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Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) has gained international attention over the past decade. There are ongoing discussions about whether and how projects should be integrated into national climate change mitigation efforts under the Paris Agreement. We find that the crediting baselines assume consistently higher deforestation than counterfactual forest loss in synthetic control sites. This gap is partially due to decreased deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon during the early implementation phase of the REDD+ projects considered here. This suggests that forest carbon finance must strike a balance between controlling conservation investment risk and ensuring the environmental integrity of carbon emission offsets.
