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Leakage
Also known as: Carbon leakage, kebocoran karbon
TL;DR
When a carbon project displaces emissions to outside its boundary — e.g. avoided deforestation in one province driving increased clearing in another.
Full explainer
Leakage is the indirect emissions displacement that can occur when a carbon project successfully reduces emissions within its boundary but unintentionally drives equivalent (or greater) emissions outside it. For an Indonesian REDD+ project, the canonical leakage concern is that effectively protecting a forest in Central Kalimantan could simply shift logging activity to West Kalimantan or East Kalimantan, leaving net deforestation unchanged.
Modern methodologies (VM0048, VM0033) require leakage assessment as part of baseline setting and prescribe leakage deduction factors that scale with project type and ecosystem context. ICVCM CCP-eligible methodologies must demonstrate that leakage is either minimal, monitored, or accounted for. Leakage assessment is one of the harder MRV problems because the counterfactual (where would the activity have shifted to) is inherently unobservable.
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