News

A newly recognised Official Statistic from the UK government integrates our recently published LIFE biodiversity metric to track the environmental impacts of our consumption.The environmental impact of our consumption habits is becoming more widely understood. This growing interest is reflected in internationally-agreed consumption targets in both …

Members of 4C have joined with economics and conservation science colleagues in an opinion piece in Science highlighting the problem that efforts to safeguard and restore biodiversity in places which produce food or wood risk simply displacing that production elsewhere. Such leakage is acknowledged as a significant issue in carbon projects, but is …

We are excited to share this position paper from 4C on ‘Scientific credibility for high-integrity voluntary carbon markets’, based on our reflections on our work over the past three years, and setting out our hopes and ambitions for nature-based carbon credits and the Voluntary Carbon Market in 2025.We are encouraged by progress at COP29 to operati…

Our work on LIFE (a metric for mapping the impact of land-cover change on global extinctions) is now available in the proceedings of the Royal Society Philosophical Transactions B. As with all of our outputs, the code and datasets are available under liberal licenses (within the bounds of the restrictions imposed on us by the datasets we used to co…

Two peer-reviewed articles from 4C in the past few weeks have spun up discussions around the future of financing deforestation avoidance and afforestation projects.A commentary in Nature Sustainability on "Nature-based Credits at a Crossroads" discusses the principles that should form the basis of scientifically credit nature based carbon credits. …

Nature-based solutions (NbS) present a promising approach for protecting biodiversity while meeting ambitious climate targets, but there is growing international concern that they are sometimes linked to significant justice and equity concerns. Current reporting practices often require only superficial descriptions of how projects approach justice …

Carbon credits purchased in the voluntary carbon market allow unavoidable emissions (such as from international flights for essential travel) to be offset by an equivalent climate benefit, such as avoiding emissions from tropical deforestation. However, many concerns regarding the credibility of these offsetting claims have been raised. Moreover, t…

The University of Cambridge's annual sustainability report for last year is now available online here, and provides details of the University's efforts towards reducing our collective impact on the planet.  4C has been working closely with the University towards a common understanding of when and where offsets should be used. To quote the report (p…

LIFE is a new metric that's like a crystal ball for global biodiversity. A big challenge facing the world today is global consumption causing land cover changes like deforestation, which reduces habitat for wildlife and makes them more vulnerable to extinction.  Now, picture a policymaker anywhere in the world using the new LIFE metric to see how c…

A new way to price carbon credits could encourage desperately needed investment in forest preservation and boost vital progress towards net-zero.Research published today in Nature Climate Change by the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits.A new approach to valuing the carbon storage potential of natural habitats aims to help restore faith in offset …

Join us in the fight against climate change!We're seeking a passionate Post-doc Researcher to join our team here at Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits (4C) for a two-year project. Working with our partners at re.green, you'll play a key role in developing a remote sensing framework to measure leakage from forest restoration efforts in Brazil.Quali…

Prof Keshav, one of the directors of 4C, has spent the past decade reducing the carbon cost of energy, buildings and transport. But that's only part of the puzzle: we still need to remove carbon from the atmosphere.In this video, Keshav explains how forestry and nature-based solutions are a 'two-for-one', supporting biodiversity as well as removing…

This news article was written by Andrew Benton and was first published by the Cambridge Conservation Research Institute.A new study by James Ball and colleagues in the Cambridge Conservation Research Institute has developed a computer vision method for delineating tree crowns in tropical forests from aerial RGB imagery, with the new approach availa…

This draft document now available on Cambridge Open Engage describes the methodology developed by 4C for estimating the number of credits to be issued to a project in the tropical moist forest (TMF) biome. It expands on the methodology outlined in the Cambridge Offset Working Group report, and forms the basis for how we are evaluating projects with…

A letter to Science, co-authored by 17 conservation and climate researchers, argues that carbon credits can be a valuable tool for climate change mitigation and forest conservation, but their success depends on improving their credibility.The co-authors are from the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Exeter, Bangor, São Paulo, North Carolina, VU Am…