Professor Michael Wara questions whether it may be time to give up on carbon markets in this Nature article by Richard Hodson. 

Factories in Russia increased their production of industrial waste products and then claimed millions of carbon credits for destroying them after an international trading scheme went into effect.

Evidence published1 in Nature Climate Change reveals that several Russian chemical plants increased production of highly potent greenhouse-gas waste to “unprecedented levels” after they could reap financial benefits from their disposal.

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“This whole story makes a lot of sense to me,” says Michael Wara, an environmental-law researcher at Stanford Law School in California. “It happened in the CDM, and now they’ve shown that it’s happening with the JI programme. That’s not at all surprising given all the incentives.”

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Wara, however, says that it may be time to give up on carbon markets altogether. “The system didn’t really work very well,” he says. “People respond to incentives, ultimately, and this is an incentive that was created by the design of the system.”