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NOTE: This article has been reprinted from Ecosystem Marketplace’s Forest Carbon Newsletter. You can receive this summary of global news and views from the world of forest carbon automatically in your inbox every two weeks by clicking here.
1 October 2010 | Carbon standards are the cornerstone of any carbon market, because they define all the actions and outputs that constitute a bona fide emission reduction. They’ve also been front and center these past few weeks, with news coming in from China’s Panda Standard, North America’s American Carbon Registry (ACR), the UK’s Woodland Carbon Code, and the global Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS).
Specifically, the Panda Standard is gearing up to release its rules for cutting emissions from deforestation and agriculture; the ACR approved a new way for timberland owners to earn carbon credits by improving their forestry management; and the VCS both registered its first offsets issued for saving forests and released a rough draft of a new tool for ensuring the environmental integrity of offsets from improved land use.
In the UK, the Forestry Commission launched a “Woodland Carbon Code” for “voluntary carbon sequestration projects” – and received immediate criticism for erring on the side of flexibility – and, critics argue, making it possible for the same emission reduction to be credited twice.
We also saw disturbing news from Brazil, which looks set to gut its 75-year-old forest code, which has been credited with helping to reduce forest fragmentation and deforestation – regardless of who wins the upcoming election.
Forestry offsets also burst into the mainstream with a special report in The Economist, which succinctly describes the current status of our tropical rainforests and the international political scene surrounding these “planetary lungs”. In a series of articles, the newsweekly goes into some detail of why forests are fundamental for a number of factors, among them being their necessity of combating climate change. Furthermore, it discusses REDD – why it is a mechanism with potential and international support, but also the challenges that are barriers to its success.
Read on for all this and more on latest iteration Ecosystem Marketplace’s Forest Carbon Newsletter below.
—The Ecosystem Marketplace Team