  Independent retrospective analyses of the effectiveness of reducing
deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) projects are vital to ensure
climate change benefits are being delivered. A recent study in Science by West
et al. (1) appeared therefore to be a timely alert that the majority of
projects operating in the 2010s failed to reduce deforestation rates.
Unfortunately, their analysis suffered from major flaws in the choice of
underlying data, resulting in poorly matched and unstable counterfactual
scenarios. These were compounded by calculation errors, biasing the study
against finding that projects significantly reduced deforestation. This flawed
analysis of 24 projects unfairly condemned all 100+ REDD projects, and risks
cutting off finance for protecting vulnerable tropical forests from destruction
at a time when funding needs to grow rapidly.
