Forest carbon buffer pools are inadequate as wildfire acreage quadruples by 2100

Forest carbon offset programs (like those under California's cap-and-trade or Verra's VCS) require projects to contribute a percentage of their credits to a 'buffer pool' as insurance against reversals -- events like wildfires, disease, or illegal logging that release stored carbon back into the atmosphere. A 2025 study in AGU's journal found that current buffer pool contributions do not adequately insure against disturbance-driven carbon losses. The fundamental flaw: none of the major protocols factor climate change itself into their buffer calculations. Annual wildfire acreage in the U.S. is projected to quadruple by 2100, but buffer pool allocations use historical fire data that dramatically understates future risk. In practice, the 2020-2021 western U.S. wildfire seasons alone depleted a significant share of California's forest offset buffer pool. Buyers of forest carbon credits -- companies like Delta, Shell, and major tech firms -- face the risk that their offsets will literally go up in smoke, with buffer pools too small to make them whole. This matters because forest offsets represent the cheapest category of carbon credits ($5-15/tonne), so corporations default to them to meet net-zero pledges, but structurally underinsured permanence means these pledges may be worthless. The problem persists because acknowledging climate-adjusted reversal risk would require doubling or tripling buffer pool contributions, which would make forest offsets economically uncompetitive.