Ground-Truth: Can Forest Carbon Protocols Ensure High-Quality Credits?

Abstract

Forests have substantial potential to help mitigate climate change. Private finance channeled through carbon credits is one way to fund that mitigation, but market-based approaches to forest carbon projects have been fraught to date. Public skepticism of forest carbon markets signals a need to closely scrutinize the system for certifying carbon credits. We rigorously reviewed and scored new and existing protocols for the voluntary and North American compliance carbon markets. We included protocols for forest projects engaging in improved forest management, afforestation/reforestation, and avoided planned forest conversion. Most protocols score poorly overall, and none were assessed as robust. Only one new protocol that had yet to issue credits at the time of our evaluation was assessed as satisfactory, owing to improvements in the approach to additionality demonstration. We conclude that existing protocols do not ensure carbon credits are consistently real, high-quality, and accurately represent 1 tonne of avoided, reduced, or removed emissions. We offer recommendations for how protocols can be strengthened using existing data and new tools to promote reliably high-quality credits. Continuing to rely on the status quo without such investments is a serious risk to climate change mitigation, and in our estimation, these proposed improvements would increase the likelihood that forests carbon projects can deliver their promised climate mitigation benefits.