 50–75%. There do not appear to be further gains beyond this threshold. These results suggest that there are large health benefits to achieving coverage levels well below the 100% coverage pushed by the CLTS movement. Open defecation decreased in all countries through improved access to private sanitation facilities, and additionally through increased use of sanitation facilities in Mali who implemented the most intensive behavior change intervention.

California’s cap-and-trade compliance offset market incentivizes forest managers to maintain elevated carbon stocks. It provides these incentives without enforcing standardized fire mitigation practices despite many projects being located in fire prone regions. Here, we evaluated the difference between management actions in California forests that participated in the carbon offset market versus those that engaged with state programs to reduce wildfire risk via fuel reduction treatments. Using remotely sensed data from the California Forest Observatory and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, we compared the vertical forest structure and vegetation canopy trends on forest offsets with forests that are receiving fuel treatment. We found California forests managed for carbon under the Improved Forest Management (IFM) program by the California Air Resources Board had higher levels of biomass than forests managed for fire risk reduction as indicated by 2016 lidar-estimated fuel loads. In addition, IFM-participating forests did not reduce their fuel loads between 2016 and 2020, whereas lands receiving grants for fuel management did, indicating that on average, the IFM projects were not engaging in fuel reduction efforts. However, despite the differences in fuel management between IFM projects and active fuel treatments, we found that both types of management saw a declining trend in vegetation greenness between 2015 and 2021. While declining greenness is expected of active fuel treatments associated with vegetation removal, such a trend in the case of IFM indicates additional wildfire risk. Managing forests for long-term carbon storage and sequestration requires consideration of fire risk mitigation. Given the little evidence of fuel reduction in the first decade of IFM projects implementation we question whether the century-long duration of carbon stocks in these offsets is realistic. We recommend that policymakers reevaluate the incentives directed at carbon stock preservation or expansion to better encompass the growing wildfire risk in California.

This paper explores the aggregate economic effects from India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), which provides up to 100 days of labor to rural laborers at the mandated minimum wage. We examine the within-district change to night-time lights and banking deposits using the staggered program rollout for identification. We find consistent and robust evidence that NREGS increased aggregate economic output by 1-2% per capita measured by night-time lights. This effect, however, is not equal across districts. We observe no positive effect of the program in poorer districts, illuminating an important source of heterogeneity.