FEATURE: New report concludes forest carbon methods 'too weak' to ensure high quality credits

Quantum Commodity Intelligence - Most forest carbon protocols, including a methodology approved for the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market's (IC-VCM's) Core Carbon Principles (CCPs) labels, are too weak to ensure that the credits generated can be deemed high quality, a new study has found.

The study — 'Ground Truth: An Assessment of Forest Carbon Credit Protocols' — carried out by US academics for the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) non-profit raised concerns over permanence, additionality, leakage and weak monitoring and verification.

"Given the large volume of forest carbon credits in the market, it's time to overhaul these protocols," said Kathy Fallon, director of the land systems programme at CATF.

"The good news is that while stronger federal oversight would be helpful, it isn't needed to improve protocols. Registries and states can revise protocols to implement our recommendations, and companies with climate targets can demand improved quality," she said.

The study assessed 20 protocols — although some cover more than one project type and so there were 30 scores in total — used in compliance and voluntary markets in North America and 'scored' them zero to six from fundamentally flawed to exemplary.

The highest score achieved was a three — satisfactory — for version one of US-based registry Verra's VM0045 'Methodology for Improved Forest Management Using Dynamic Matched Baselines from National Forest Inventories', for which there is now an updated version (1.1) that wasn't assessed.

The version of VM0045 assessed was deemed 'robust' for determining the baseline scenario, reassessment of the baseline over time, the sampling frequency for monitoring, and on the data sources for monitoring and credit issuance. However, aspects of the method, particularly in relation to the buffer pool, and on the requirements for showing additionality, scored 'weak'.

Overall, weak was the score for the vast majority of the protocols (86.7%), with 10% achieving a 'very weak' rating. The three in the latter category are Canadian province British Columbia's Forest Carbon Offset Protocol (V.2.0), Climate Action Reserve's Mexico Forest Protocol (V3.0), and Plan Vivo's PM001 Agriculture and Forestry Carbon Benefit Assessment Methodology (V1.0).

"Most protocols inadequately account for risks to carbon storage over time such as wildfires, pests, and land use change, allow for too much developer discretion in claims about what would have happened in the absence of the project and/or do not robustly account for how project development could affect forest carbon storage in other locations," the report said.

But it noted that the weaknesses vary from method to method, thereby "making a single simple fix elusive". Therefore, to "ensure credits are consistently high-quality, all protocols need to be strong in all the components evaluated in this assessment", the authors said.

One of the methods with a weak rating is version one of Verra's VM0047 Afforestation, Reforestation, and Revegetation, which was approved under the IC-VCM's CCPs in December last year. Some parts of VM0047 were scored as robust.

However, much of the assessment found the method weak and in the case of the requirements for incorporating uncertainty into the baseline scenario, very weak. A new version of VM0047 released on May 14 wasn't assessed.

The authors of the report noted several areas that could be improved by using the "best available science". They include specifying the use of up-to-date, place-based data maintained by independent entities to improve the accuracy and reliability of carbon quantification.

In addition, the report said methods should be developed to account for changing conditions, such as climate impacts and economic pressure, when estimating the impact of the project intervention over time. Protocols should also be structured to enable timely updates to risk ratings, new methods for carbon monitoring, and key parameters to reflect the best available science.

Monitoring and verification should be enhanced, transparency increased, and protocols should evolve with improvements in science and technology, the report said. There should also be improved transparency, alleviation of verifier conflicts of interest, and considerations of non-greenhouse gas climate impacts.