We are excited to share this position paper from 4C on ‘Scientific credibility for high-integrity voluntary carbon markets’, based on our reflections on our work over the past three years, and setting out our hopes and ambitions for nature-based carbon credits and the Voluntary Carbon Market in 2025.
We are encouraged by progress at COP29 to operationalise Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, and the IC-VCM’s approval of three new REDD+ methodologies as compliant with the Core Carbon Principles. We also welcome the trend towards jurisdictional REDD+ approaches, which align the contribution of carbon projects with Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement, require independent data providers to calculate baseline rates of deforestation, and standardise baselines against historical deforestation rates in the jurisdiction.
However, we argue in this piece that deeper and more comprehensive reforms to the market are needed to ensure its longer-term sustainability. We have identified several key areas where progress is urgently needed. These include:
- establishing common standards for carbon quantification and accounting, to cover additionality, leakage and permanence.
- avoiding perverse incentives and align the motivations of all stakeholders with high-integrity outcomes. Current standards have not dealt with these conflicts adequately, and this is effectively preventing a transition to high-integrity standards.
- Issuing all carbon credits based on trusted primary observations.
- Making all the data needed to reproduce carbon calculations available in standard file formats.
- As far as possible, reporting social and biodiversity dimensions of projects separately from carbon calculations.
- integrating DMRV methods into carbon and biodiversity accounting standards to reduce the financial and administrative burdens on nature-based projects and the local communities participating in or affected by them.
We fully appreciate that these are challenging goals, requiring a coordinated response from stakeholders with different perspectives and types of expertise. But the problems in the VCM are not insoluble, and we believe that the scientific community has a central role to play in improving the situation, especially with respect to impact evaluation. We hope that, as we go into 2025, standards and accreditation bodies will actively invite and facilitate the integration of contributions from cutting edge conservation science. Together, we can then make meaningful progress towards a common set of continuously improving standards for carbon quantification.