Evidence of non-additional pig manure offset projects

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Highlights the need for better additionality tests and quantitative methods to assess offset integrity.

🏢実務担当者:Demonstrates the risk of non-additional offsets and the importance of thorough due diligence when using carbon credits.

🏛政策担当者:Provides clear evidence that current market rules fail to ensure additionality, supporting calls for regulatory reform.

Each carbon offset represents the claim that one ton of CO₂ emissions has been avoided or removed from the atmosphere. For offsets to deliver real climate benefits, the emission reductions they represent must be “additional,” meaning they would not have occurred without financial support from the carbon market. Despite its importance, additionality has proven difficult to achieve in practice. Prior research and investigative reporting have documented widespread non-additionality throughout the carbon market, yet quantitative assessments of additionality remain rare. Here, we use offset project documentation and government statistics to evaluate the financial additionality of pig manure management projects in China that capture and burn manure-derived methane. We find that 31 percent of the anticipated annual offset credits (5.95 million of 19.2 million) from the 74 projects we analyzed are likely non-additional because they ignore the financial benefits associated with generating energy from captured methane. Notably, our analysis relies only on project-reported data and publicly available government statistics, requiring no modeled counterfactuals. Our findings suggest that current market rules require significant reform to ensure that offsets represent real climate benefits.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.31223/x5vb6wfirst seen 2026-05-15 17:31:46