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The market for voluntary carbon offsets is evolving quickly, with many organizations that offer offsets holding themselves to different project standards. These variances have led to increased scrutiny and skepticism of the voluntary carbon offset market, and The Nature Conservancy agrees that there are serious challenges that can and must be addressed to produce verifiable offsets.
The Nature Conservancy’s voluntary carbon offset program produces verifiable reductions in greenhouse gases. This program is critically important as an example for carbon markets where conserved and restored forests are valued for the greenhouse gasses they store and the habitats and natural services — such as healthy watersheds — they provide.
Contributions to the voluntary carbon offset program help fund Conservancy projects that are specifically designed to capture and store carbon and thus, help reduce the build up of greenhouse gases that are causing climate change. Contributions will be used to set aside land, provide funding for forest conservation, plant trees and measure and verify the amount of carbon captured and stored over the next 70 years, by when the forest will have matured.
Contributions will support the investment necessary to protect land and plant trees that will grow and capture and store carbon offsets over the course of 70 years.
The Challenges of Carbon Offsets
The Conservancy’s voluntary carbon offset program has been designed and implemented by climate change experts and forest scientists with years of experience, analyzing, measuring and verifying forest carbon projects. The voluntary carbon offset program’s projects involved in the program address the technical concerns that are raised about forest carbon projects, including:
- Permanence, which, simply stated, is the life of the project. It wouldn’t help to reduce climate change much if a tree were planted one year only to be cut the next. The most desirable forest carbon projects are those where the restored and protected forests are likely to remain intact indefinitely.
- Additionality, which refers to the amount of carbon dioxide captured, stored or prevented from reaching the atmosphere compared to what would happen without the project. In other words, is this something that would have happened anyway?
- Leakage, which occurs when emissions avoided within a site are not eliminated, but rather displaced to another location, or when carbon capture and storage at a site leads to land clearing elsewhere.
- Measurement and monitoring, which entails periodic field measurements of forest growth and associated capture and storage of carbon.
- Verification, which occurs throughout the life of a project to ensure it meets its intended goals of carbon storage and that all additionality, measurement, leakage and permanence requirements are being met
Meeting Challenges with High Standards
The projects in the Conservancy’s voluntary carbon program address these issues in the following ways:
- Permanence — The Conservancy is putting into place several safeguards to protect the carbon stored in these forests now and into the future. We will maintain a conservation easement or similar protections on all forest carbon projects. This will require that the land will remain forested for future generations.
In addition, the Conservancy is withholding a percentage of the carbon benefits from each project entered into the voluntary carbon offset program, and will not take offset contributions related to these benefits. This is designed to make up for any natural damage that could occur to the project down the road.
For instance, if trees are damaged or killed in an ice storm, or another natural event, offsets in the reserve will essentially replace them within the offset program. This reserve will also provide protection if the project does not meet the expected carbon sequestration performance goals.
- Additionality — The forest protection and restoration projects The Nature Conservancy carries out are not business-as-usual activities. In each project we calculate the carbon storage that would have occurred without the project (known as the baseline carbon storage or the carbon storage in the business-as-usual scenario) and subtract that from the carbon benefits. A third party verifies that the project is not a business-as-usual activity and the calculation of the baseline carbon storage.
- Leakage — The Nature Conservancy will target projects that will minimize the likelihood of displacing carbon emissions. For example we focus our forest restoration projects on unproductive crop or grazing land, where native trees will grow very well, so relatively little activity will be displaced. The Conservancy will also discount the carbon benefits from forest carbon projects from the outset in order to account for leakage that may occur.
- Measurement and monitoring — Field measurements of forest growth will be undertaken and will be based upon well-established forest inventory and scientific principles. These measurements will be made available for review.
- Verification — Every year local Conservancy stewardship staff will ensure that the projects are being implemented successfully. Staff will measure carbon storage for every project within the carbon offset program for its expected carbon sequestration performance goals, and those measurements will be verified once every five years. Participants in the carbon storage program will receive regular reports from this testing — as well as any other news regarding the program — as it is warranted.
If you have any additional questions, concerns, or comments about the standards used in the offset program, please don’t hesitate to contact us and tell us what you think about climate change, forest carbon projects, and the carbon market.
Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Byron Jorjorian (bald eagle); Photo © Byron Jorjorian (conservation workers in the Lower Mississippi Valley).
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