Commentary
From Crisis to Compromise: What Article 6.4’s Permanence Standard Means for Carbon Markets

After months of debate, the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body approved a permanence standard that keeps nature-based carbon projects viable—here’s what changed and why it matters. 

2025 promised a breadth of new research, evaluations, and advancements around how we as a global community can effectively mitigate climate change using all the tools in our toolbox—and it has not disappointed.  

One major avenue that we have seen change is through the UNFCCC Article 6.4 Supervisory Body (SBM), a group tasked with developing and supervising the operationalization of the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism (PACM), a UN-level international carbon market. Put simply, this body is working out all the kinks to make voluntary climate action effective, affordable, and credible.  

Last month, the SBM formally approved a key regulatory document for operationalizing Article 6.4 crediting activities: the non-permanence and reversals standard. Approving this standard represents one step closer towards a fully functioning PACM. Key rules on non-permanence and reversals were determined in the standard, and as such, it has tremendous implications for the eligibility of carbon project developers and other practitioners across the industry.  

What does this mean for the voluntary carbon market and nature-based projects? How would this affect nature and the small-holder communities that depend on it?  

The journey to a workable standard 

The standard approval follows years of discourse between the engineered and nature-based carbon communities. Prior to October, there were opportunities for the community to comment on the standard while it was in draft form, in which AFF participated. This was a significant moment, with over one hundred individual submissions from national governments, market actors and the scientific community sharing how such a draft standard could be workable or not. Prior draft versions of the standard had proposed stringent rules perceived to make most land-based projects, including forestry, infeasible to implement or invest in. 

Defending nature: How best to manage reversal risk? 

One issue that the nature-based community identified was the draft’s requirement of indefinite post-credit monitoring periods for project types deemed to have a material risk of reversal. Many submissions to the draft proposal commented on how indefinite monitoring periods were impractical to implement, describing it as existential to the business model of their projects, many of which are already scarce in funding and investment. This dilemma is compounded for developers of small holder and grouped projects, in which indefinite monitoring is even more costly and complicated to implement.  

Thankfully, following a swarm of awareness campaigns and comments on the draft, this “indefinite” language has since been removed in the final approved standard, with more deference now provided at the methodology level to determine when a project’s risk of reversal is considered negligible. Ensuring that credits achieve immaterial risk of reversal is important to use credit uses, and as we get into the methodologies, more work is needed to provide implementable and equitable ways and standards of achieving this for all project types. 

Related, on reversals, the final standard opens the door to ongoing innovation for market solutions, such as insurance policies or third-party guarantees, to detect and cover future reversals.  

This preserves the opportunity for concepts such as AFF’s Permanence Trust to play a growing role in addressing many of the permanence and reversal considerations inherent to nature-based projects. As currently envisioned, the Trust would be an independent market entity with a mandate to ensure the permanence of any credits backed by the facility through monitoring the persistence of credited carbon benefits, assessing non-permanence risk, and addressing reversals of stored carbon that has been credited over a time frame consistent with the emerging consensus of scientists and global standards, such as the PACM non-permanence and reversals standard.   

Why US projects should be still engaged on Article 6 

As a project developer of forest carbon projects for small family forest owners across the US, AFF recognizes that its role as a direct participant in Article 6 is confined to the ambitions of our host government. That means that the credits that we produce for the voluntary carbon market are currently ineligible for the PACM market, due to a formal lack of Article 6.4 support at the federal level. However, we believe there is still a strong role to play for US-based project developers and other practitioners to share their expertise and realities. We engage the international community to ensure that the voices of U.S.-based projects and forest communities are heard, and we are continuously scoping out every outlet possible to widen our participation at the international level.  

A small win in a big battle 

This was a real moment in time where nature could almost have been made effectively infeasible in Article 6.4. But the community spoke up and the SBM listened, and now nature and the small holder communities that depend on it have the seat they deserve at the PACM table.  

This decision signals a pragmatic approach to global decarbonization, true to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s plea for “everything, everywhere, all at once” to avoid the most severe consequences of our changing climate. This galvanizing moment also demonstrated the power and voice of practitioners across the voluntary carbon market, particularly advocates for natural climate solutions, who were able to draw on their real-world experience to inform policymakers at the UN level how their proposed standard would play out on the ground.  

Time is of the essence, and ahead of COP30 this month, and with only 25 more years until 2050, the sooner the SBM fully operationalizes PACM, the sooner practitioners can produce the climate benefit that the planet sorely needs.  

While the SBM has further work ahead to hash out more details and adopt its first methodologies under PACM, this month’s approval of the non-permanence standard is a major win for nature, local communities, and the planet.