Our Response to Verra & REDD+ Backlash: The Need for More Accurate Carbon Accounting
Treeconomy
A carbon removal company harnessing technology to quantify and generate financial gain from natural capital.
The recent article in The Guardian reported that more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets certified by Verra are worthless. A light was shed on some of the issues with crediting volumes from REDD+ (avoided deforestation) schemes - particularly on the selection of project baseline scenarios. These issues are not exactly new news to most market participants, but they have brought attention to the need for a better carbon accounting system.
Issues with REDD+ & Carbon Accounting
The article focuses on the issue of REDD+ schemes being rooted in the selection of baselines. While the baseline is crucial, it is only part of the equation. To us, the most critical part is often missed - the measurement of the current carbon stock in the forest. Without accurate carbon accounting, it is difficult to determine the real impact of carbon projects.
Better governance and scrutiny are absolutely required in the selection of baselines for REDD+ projects, including dynamic baselining and integration into jurisdictional baselines & monitoring systems. However, a lot more still needs to be done on absolute and carbon stock assessments across these projects.
Our Focus on Afforestation & Restoration Projects
The last two weeks have been filled with questions about how the Guardian's announcement impacts our business. For clarity for all stakeholders, Treeconomy doesn't develop REDD+ or avoided emissions projects. Instead, our focus is on afforestation and ecosystem restoration projects that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
We believe that a worthwhile project must have an ecological foundation and a carbon removal element. This is why we centre on afforestation and regeneration of ecosystems such as rewilding, mine reclamation, peatland restoration, and mangrove planting.
Our goal of removing carbon dioxide is grounded in climate science. A global independent scientific assessment of carbon dioxide removal states that scaling up CDR is an urgent priority. This is in order to reduce CO2 emissions quickly and to meet the Paris Agreement's temperature target of 2°C (all backed by IPCC models).
It is also much “easier” to demonstrate that the projects we focus on are additional and more climate-effective than the REDD+ projects that are referred to in the article. Unlike REDD+ projects, in afforestation, we do not have to model and evidence counterfactual baseline scenarios. Since there is no parallel universe for REDD+ projects we will never know the real number. Meanwhile, afforestation projects had no trees and now, with our intervention, there are trees.
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We Are Building a Better System for Carbon Accounting
However, even if we target “simpler” projects, the same problem of poor carbon accounting persists. To mature nature-based carbon removal we need to invest in trust-creating systems. At Treeconomy, we have recognised the need for a better system of carbon accounting. This is why we are building and continuously developing Sherwood - our monitoring platform. Its purpose is to ensure accurate carbon accounting and project monitoring using high-resolution data as our default.
We cannot allow the poorly managed and biased systems of today’s projects to ruin the future of nature-based projects
Carbon dioxide removal has to scale up to 1 billion tonnes per year in 2030, and 4 - 13 billion tonnes per year by 2050, from less than 10 million tonnes today. This will require many technologies to scale & evolve; from engineered solutions (fans to suck it out & enhanced weathering of rocks amongst others) to afforestation and nature-based systems (novel methods of managing land). One of our biggest concerns is that unless we develop significantly better methods for supporting and evidencing nature-based carbon removal, nature projects will be discounted and not supported in the future. This would be terrible for the environment. It will ignore the most developed and readily available CDR technology - an incredibly stupid decision.
This concern is real; we see discussion about including engineered CDR into compliance markets, both the UK & EU emissions trading schemes - but not nature projects, despite it being the only technology type ready to scale today!
We need nature-based to be successful. Human structures are currently getting in the way of this rather than enabling it. We hope Sherwood goes some way to fixing this.
The headline of today may be about the REDD+ baselines, but the headline of tomorrow will be about the lack of carbon accounting used on these projects. At Treeconomy, we are working to create a better system of carbon accounting that is accurate, reliable, and evidence-based. Because action is more effective than words in the climate crisis, we are taking steps to fix this problem today.
Contact us through our website to find out how comprehensive carbon accounting and performance analytics can make your nature-based projects more transparent and trustworthy. Our team of experts is always happy to help you with your questions!