Global Environmental Change最新文献

{"title":"Does stricter sewage treatment targets policy exacerbate the contradiction between effluent water quality improvement and carbon emissions mitigation? An evidence from China","authors":"Xuan Yang ,&nbsp;Cuncun Duan ,&nbsp;Bin Chen ,&nbsp;Saige Wang","doi":"10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102881","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102881","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Rapid expansion and upgrading of wastewater treatment facilities globally, driven by stricter wastewater policies, significantly contribute to carbon emissions. China has contributed 30 % of carbon emissions in the world, 1 % of which comes from wastewater treatment, necessitating more understanding of the impact of policies, especially the stringent “10-Point Water Plan” policy. From a micro perspective, this study uses the difference-in-differences method to analyze the impact of wastewater treatment policies on water and carbon issues in China’s 2894 wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), and delves into the heterogeneity, and mechanisms across various dimensions. The results show that stricter sewage treatment policy decrease effluent concentration of the chemical oxygen demand (COD) by 2.35 %, and also cause a 1.74 % rise in carbon emissions per 10,000 m³ of wastewater treated, intensifying the short-term contradiction, while the contradictions may fall in the long term. It is more significant in southern regions and the cities with lower environmental regulation intensity. Also, there are significant differences in different wastewater treatment technology and scale. Significant improvements in effluent water quality are observed in WWTPs with 100,000 to 200,000 m³/day capacity and those using biofilm treatment technology. Through mechanism analysis, reasonable expansion of urban pipelines and WWTPs, promotion of biofilm treatment technology, reduction of energy consumption, and improvement of pollutant reduction efficiency are feasible paths to improve water quality and reduce carbon emissions. This research provides a perspective on solving water-carbon contradictions in WWTPs, holding critical significance for urban wastewater treatment and carbon emission management.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":328,"journal":{"name":"Global Environmental Change","volume":"87 ","pages":"Article 102881"},"PeriodicalIF":8.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141453298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Progress and gaps in U.S. Adaptation policy at the local level","authors":"Bethany Tietjen ,&nbsp;Jenna Clark ,&nbsp;Erin Coughlan de Perez","doi":"10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102882","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102882","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>As climate impacts intensify, local governments across the United States are developing ad-hoc policies and plans to increase their resilience to climate hazards across all sectors, but there is limited assessment of what policies currently exist in U.S. communities to adapt to climate change. In this article, we develop a novel policy inventory for adaptation policies in five U.S. counties. Using a comprehensive definition of adaptation policy that includes policies that do not explicitly mention climate change, and a new taxonomy for coding these policies in a U.S. context, we identify 508 policies across these five locations. Through analysis of these policy inventories and interviews with local stakeholders, we identify four thematic policy gaps, as well as a major gap in policies to address extreme heat across all five locations. This first-of-its-kind climate policy assessment provides both a novel methodology to benchmark progress as well as recommendations for investment in local adaptation to climate change across the United States<em>.</em></p></div>","PeriodicalId":328,"journal":{"name":"Global Environmental Change","volume":"87 ","pages":"Article 102882"},"PeriodicalIF":8.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378024000864/pdfft?md5=3777419321cf6677ee8a5fde10eb3e5c&pid=1-s2.0-S0959378024000864-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141539695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Progress in understanding the social dimensions of desalination and future research directions","authors":"Brian F. O’Neill ,&nbsp;Joe Williams","doi":"10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102877","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102877","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The piece outlines the contributions of key works in the field of the political ecology of desalination over the past decade. We note that the field is diverse in terms of contributions from geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and public policy scholars. The research to date has been concerned with the ways in which the deployment of desalting techniques can reflect and reinforce social processes of inequality, political power and economic flows. In this way, desalination has been opened up for intellectual debate beyond technical considerations of the desalting industry and engineers. A critical perspective that complements the recent discussions of environmental harm caused by the desalination industry has emerged as well across a number of global and transboundary contexts. A number of themes emerged that will continue to be of interest to scholars and that need to be addressed in the years ahead. First, desalination intersects transboundary water governance and geopolitics between different water uses and emerges from complex assemblages of local and global actors, including financial actors, water companies, governments, technologies, and natural forces. Second, critical scholarship on desalination needs to continue to pay attention to the interests in and overarching patterns of, the Green New Deal and Blue Economy, each of which intersect with the worlds of academia and policymaking, and involve issues of climate adaptation and mitigation. Third, questions about equity remain with desalination as it is a solution deeply imbricated in the unequal distribution of resources, and questions about representation in decision-making remain. Fourth, research on finance and infrastructure have been at the core of critical desalting research and should remain so. Fifth, there is a growing heterogeneity in terms of research in types of desalting, from reverse osmosis to inland desalting to nuclear and more. This variety will make for rich research for the years ahead. Our hope is that the epistemological, theoretical, and methodological flexibility of this area of research will remain a strong point continuing its rigor, as well as the already robust collegiality among scholars in this interesting, and still nascent field.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":328,"journal":{"name":"Global Environmental Change","volume":"87 ","pages":"Article 102877"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141424408","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Variation in under-5 mortality attributable to anomalous precipitation during El Niño–Southern Oscillation cycles: Assessment of the intertemporal inequality in child health","authors":"Tao Xue ,&nbsp;Jingyi Wu ,&nbsp;Fangzhou Li ,&nbsp;Mingkun Tong ,&nbsp;Hengyi Liu ,&nbsp;Wulin Yang ,&nbsp;Pengfei Li","doi":"10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102879","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102879","url":null,"abstract":"<div><h3>Objective</h3><p>To explore the health effect of anomalous precipitation on deaths among children younger than 5 years (under-5 deaths) in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).</p></div><div><h3>Methods</h3><p>Based on a sample of 1.6 million children from 56 LMICs, we conducted a sibling-matched Cox regression model to examine the association between under-5 deaths and anomalous precipitation in annual average. We established a nonlinear exposure–response function to characterize heterogeneity in the association, and checked its robustness by conducting a few sensitivity analyses. To illustrate absolute risks embedded in the complex climate-health linkage, across 100 LMICs, we calculated burden of under-5 deaths attributable to anomalous precipitation, and showed how the burden varied with the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a well-known predictable climate pattern affecting the rainfall cycle. We focused on the intertemporal inequality in the attributable burden.</p></div><div><h3>Results</h3><p>The epidemiological analyses showed a robust negative association between anomalous precipitation and under-5 deaths for arid areas, and a potentially positive association for humid areas. The anomalous precipitation was significantly associated to an intertemporal inequality in under-5 mortality. Across the 100 LMICs, 26.7% or 134 million under-5 children lived in ENSO-sensitive areas. Among them, anomalous rainfall decreased under-5 deaths by 46,246 (CI: 24,599–68,703) during an El Niño year (October 2015 to September 2016), and increased under-5 deaths by 77,505 (CI: 55,890–99,815) during a La Niña year (March 2008 to February 2009) across the 100 LMICs.</p></div><div><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>Anomalous precipitation can lead to intertemporal inequality in child health. Healthcare resources should be allocated according to predicted variability in precipitation, such as ENSO-mediated extreme rainfall.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":328,"journal":{"name":"Global Environmental Change","volume":"87 ","pages":"Article 102879"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141424407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Discourses of climate inaction undermine public support for 1.5 °C lifestyles","authors":"Catherine Cherry ,&nbsp;Caroline Verfuerth ,&nbsp;Christina Demski","doi":"10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102875","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102875","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Urgent action to tackle the climate crisis will only be possible with significant public support for radical lifestyle change. Arguments that seek to delay climate action and justify inadequate mitigation efforts, often termed ‘discourses of delay’, are widespread within political and media debate on climate change. Here we report the results of novel public deliberation and visioning workshops, conducted across the UK in 2020/2021 to explore visions of a 1.5 °C future. We found that despite very strong public support for many low-carbon lifestyle strategies in principle, entrenched discourses of delay are limiting beliefs that a fair, low-carbon future is possible. Consisting of four overarching narratives of climate inaction (Resisting personal responsibility; Rejecting the need for urgency; Believing change is impossible; and Defending the social contract), this public discourse of delay is characterised by three distinct repertoires (each with its own emotional resonance), that act to weaken support for climate action by producing defensive responses to discussions of low-carbon lifestyle change and undermining public sense of agency. We argue that countering these narratives, and the defensive responses they invoke, is essential for achieving meaningful public action on climate change.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":328,"journal":{"name":"Global Environmental Change","volume":"87 ","pages":"Article 102875"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378024000797/pdfft?md5=6f29a9a1cf01543c8c433b5c5fb73709&pid=1-s2.0-S0959378024000797-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141423859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Impact of lifestyle, human diet and nutrient use efficiency in food production on eutrophication of global aquifers and surface waters","authors":"A.F. Bouwman ,&nbsp;A.H.W. Beusen ,&nbsp;J.C. Doelman ,&nbsp;E. Stehfest ,&nbsp;H. Westhoek","doi":"10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102874","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102874","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>A spatially explicit (0.5 degree resolution) analysis is presented of the impact of human lifestyle, diet and nutrient use efficiency in food production and wastewater treatment on exceedance of threshold concentrations for nitrate in groundwater, and total N and total P concentrations in surface water, as well as criteria for their ratio. This analysis starts from the middle-of-the-road (SSP2) and the sustainability (SSP1) Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSP), focusing on the year 2050. The scenarios with changed lifestyle assume a reduction of food wastage and a low-meat diet for all world inhabitants, implying large reductions of meat and milk consumption and production in industrialized countries. Scenarios with improved nutrient use efficiencies assume maximum achievable efficiencies under practical conditions. The SSP2 scenario combined with assumptions on lifestyle and human diet leads to improvement in industrialized countries only, and increased levels in many other regions. A strong improvement is achieved in SSP1, but not in many developing countries, and SSP1 combined with changed lifestyle leads to improvement of groundwater and surface water quality in industrialized countries only. Therefore, changed lifestyle needs to be combined with efforts to improve the efficiency in food production systems and wastewater treatment to achieve reductions of the area affected by groundwater contamination and eutrophication of surface waters. Reduction strategies need to find a balance between N and P, since it is easier to reduce N in rivers to levels below the threshold than P.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":328,"journal":{"name":"Global Environmental Change","volume":"87 ","pages":"Article 102874"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378024000785/pdfft?md5=2372a642dcc939639089c96de7d58d5a&pid=1-s2.0-S0959378024000785-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141328580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Migrants as sustainability actors: Contrasting nation, city and migrant discourses and actions","authors":"Claudia Fry ,&nbsp;Emily Boyd ,&nbsp;Mark Connaughton ,&nbsp;W. Neil Adger ,&nbsp;Maria Franco Gavonel ,&nbsp;Caroline Zickgraf ,&nbsp;Sonja Fransen ,&nbsp;Dominique Jolivet ,&nbsp;Anita H. Fábos ,&nbsp;Ed Carr","doi":"10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102860","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102860","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Although it is widely recognized that migration is socially transformative, the potential contributions of migrants to transformations towards sustainability in their destination areas are often overlooked in mainstream discourse on environmentalism and sustainability. Here we seek to identify current narratives of migrants and sustainability across individual, urban, and national scales. Migrants are commonly framed in public policy as having no or even negative impacts on sustainability. The study hypotheses that the lived experience of sustainability by migrants within urban destinations differ from dominant discourses and perceptions of migrant populations within societies. We test and document such divergence using data from 21 interviews with key stakeholders from the city and Swedish national level, an attitudinal survey of 895 migrants and non-migrants in Malmö, Sweden; and a media analysis of local and national Swedish newspapers. Survey results show that migrants engage more extensively with a number of sustainability actions compared to non-migrants culminating in new insights on ‘migrants as sustainability actors’. By contrasting individual scale practices against urban to national sustainability narratives, the study illuminates current barriers to and the potential of migrants to play a transformative role in progress towards sustainability that is unrecognized in dominant policy discourses. To tap into this potential, the study emphasizes that sustainability policy across scales should embrace plurality and migration as fundamental parts of progress towards sustainability.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":328,"journal":{"name":"Global Environmental Change","volume":"87 ","pages":"Article 102860"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378024000645/pdfft?md5=4457d6da679cd1e4d5d705e2cfda6174&pid=1-s2.0-S0959378024000645-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141324077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Biological invasions as burdens to primary economic sectors","authors":"Anna J. Turbelin ,&nbsp;Emma J. Hudgins ,&nbsp;Jane A. Catford ,&nbsp;Ross N. Cuthbert ,&nbsp;Christophe Diagne ,&nbsp;Melina Kourantidou ,&nbsp;David Roiz ,&nbsp;Franck Courchamp","doi":"10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102858","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102858","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Many human-introduced alien species economically impact industries worldwide. Management prioritisation and coordination efforts towards biological invasions are hampered by a lack of comprehensive quantification of costs to key economic sectors. Here, we quantify and estimate global invasion costs to seven major sectors and unravel the introduction pathways of species causing these costs — focusing mainly on primary economic sectors: agriculture, fisheries and forestry. From 1970 to 2020, costs reported in the InvaCost database as pertaining to <em>Agriculture, Fisheries</em>, and <em>Forestry</em> totaled $509 bn, $1.3 bn, and $134 bn, respectively (in 2017 United States dollars). Pathways of costly species were diverse, arising predominantly from cultural and agricultural activities, through unintentional contaminants with trade, and often impacted different sectors than those for which species were initially introduced. Costs to <em>Agriculture</em> were pervasive and greatest in at least 37 % (n = 46/123) of the countries assessed, with the United States accumulating the greatest costs for primary sectors ($365 bn), followed by China ($101 bn), and Australia ($36 bn). We further identified 19 countries highly economically reliant on <em>Agriculture</em>, <em>Fisheries</em>, and <em>Forestry</em> that are experiencing massive economic impacts from biological invasions, especially in the Global South. Based on an extrapolation to fill cost data gaps, we estimated total global costs ranging from at least $517–1,400 bn for <em>Agriculture</em>, $5.7–6.5 bn for <em>Fisheries</em>, and $142–768 bn for <em>Forestry</em>, evidencing substantial underreporting in the <em>Forestry</em> sector in particular. Burgeoning global invasion costs challenge sustainable development and highlight the need for improved management action to reduce future impacts on industry.</p></div><div><h3>Significance</h3><p>With rapidly rising biological invasion rates, efficient management is critical for economic and environmental impact mitigation. Specifically, improved quantification of the economic cost of biological invasions to the world’s primary economic sectors could provide crucial information for policymakers who must prioritise actions to limit ongoing and future impacts. We show that since 1970, over $600 bn in impacts has been incurred across <em>Agriculture</em>, <em>Fisheries</em> and <em>Forestry</em>, with the largest share reported in <em>Agriculture</em>. We further identify 19 countries, which rely heavily on primary sectors, facing comparatively high impacts from invasions, requiring urgent action. However, gaps in cost reporting across invasive taxa and countries suggest that these impacts are grossly underestimated. Proactive prioritisation by policymakers is needed to mitigate future impacts to primary sectors.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":328,"journal":{"name":"Global Environmental Change","volume":"87 ","pages":"Article 102858"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141315400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From grey to green? Tipping a coal region incrementally","authors":"Franziska Mey ,&nbsp;Arno Weik ,&nbsp;Johan Lilliestam","doi":"10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102862","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102862","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>A rapid and full decarbonisation of both energy and industry is essential to meet the targets in the Paris agreement, which brings coal- and carbon-intensive regions under significant pressure. Some regions have advanced in their transition and can provide insights in the system change processes. In this paper, we investigate the socio-economic transition processes of Essen and Duisburg as part of the wider structural change in the Ruhr Region/ Germany. We explore causes and effects of their trajectories in the last 30 + years and identify differences in outcome as a function of the interventions and/or contextual differences, while investigating whether either city crossed a tipping point in their transition process (yet). Therefore, we specifically evaluate the cities’ development trajectories by seeking evidence for “no”, “incremental” or “radical or tipping” changes in sets of qualitative and quantitative indicators.</p><p>Our analysis shows that both cities experienced incremental changes in their demographic, economic and political trajectories but we found no evidence for either city to have crossed a tipping point in their transition process yet. However, distinct developments in the cities’ policy narratives and visions indicate qualitative changes while putting them on different development trajectories potentially leading to tipping points in the future. Our study shows that the sequence of interventions and timing are important factors for the trajectory of a region determining the quality of societal change. It also suggests that radical change and tipping are the exception rather than the rule, especially in the highly complex social systems of cities.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":328,"journal":{"name":"Global Environmental Change","volume":"87 ","pages":"Article 102862"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378024000669/pdfft?md5=06d530ef305c637f7680cac599389e43&pid=1-s2.0-S0959378024000669-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141315399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Methodological issues with deforestation baselines compromise the integrity of carbon offsets from REDD+","authors":"Thales A.P. West ,&nbsp;Barbara Bomfim ,&nbsp;Barbara K. Haya","doi":"10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102863","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102863","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The number of voluntary interventions seeking to generate carbon offsets by reducing deforestation and forest degradation, generally known as REDD+ projects, has increased significantly over the past decade. Offsets are issued based on project performance in comparison to a baseline scenario representing the expected deforestation in a project area in the absence of REDD+. Baselines from most ongoing REDD+ projects were established following four methodologies approved by the largest voluntary carbon offset certification scheme worldwide, the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) from Verra. These methodologies often rely on oversimplified assumptions about deforestation that remain overlooked by project developers, certification bodies, and buyers. Here, we explore what these methodological assumptions are and their implications. We then construct alternative deforestation baselines for four ongoing VCS-certified projects using the four VCS-REDD+ methodologies and examine how they differ. Overall, we observe large discrepancies among the project baselines. On average, the highest baseline value we calculate for each project is more than 14 times greater than the lowest value across the four projects studied. This illustrates the lack of robustness and consistency across the VCS-REDD+ methodologies. The results also call into question the additionality of carbon offsets issued based on these methodologies. New baseline methods need to be urgently developed if voluntary REDD+ projects are to reliably estimate their additional contribution to climate change mitigation. The incorporation of causal inference methods represents current best practices in measuring the efficacy of REDD+ interventions. Regrettably, these methods remain largely overlooked by project developers, certification standards, and governmental and international bodies. Dynamic baselines developed by independent analysts could potentially enable project developers to distinguish the impacts of the REDD+ intervention from confounding factors and properly estimate additionality.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":328,"journal":{"name":"Global Environmental Change","volume":"87 ","pages":"Article 102863"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378024000670/pdfft?md5=f9ab68170469412f6219f5074f7efe3e&pid=1-s2.0-S0959378024000670-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141303377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}