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 managed to produce real offsets.  

The Nature Conservancy’s voluntary carbon offset program produces measurable reductions in greenhouse gases. This program is critically important as an example for carbon markets where conserved forests are valued for the greenhouse gasses they store and the habitats and natural services — such as healthy watersheds — they provide.

Contributions to the offset program help fund Conservancy projects that are specifically designed to sequester carbon and thus, help reduce the effects of climate change caused by carbon emissions. Contributions will be used to set aside land, provide funding for forest conservation, plant trees and measure and verify the amount of carbon sequestered over the next 70 years, by when the forest will have matured.

The Challenges of Carbon Offsets

The Conservancy’s carbon offset program has been designed and implemented by climate change experts and forest scientists with years of experience, analyzing, measuring and verifying carbon sequestration projects. The projects involved in the program address the technical concerns that have been raised about carbon sequestration 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 carbon sequestration projects are those where the restored 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 shifted to another location, or when sequestration 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.
• Standards of verification, which occurs throughout the life of a project to ensure it meets its intended goals of carbon sequestration and that all additionality, measurement, leakage and permanence requirements are being met.

Meeting Challenges with High Standards

The projects in the Conservancy’s offset program address these issues in the following ways:

• Permanence — The Conservancy is putting into place several safeguards to protect the carbon stored in these new forests now and into the future.  We will maintain a conservation easement on all carbon offset projects. This will require that the land will forested for future generations.

  In addition, the Conservancy is withholding a percentage of the carbon benefits from each project entered into the carbon offset program, and will not take offset contributions related to these benefits. This will 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 costs of the projects in the carbon offset program are funded via carbon offset contributions. As revenue from carbon offset contributions provides the funding to pay the costs not only of setting aside land for these projects, but also of planting trees and managing the project, the project’s implementation would not have been possible without this source of revenue. 

  We are aware of the intense scrutiny directed at forest carbon projects and agree that there are numerous challenges that need to be managed. Drawing on our 12 years of experience in the forest carbon market, the Conservancy is uniquely prepared to address questions of additionality that are critical to establishing the integrity of carbon benefits. In particular, our approach adds new lands to protected status, demonstrating that the generation and continued storage of forest carbon can be attributed directly to your participation in the program.

• Leakage — For projects entered into the carbon offset program, the Conservancy will focus our tree planting on unproductive crop or grazing land, but where native trees will grow very well, so relatively little activity will be displaced.  Second, the Conservancy will discount carbon sequestered from offset projects from the outset in order to account for leakage that may occur. This is a conservative way to account for leakage and is in accordance with Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS) standards and independent economic studies.  
   

  Put simply, targeting our activities on unproductive crop lands will help to minimize leakage, and the Conservancy is withholding from the carbon offset program a portion of the carbon dioxide stored in each project to account for any unforseen land clearing that may occur elsewhere as a result of these projects.

• Measurement and monitoring — Field measurements of forest growth will be undertaken once every five years, and will be based upon well-established forest inventory and scientific principles. These measurements will be made available for review.
• Standards of 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. 
   

  In addition, The Conservancy is pursing certification under the VCS for carbon storage and are designing program projects to meet standards set out by the Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Alliance (CCB).

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).