Tag: Article Opinion

The world has agreed that tropical rainforests need protection, so the multi-billion dollar REDD+ program is on its way. The challenge is its practical implementation. DMCii’s Prof. Jim Lynch explains why satellite surveying could do for the 21st century carbon trading economy what seismic surveys did for 20th century oil and gas.

July 16 2012 |     Carbon projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) can save rainforests and slow climate change by keeping carbon locked in trees, but this mechanism and its sibling, REDD+, can only scale up if investors will know how many trees there are, and how much carbon is stored within them and whether this carbon is staying put, year on year.

Current methodologies being advocated within the United Nations require the use of forest audits based on traditional forestry management methods of the developed world, but these are simply too expensive to work in the developing world. The Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, has more than 100 million hectares of inaccessible rainforest, and the country doesn’t have the resources to survey this from the ground in a cost-effective manner, let alone quantify the results into a standardised format to be cross-checked against forest stocks elsewhere.

Lessons From The Energy Sector

Perhaps the emerging carbon-trading economy can take a lesson from the oil and gas economy that dominated the previous century. Sinking exploratory wells represented an impossibly costly way to explore. So a standard technological solution emerged to discover and quantify oil and gas stocks: seismic surveys. Low-frequency sound waves are propagated into promising geological sites and the time taken for them to reflect back is employed to build up a picture of oil and gas deposits. The technique began with wildcatters in the 1920s exploding dynamite sticks; today it involves carefully planned networks of seismic sources and geophones to build up a three-dimensional map of reservoir architecture, with raw acoustic results processed via sophisticated algorithm chains and skillfully interpreted. Modern seismic surveys are employed not only to find new wells but also tracking fluid-front movement to trace a reservoir’s depletion over time.

What is the equivalent technological solution for forest monitoring? Earth observation. The only way REDD+ can be made to work on a global scale in a truly open, transparent way is satellite imaging. That’s why I’m working with satellite imagery and services provider DMCii in the UK to develop standardised information products for forest monitoring, tailored to the requirements of REDD+ as well as comparable international forest monitoring schemes – such as the EU’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan, ensuring countries importing timber to Europe are logging on a legal and sustainable basis.

What Satellites Can Deliver

Earth observation can contribute to two aspects of the forest monitoring problem. Firstly, as a means of ascertaining where all the trees are, and how many of them there are. Satellites’ wide area view enables a highly-accurate census to be made. Then comes the stage of processing the imagery to make biomass estimates and gain a measurement of the carbon stocks bound up in them – seeing the carbon for the trees – and then, just as importantly, to estimate carbon fluxes: how that carbon stock is changing over time.

The last half-century of Earth observation has demonstrated that it is not the individual remote sensing image but a sequence of images over time that gives the most added value. When it comes to tropical rainforests this is especially true: one can never have enough data about these vast expanses, possessing their own self-generating climate systems – repeated monitoring is important simply to catch gaps in clouds. Then such gaps can be mosaiced together to build up a complete picture.

We’re not starting from a blank page. The rapid development of satellite-based precision agriculture offers a model to learn from. Satellites are increasingly – and lucratively – being employed to monitor crop growth to guide the most-efficient application of fertiliser and pesticide for optimal yield. Many of the methods and algorithms originally developed for precision agriculture provide a measurement of photosynthetic activity can be also be applied to forest monitoring.This is very exciting – with the right models and algorithms we can analyse carbon pools for different climates around the world.

How We Do It

But won’t monitoring from space be astronomically expensive? Not necessarily. DMCii has built a business in selling imagery from the Disaster Monitoring Constellation, a fleet of separately-owned and collectively-managed satellites performing medium-resolution Earth monitoring. As the satellites, built by the UK’s Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. are affordable, and the data is too.

Of the users around the globe making use of DMCii data products, one of the most notable is Brazil, as one of the few forested developing nations to establish an annual forest audit. Brazil is also one of the inspirations for REDD+, having cut its deforestation by half in the last decade and a half. Both achievements are based on the use of satellite data.

Brazil’s space agency the National Institute for Space Research (known by its Spanish initials as INPE) approached DMCii in 2005 to begin purchasing DMC imagery. Today DMCii’s contribution is core to Brazil’s forest monitoring programme, having moved beyond regular land cover mapping to active guidance of enforcement efforts. The distinctive patterns of deforestation have become familiar sights – ‘fishbone’ lines of clearing extending from a main road as the transportation route, or alternatively a river system.

Early on, in my role with the OECD Sustainability Agency, we could challenge the authorities with this irrefutable evidence, and help guide fact-based policy. In addition to starting to brake deforestation rates, Brazil has also set up new national parks, indigenous reserves and sustainable logging zones. It’s a template for what REDD+ could accomplish on a broader scale– and all down to satellites.

The precise nature of DMCii information products and services for REDD+ and related forest monitoring activities are still to be determined. We envisage two main classes of user: firstly, people mainly interested acquiring auditing information in a quick, digestible format, such as financial investors. Secondly, the national governments themselves, who will want to demonstrate their effective reduction in emissions clearly with a high degree of quality and precision, so they can be rewarded for their efforts. We’d also supply the associated measurement and management systems – based on standard geographic information systems (GIS) –to employ the data.

Theoretically the information products would be data-neutral; in other words we could employ free imagery from government satellites such as the US Landsat for annual forest surveys, which is the minimum frequency that REDD+ certification is likely to require. But, once you consider the billions of dollars set to be pledged for REDD+, then the case is clear to acquire additional paid-for data to step up the frequency and accuracy of satellite observations. In the case of particular regions at risk then the frequency of acquisitions could reach daily revisits using the DMC satellites. Because they operate in a constellation, their acquisition opportunities are not constrained by the fixed orbit of a single satellite, which might take weeks or months to return to a given target.

Last year’s addition to the DMC, the NigeriaSat-2 satellite, offers very high resolution 2.5 m imagery, that is potentially capable of surveying individual REDD+ projects in detail (incidentally giving Nigeria a superior imaging capability to SSTL’s homeland of Great Britain). The UK and SSTL has also announced plans for a new generation of NovaSAR small radar satellites, able to perform observations through clouds or at night, and sensitive to complementary environmental parameters such as leaf area index and soil moisture.

DMCii also acquires additional regional forest monitoring capabilities with third party specialists. So we wouldn’t always perform mapping or ground truthing ourselves, but are active in establishing regional partnerships to do just that. In May, a DMCii led consortium won a place on the UK Department for International Development (DfID) Forest Governance Markets and Climate (FGMC) Framework Agreement meaning that we will be able to bid for projects to monitor forest governance and deforestation globally. The multidisciplinary consortium, known as inFORm, comprises commercial and academic partners with skills such as forest mapping, carbon accounting, timber tracking, policy development and broad ranging Earth Observation technologies, allowing a holistic approach to tackling deforestation.

For me, one of the strengths of satellite products is that for all the data they contain, they can typically be understood by everyone, not just forest specialists – regional politicians to national media to village headmen. If you present people with clear and accurate information about their national resources, they can then make informed decisions about their future exploitation. In the past satellite images have helped motivate Brazilian politicians to take action and helped guide public opinion too.

It is clear that the fruits of past development activities have not always been fairly shared. I was in Ghana in 2010 and I went to villages well away from Accra and asked them what they wanted most. Some electric lights so we’re not in darkness every night was the answer – and running past their village were thick power lines on massive pylons.

REDD+ needs to be fair if it is going to be truly sustainable. Satellite imagery can help establish a level playing field of information, showing where the trees are actually placed in areas of contested land ownership, and serving as a basis for organised action on the ground, such as surveying and enforcement activities.

Through its staff and parent company SSTL, DMCii has a promising record in knowledge transfer; it has worked with customer nations such as Egypt, Turkey and Nigeria to not only deliver satellites but the beginnings of full national space programmes along with them. The same kind of knowledge sharing, to make REDD+ a bottom-up initiative that local populations have a true stake in, will be crucial.

While satellites offer a technical solution to the challenges of implementing a carbon trading economy based on preserving the tropical rainforests – just as seismic surveys proved to be the technical foundation of the expanding oil and gas industry – the political and social factors inherent in making REDD+ a reality will decide whether it succeeds or fails.

About the author

Trained in industrial chemistry and soil microbiology, Professor Jim Lynch OBE has served as Chief Executive of the UK government’s executive agency, Forest Research, Co-ordinator for the OECD Programme on Biological Resource Management and currently sits on the Board of the European Forestry Institute and Africa’s Council for the Frontiers of Knowledge. As Distinguished Professor of Life Sciences (Emeritus) at the University of Surrey, Prof. Lynch has begun work on a new project to develop forest monitoring information products for DMCii, a subsidiary of University of Surrey spin-off company Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL).

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Additional resources

The following article is reproduced with permission from the blog EDF Talks Global Climate. View the original post here.

9 June 2011 | This past week I could have sworn I was back in the 1980s, based on the news coming out of Brazil.

Brazil’s powerful agriculture caucus (bancada ruralista) and Communist Party led the charge in the House of Representatives to pass a bill that, if enacted, would essentially legalize deforestation in vast amounts of land.

And three activists who worked for years to protect forests from illegal logging were killed for their efforts.

Then, yesterday, the Brazilian environmental agency approved the Belo Monte dam – a hydroelectric project so controversial and flawed that the Federal Attorney General’s office brought a series of lawsuits against it, most of which have not been judged, and recommended that it not be licensed.

As someone who works with indigenous and environmental groups in Brazil and has been active in tropical forest policy for years, I find this series of events deeply troubling, and reminiscent of the Brazilian Amazon’s dark past. And these events come at a time when, because of strong pressure on land use from increasing commodity prices, and an expectation that the Congress would revise the 1965 Forest Code, the clearing of trees for expanding farms and cattle ranching in the Amazon rainforest is on the rise, possibly up 30% over last year.

Brazil’s government is at a crossroads – either it can go back to a future of rampant deforestation and frontier chaos, or ahead, to the future of a sustainable and equitable green economy leader, with rule of law, good governance and a secure natural and investment environment. Senate action on the Forest Code over the next few months could spell the difference.

Is Brazil going backward or forward?

This series of events recalls the former status-quo, business-as-usual days when deforestation was accepted – even promoted – as a necessary corollary to development and prosperity.

Those were the days when Brazil was the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, with about 70% of its emissions caused by clearing forests. At the height of deforestation, the Amazon was losing more than 21,000 km2 – more than 8,000 square miles, about twice the size of Connecticut – of forest a year.

Those were also the days when grassroots environmental and union leaders were killed for working to protect the forest and forest peoples’ rights; prominent activists like rubber tapper and union leader Chico Mendes and Roman Catholic Sister Dorothy Stang were both slain for their efforts to keep forests standing for the sake of communities’ livelihoods and the environment.

Brazil has come a long way since then, particularly in reducing deforestation and altering public perception of it.

Reducing deforestation: Brazil has experienced seven years of almost uninterrupted decreases in deforestation, establishing it as the world leader in greenhouse gas pollution reductions. Between 2006 and 2010, Brazil has reduced Amazon deforestation about two-thirds below the annual average from 1996–2005, reducing about 1 billion tons of greenhouse gas pollution. This was due largely to the 2003 National Plan to Prevent and Control Amazon Deforestation and the subsequent 2009 National Climate Change Policy, in which Brazil committed to reducing deforestation 80% below the 1996–2005 average by 2020.

Social shift against deforestation: Popular opinion on the Amazon has clearly changed – most people want deforestation to stop. Most people also think that murders for hire in land conflicts should be punished – and in cases when international spotlights shone on Amazon assassinations, like Chico Mendes and Sister Dorothy Stang, it seemed as though the rule of law could be taking hold.

But despite these encouraging environmental strides, and even aside from the passage of the explicitly anti-environment bill, three disturbing themes of the past couple weeks are calling into question just how permanent Brazil’s environmental progress is:

So, what does all this mean for Brazil?

EDF believes that the brutal killings, the influence of the agriculture caucus, the rapidly increasing deforestation, and the House vote to cripple Brazil’s environmental legislation, must be met with a solid government response for Brazil to maintain its international leadership on the environment. And we’re not the only ones calling for action at this critical juncture.

The Forest Code changes were opposed by Brazil’s major national scientific associations – the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science – as well as numerous forestry sector trade associations and ten former Environment Ministers. The Ministers wrote in a letter to President Dilma Rousseff:

“We understand… that history has reserved for our times… above all, the opportunity to lead a great collective effort for Brazil to proceed on its pathway as a nation that develops with social justice and environmental sustainability.”

And the range of interests that came together to support forest protect protection – the scientific community, the National Council of Brazilian Bishops, the national association of attorneys, small farmers’ organizations and environmentalists — are coming together to provide the efforts needed to produce balanced and fair revisions to the Forest Code.

If enacted, the House language would open up wholesale entire categories of land that are now protected, and could completely roll back the progress Brazil has made in the last seven years by:

• Giving amnesty for past illegal deforestation
• Opening up to deforestation hundreds of thousands of acres of currently protected forests along watercourses, on steep slopes and hilltops and mangrove swamps
• Making virtually any regulation against forest clearance unenforceable, by inter alia, allowing illegal deforestation to be compensated with replanting over a twenty year period.

Justification for change in Forest Code “patently false”

The most common justification for Congressional support for the bill – that environmental regulation has shackled Brazil’s development and growth of agriculture – is patently false. The Communist Party’s Rebelo and his large landholder and rancher allies also justified the measure in the name of small farmers burdened with environmental restrictions.

The fact is, since 2003, Brazil’s economy has grown steadily and robustly and some 25 million people escaped poverty, all while Amazon deforestation declined two-thirds below the average of the previous decade. In recent years, Brazil has become the world’s largest exporter of beef, chicken and sugar, and the second biggest exporter of soy.

And major small farmers’ organizations actually opposed the bill. The Amazon has enormous potential for growth through intensification – some 80% of the deforested land in the Amazon is extremely low-yield cattle pasture (less than one head per hectare). Small farmers are poor because they lack access to credit, technology and technical assistance, not because of environmental regulation, as Rebelo claims.

World watching Brazil as Forest Code moves to Senate, President

The House passage of the Forest Code is certainly not the end of this story.

The bill now goes to Brazil’s Senate, which could spend months debating it. (Before last week’s passage of the bill, the House had been debating the Forest Code since 2009). The rapporteur for the bill, Senator Jorge Viana, has an outstanding record on forest protection and sustainable development as former governor of Acre state. If the Senate makes any changes, the bill goes back to the House, and so on, until the bill’s language is agreed. The bill is then sent to President Rousseff, who has the option to veto portions of the bill or the entire bill.

During Rousseff’s presidential campaign last fall, she pledged to reduce deforestation in the Amazon by 80 percent and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 39 percent by 2020. Reuters quotes the then-candidate saying, in regards to these pledges from her environmental platform:

“I will keep those promises.”

President Rousseff and the Senate have — and should grab — the opportunity to preserve Brazil’s leadership on sustainable development and signal investors that they can count on rule of law and a stable investment environment in a plethora of sustainable, green economy alternatives from biofuels, to sustainable forestry and forest carbon credits.

However, if the bill should pass the Senate and be enacted as currently written, it could, over time, erase Brazil’s gains in controlling Amazon deforestation, undermine the considerable international stature the country gained through its environmental leadership, and foreclose Brazil’s enormous green growth potential.

With Brazil set to host the Rio +20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development next year, the world will be watching the Senate and President closely.

This story has been temporarily removed and is being reviewed.

Climate talks have resumed in Bangkok, with several familiar sticking points.   One issue that has overstayed its welcome is the debate over how developed countries should account for carbon stored in and released from their farms, forests, prairies, and bogs.   Current rules let them decide which types of land use they will account for and which they can ignore.   Developing countries say that’s not fair, and with good reason.

This article has been excerpted from the Humane Society International Bulletin “Call for Truth in Targets” (avalible for download, right), which was distributed to negotiators attending this week’s climate talks in Bangkok, Thailand.   If you repost, please reference the original.

5 April 2011 | BANGKOK | Under the accounting rules of the Kyoto Protocol there is no requirement to account comprehensively for all emissions from land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF). In a nutshell, this allows Annex 1 developed country Parties to pick and choose what they will account for and, as a result, they tend not to select to account for emissive activities. Their accounts are thus skewed by the incorporation of removals (sequestration) whilst leaving out emissions (logging).

This is the existing emissions loophole. Targets for Annex 1 developed countries are being undermined by the failure to even get important emissions onto the books.

The present accounting system is activities-based. It does not cover the entire land sector as would occur if land-based accounting was instituted. This is another problem for getting a real reflection of what is happening in land and forests into the accounts. The current LULUCF system defines several activities occurring in the land and forests sector but only mandates accounting for three activities1, leaving it voluntary for Parties to select to account for any other identified activities2. For instance there is no requirement to account for the drainage of peat soils and use of drained peatlands although both are known to be highly emissive.

The three activities that are currently mandated for accounting are:

• Afforestation: this means planting trees on an area not previously forested, usually it is plantation establishment;
• Reforestation: this means replanting trees (plantations) on an area that has been previously deforested and maintained as non-forested land; and
• Deforestation: this comprises land use change through clearing forest and using that land for other purposes than growing forest again.

Afforestation and Reforestation (known as A & R) deliver removals of carbon from the atmosphere via sequestration within the growing vegetation and soils.
Deforestation involves carbon emissions attributable to land use change, but this activity is restricted in the emissions it includes because it does not encompass the major emitting activity of logging when that area is subject to ongoing logging cycles, nor does it encompass the conversion of natural forest to plantations.

In both cases no land use change is involved. These instead fall under the voluntary activity of Forest Management, which is only selected by some of the Parties.

A cynic might note that the current accounting system is basically constructed to indicate when land enters or leaves the control of the forest industry while hiding harm industry does with the forest it controls. The current voluntary activities for LULUCF accounting are:

• Forest management (logging, and conversion of natural forests to plantations);
• Cropland management; and
• Grazing land management.

Each of these activities is generally emissive in nature and they are not frequently selected for accounting. This loophole is of a significant size. For example drained organic soils in developed countries emit about half a billion tonnes of CO2 emissions every year.

Encouragingly, it was decided in Cancun that a new, voluntary activity of ‘Drainage and rewetting’ of peatland should be adopted. This is welcome progress, as emissions from drained peatlands are large and ongoing until such drainage is reversed and the peat is rewetted or the peat exhausted. It can be predicted that Annex 1 Parties will select this new activity only when they are rewetting peatland and can gain from accounting for the emissions reductions involved, but this is an important and welcome initiative.

Currently, there is not even a proposal to make all of the remaining voluntary LULUCF activities mandatory for accounting let alone a commitment to do so. Mandatory accounting is the least that should be expected in terms of a move towards more comprehensive coverage in LULUCF in the Second Commitment Period. A ‘hot spots’ approach involving applying higher tier accounting to areas known to be of significant emissions impact, whilst the remainder is dealt with by lower tier accounting, is being discussed within the EU in order to overcome objections to the accounting impost entailed with a move to mandatory accounting. This is a commendable idea.

Proposed new accounting rules for logging (‘forest management’) are problematic and introduce their own emissions accounting loophole.   Criticism over the serious inadequacies of accounting for land sector emissions of developed countries under current LULUCF rules has prompted negotiations to construct new rules that will encourage most or all Annex 1 Parties to account for forest management (logging).

The problem is that the new accounting method that is proposed is more perverse than those we have now.

Developed countries are pushing hard for a new accounting framework that allows them to increase logging emissions without taking responsibility for them. This planned increase in emissions has been estimated at around half a billion tonnes of CO2 in total.   The proposed approach simply removes logging emissions from the books.

How does the logging loophole happen?

This is called the ‘reference level’ approach. It works by allowing each developed country to pick any level of emissions it likes and use it as a baseline.

Many Annex 1 countries have indicated that they intend to use forward looking (or projected) baselines. These countries plan to use Business As Usual (BAU) emissions, including any planned increases, based on their existing national forest and forest industry policy settings, as their baseline. Only deviations in emissions from this baseline will be accounted for. In other words, however grandiose their LULUCF growth plans may be, if they meet them, their accounting liability would be zero. Perversely, if actual emissions turn out to be less than their grandiose plans, the LULUCF system will book an undeserved accounting credit.

Such a projected reference level is designed to measure deviation from planned growth. It also serves to hide any increases in emissions associated with such planned growth. It prevents any level of ambition being imposed upon the sector.

Logging emissions should be measured relative to historical emissions data, and the intent should be to reduce them relative to those emissions levels. Use of a long term historical average as the baseline is the only option that closes the accounting loophole in a realistic and acceptable way.

Why has the logging loophole been designed?

Annex 1 Parties are failing to conserve stores (reservoirs) and enhance sinks and reservoirs. Many Parties intend to increase harvest rates and emissions from forest management. They are under pressure to account for forest management in the second Commitment Period.   However most of those Parties find owning up to the real emissions to be inconvenient. These emissions would not be reflected in accounts using the projected reference level approach.

Why does it matter?

If LULUCF is to strengthen ambition, the proposed accounting loophole for more logging must be closed. It is a serious departure from what a climate agreement should set out to achieve. Such perverse rules are not being constructed for other industry sectors. The forest industry is stitching up a deal all of their own with the complicit support of developed country Party negotiators. It is unlikely that other industries have been consulted as to whether they think it acceptable that forestry gets such a free ride and they do not.

There is significant carbon contained in developed country forests, and a large amount of emissions will arise from logging them. Three of the top five forested countries of the world are developed countries (Canada, USA, Russia) and Australia has the most carbon dense natural forests in the world.

Developed countries must reduce their logging emissions, not increase them. The first necessary step is that they agree to account for them properly and comprehensively. Hiding logging emissions in this new forward looking baseline accounting loophole will significantly undermine the targets of developed countries to make quantified economy wide emissions reductions while encouraging them to miss a great opportunity to increase ambition.

Alistair Graham has thirty years experience working with and for local, national and international ENGOs on a wide range of conservation and environment issues, especially native forest conservation and oceans governance, including negotiation and implementation of regional and global international agreements.   He can be reached at: [email protected].

Additional resources

Western science has achieved great things, but it often misses the obvious – at least from the perspective of indigenous peoples who have lived with that obvious for generations.   The same blind spot applies to indigenous peoples – a blind spot that can have devastating implications for the development of forest carbon projects if not addressed.

15 March 2011 | In the mid 1990s, research scientists from Environment Canada encountered a puzzling phenomenon.   The Common Eider (Somateria mollissima sedentary), a non-migratory bird native from Hudson Bay, Nunavut, Canada, near the Inuit community of Sanikiluaq were dying off in droves, and none of the scientists could figure out why.  

The local Inuit, however, had been hunting and harvesting the Common Eider for generations.   They knew the bird’s habits, its quirks, and its needs – and they knew that the birds were dying because they’d lost their access to open water.   Only when this information was shared with western scientists could appropriate action take place.

This enlightening case study from Ethno-Ornithology: Birds, Indigenous Peoples, Culture and Society is, unfortunately, the exception that proves the rule.

More often than not, indigenous peoples have not had the kind of access to western scientific information regarding biodiversity that the Sanikiluaq Inuit had, and scientists have not had the kind of access to indigenous knowledge that the Environment Canada team did.   This can have significant ecological and financial consequences for forest carbon projects.

Communication Breakdown

Conservation dialogues between indigenous communities and western scientists are not only hampered by the lack of effective communication between scientists and indigenous peoples, they are also hampered because most scientific information is not available in local languages.

If we wanted to engage in avian conservation in Honduras, for example, we’d soon find that all the guidebooks are in English, which means we would be challenged to discuss basic conservation information – much less conservation finance outcomes – with the local communities, because there would be no foundational material in Spanish. This is further compounded by the inability of forest carbon project developers to discuss biodiversity in contexts that are well-understood by locals working on the projects, regardless of whether the locals also speak English, as is required by the Verified Carbon Standard and the Climate, Community, Biodiversity Standard.

Furthermore, if indigenous communities are going to benefit from carbon payments for saving endangered rainforest and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD), they need to base their decisions on both traditional and western scientific knowledge that can be effectively communicated. Integrating traditional knowledge with scientific knowledge can improve and clarify land-tenure rights for indigenous communities by bringing clarity to hunting, harvesting, and co-management of biodiversity resources on their traditional community forestry lands. As shown in the Maya Atlas: The Struggle to Preserve Maya Land in Southern Belize, 42 local communities in southern Belize used rural participatory mapping techniques to demonstrate how they traditionally used their local environment including their diverse relationships with location specific ecology and biodiversity.

Ethno-Ornithology: Birds, Indigenous Peoples, Culture and Society is replete with case studies like this.   In another Inuit example, an unknown population of the Harlequin Duck (Histrionicus histrionics) was only discovered on Baffin Island in the Arctic after not being observed in this location since the 1930s when scientists and Inuit communicated with each other because shared of interests in conservation and biodiversity.

How Can Locals Help?

Local participation is critical for knowledge transfer and effective conservation management dialogue.   The implementation of remote camera wildlife surveys, for example, can help standardize the ways that biodiversity health is measured under the Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Standard (CCB). These low-cost surveys are easily demonstrated visually to local community members, which means that applying these survey techniques does not require all team members on the survey team to be western trained biologists allowing for the opportunity for local traditional knowledge and western scientific knowledge to interact effectively.

Western public values often set the conservation agenda, which in turn impacts conservation finance and indigenous peoples. Yet, if we do not clarify the relationship between traditional knowledge and biodiversity, we will struggle to enact successful forest carbon projects at the local level on community forest lands because both local communities will be unable to communicate with western reductionist scientists, and neither will be able to bridge the gap and act as stewards of local lands.

Traditional knowledge owners must become co-creators, co-designers, and co-managers of community forest lands through integrating traditional and western scientific knowledge with scientists if we hope to mitigate climate change.

18 February 2010 | Last week, Ecosystem Marketplace reported that a major formal voluntary carbon standard has verified its first carbon credits from projects that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD).

It’s the kind of mechanism that was pioneered and vastly improved in the voluntary carbon markets long before regulators felt comfortable enough to formally admit REDD mechanisms into an international compliance carbon market. Now, REDD is considered to be one of the few success stories at UN climate talks over the past few years.

Though small in comparison to the UN’s Kyoto (and post-Kyoto?) carbon markets, the US state of California’s cap-and-trade scheme is another program soon to hit the market, aiming to start in 2012. This market also employs protocols for project development that originated in the voluntary carbon market, adopting four protocols from the Climate Action Reserve (CAR) that can be used to generate early action credits. The program’s compliance-grade protocols will also be based on CAR’s designs.

Finally, voluntary third-party standards – including CAR, the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS) and their advisers – are engaging governments around the world to pioneer accounting systems for REDD projects and policies to co-exist within national and sub-national forestry efforts.

Now more than ever – and especially as compliance carbon markets face continued controversy – it is important to recognize and learn from these and other voluntary carbon mechanisms to foster market integrity as a whole.

But even as the voluntary carbon market becomes increasingly integrated with compliance markets worldwide, we continue to observe a niche of voluntary buyers who give the market its name and finance its frontier innovations – and will persist in the marketplace with or without government signals.

The Role of Voluntary Carbon Markets

Companies, organizations and individuals use the voluntary carbon market to set and achieve scientifically informed targets, using a combination of internal and external reductions (i.e. offsets). Companies can make and honor real commitments to significantly reduce their emissions.

The voluntary carbon market plays different roles in different countries and regions. In developed countries that are part of the Kyoto Protocol, the voluntary market makes it possible for companies and individuals who are not covered by existing climate legislation to receive carbon credits for significantly reducing their emissions.

Even companies with existing compliance obligations have made reduction commitments “above and beyond” their obligation by buying voluntary credits.

Companies located in industrialized countries that don’t have domestic cap-and-trade legislation (i.e. the U.S. and Australia) can also use the voluntary market for “pre-compliance purposes.” They learn how the carbon markets and impending legislation would work in practice – and hope to be recognized for taking “early action” to reduce emissions.

In the Global South, companies in middle income countries – particularly those involved in European supply chains – are also taking voluntary action to reduce their emissions.

The voluntary carbon market offers corporate leaders a unique opportunity to show real leadership through action rather than spouting empty rhetoric. Contrast this with business leaders who signed up to the Copenhagen Communiqué on Climate Change – which urged governments to sign a global deal at the 2009 Conference of Parties mandating deep, immediate reductions in emissions but didn’t see results.

While international and domestic climate negotiations stagnate, corporate leaders can actually lead. By voluntarily providing critical funding to emissions reduction projects in the developing world, corporations show true leadership ahead of being mandated to do so by governments. And they have already done so, to the tune of US$387 million invested in voluntary carbon credits in 2009. Indices like the FTSE4Good and the Dow Jones Sustainability Group Index have significantly incentivized corporates to become involved in the voluntary carbon market. This involvement has had a direct impact on the companies’ market capitalization.

But the global financial crisis threw a wrench in the voluntary carbon market’s previously unstoppable expansion. You see, companies that aren’t legally required to reduce their emissions do so voluntarily and these commitments are often integrated into a company’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and marketing budget – which is ultimately discretionary. And tough business climates squeeze discretionary budgets first.

In countries without a cap-and-trade programme in sight, pre-compliance activity is slowing down in the voluntary carbon marketplace. There is a limit on how much preparatory action can be taken under continued uncertainty and these countries have been in pre-compliance mode since as early as 2008!

How can the Voluntary Carbon Market Meet these Challenges Head on?

Despite the slow-down in pre-compliance activity, the voluntary carbon market is still equipped to achieve exponential growth if it is able to recognize and communicate its assets – like high quality independent, robust third-party standards which require independent validation and verification to ensure that the offset credits certified are permanent, additional and real.

Standards like CAR and VCS – and also the Gold Standard and CarbonFix forestry standard, among others – have independent registries so that the offsets can be tracked from origination to retirement. This helps create a more transparent and accountable market.

High quality VER standards also demonstrate how the voluntary carbon market is creating the types of projects which were envisaged with the creation of the Kyoto Protocol: emission reduction projects that are delivering real carbon reductions and social and development benefits.

For example, offset projects in the voluntary market are much more likely to be located in poorer regions which haven’t benefited as much from the compliance market’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). In these countries, high quality voluntary market offset projects are making tangible contributions to poverty alleviation, sustainable development and helping achieve the somewhat elusive Millennium Development Goals.

The voluntary carbon market’s high quality VER standards provide some specific and unique benefits: CAR focuses on the North American market. The Gold Standard provides premium development benefits. The VCS is renowned for its innovation particularly with its AFOLU forestry and land use programme and its tagging system which combines Voluntary Carbon Units (VCUs) with SOCIALCARBON sustainable development or CCBA biodiversity standards.

The development of forestry standards – ala VCS REDD methodologies – are a great example of where the voluntary market reaches sectors that other markets cannot reach. The compliance carbon market is now trailing as the voluntary market leads on developing standards to certify high quality and permanent forestry offsets which are combined with robust insurance mechanisms.

The voluntary market is creating innovative new programs, such as the Gold Standard VER methodology for cook stove projects, which significantly reduces deforestation and alleviates respiratory health issues. This market is developing projects that are adaptable and flexible and provide the range of benefits that customers are looking for when they voluntarily reduce their emissions.

Who Else can Help Maximize the Voluntary Carbon Market’s Potential?

Governments, NGOs and the media around the world can continue to provide support, guidance and constructive criticism for the voluntary market – joining organisations like ICROA, with its self-regulatory, externally audited Code that helps promote best practice.

NGOs in particular will benefit from embracing carbon finance from the voluntary carbon market as a solution to their objectives for increasing sustainable development and reducing environmental degradation.

Companies that make emission reduction commitments using the voluntary market must also be duly recognised so that not making these commitments becomes the rare exception. Responsible voluntary market players need to continue promoting transparency and accountability by using high quality offset credits.

The voluntary carbon market has spent a lot of time apologising for the small percentage and often historical instances of project failure. The market now needs to spend more time capitalising on the unique benefits and value that it provides.

In these times of hesitation and delay, the voluntary carbon market is providing a viable alternative to the international and domestic legislative gridlock. In many countries, the voluntary market is the only option for companies that do not yet have legal carbon reduction requirements but that want and need to take action. Describe last year as “the size of a mouse [with] the roar of a lion,” the voluntary carbon market must be championed so that in the coming years it will also become the size of a lion.

As UN negotiators scramble to develop a global mechanism for generating carbon credits by saving rainforests, individual countries are moving ahead with their own plans.   Research published last year, however, shows that most of those plans are woefully out of synch with each other – a fact that could have dire consequences for the development of a truly global carbon market.

14 February 2011 | All markets differ from region to region.   Soybean meal from Brazil, for example, has a higher protein content than does soybean meal from the United States, which makes it especially popular in China.   But the two products resemble each other enough that a Chinese buyer will grudgingly accept the latter in lieu of the former – albeit at an agreed upon discount.

That’s one of the things that makes soybean meal a commodity‘, and its status as a commodity is one of the things that makes it so easy to trade.

Carbon offsets aren’t much different: to work, they need to be commoditized and traded across jurisdictions.   That’s especially true of offsets that slow climate change by saving rainforests and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD).   It is only when offsets follow the same rules around the world that an emitter in Chicago can offset his footprint by saving rainforest in Brazil, Columbia, and Kenya.

Constance L. McDermott, Benjamin Cashore, and Peter Kanowski offer disturbing evidence that this isn’t happening.   In Global Environmental Forest Policies: An International Comparison, published last year, they have provided the first concise, systematic approach to analyzing the global diverse forest management landscape.

The 22 figures in Chapter Two alone (Selection and Global Context of the Case Study Countries) should be required reading for anyone interested in forest management for production, protection or both.

Setting the Scene

Forest management policies can be opaque and confusing, and when increased interest internationally is developing for a global UN REDD+ framework that includes both the private and public sector, maybe UN negotiators and the general public can learn from framework used by the authors. The authors eloquently define forest management policies in four categories:

1. Procedural with suggested planning processes.
2. Procedural with mandatory planning requirements.
3. Substantive with suggested performance measures.
4. Substantive with prescribed performance requirements.

This framework allows for a general comparison between leading countries that are involved in both forest products manufacturing and forest raw materials production.

Wide Policy Disparities

Questions arise even within countries, like why is less than 5% of SE US forests in IUCN Categories I – VI protected forests? Further gap analysis also demonstrates disparity between regions, leading to question like why does Eurasia and Africa have the smallest percentage of protected forests, while Australasia and the Neotropics have the greatest percentage? Also, how forestland is designated provides general contextual comparison opportunities. For example, why does Japan have 0% of its forests designated as protected for conservation?

In the Fine Print

As the authors further narrow down their analysis, remarkable data points come to the surface which may reflect misapplication of global forest management policies. For example, in regards to riparian buffer zones – the most prescriptive of all the policies analyzed – clearly strange bedfellows arise with the DRC, Mexico, and Indonesia as they all have the same prescriptive riparian buffer management policy for a specific stream type regardless of stream sizes. Even more remarkable is the fact that developed countries, in general, have fewer prescriptive nominal requirements for riparian buffers than developing countries. Even in forest road culvert size at stream crossings and road abandonment, there are greater similarities between Chile and the DRC and US policy regarding voluntary procedures for the SE states than between the western and eastern US states.

What Does this Mean for REDD+?

The devil’s in the details regarding the key takeaways from Global Environmental Forest Policies, and considering how REDD+ will be enacted. While much is made of the constant chatter surrounding REDD+ and community property and indigenous rights, it might also be suggested that the policies surrounding REDD+ regarding forest management pursue ecologically sound and consistent criteria.   You learn from the excellent comparative analysis in this book that one size does not fit all.

Scores of non-governmental organizations are trying to help indigenous people out of poverty by showing them how to earn carbon credits for managing their forests, but not all are getting results.  NGO veteran James Gray says that if NGOs really want to help, they have to cede more control to indigenous groups – and they have to convince those groups that they’re in it for the long haul.  He offers this example from his own experience with CARE in Guatemala.

7 February 2011 | When Roberto Chuc joined CARE, he did so because of our reputation as a humanitarian organization.  He believed that by working with us, he could help pull his Mayan tribe, the K’iche’, out of poverty while still preserving the forests where his family and ancestors have lived and farmed communally for hundreds of years.

He took full advantage of the voluntary carbon market to achieve his goals by helping his people earn carbon credits by saving trees and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) – apropos, since the name of his tribe translates into English as “many trees”.

But REDD is a tool available to many, and very few deliver the kind of results that Chuc has done for us and his people.

That’s because, in addition to helping his people master the intricacies of REDD, he was able to assure them that CARE had the staying power to see the project through to its conclusion, and he knew when to get out of the way.

Light Touch; Long History

CARE’s history of fighting poverty with forest-carbon projects dates back to 1989, when it helped create what some consider to be the world’s first forest-carbon project, a partnership between CARE and AES, a Fortune-500 corporation that generates and distributes electrical power.   Our history of empowering impoverished Guatemalans—and the crucial credibility it gained through this — dates back further still.

We have been working in development and relief capacities throughout Guatemala since 1959, and and our activities range from helping with natural-resource related projects as to providing education, health, sanitation and micro-loans.  When torrential rains from Tropical Storm Agatha pounded this country in  May, 2010, killing more than 150 people and leaving more than 100 still missing from land slides, CARE mobilized an emergency rescue team to help.

All of this lends us credibility that can only be gained over time, but many of the groups we work with tell us that our reputation for pitching in without taking over contributes to our current success with forest carbon projects.

“We don’t try to manipulate local plans,” Chuc says, “but rather promote good planning and respect the rights of both large and small organizations.”

This Land is my Land

Impoverished Mayan people, largely from the K’iche’ and Mam tribes, eke out a living through subsistence agriculture on the marginal land and steep slopes that make up most of CARE’s project area.

This indigenous group survived hundreds of years of oppression, first at the hands of Spanish conquerors, later at the hands of the ladino/mestizo elites that took over prime agricultural land and more recently by brutally repressive military dictators who killed more than 200,000 people during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war.

When the war finally ended, peace accords enacted in 1996 recognized indigenous communities’ inherent right to administer and utilize their collective lands enabling them to retain significant communal holdings. These communal and municipal forests remain a symbol of identity and autonomy.

But the troubled history left lingering tensions and wariness among indigenous communities of interventions that could affect their land rights.  For instance, outside mining interests are typically met with vehement rejection.

Conversely, their long history with CARE fostered trust.  And their right to administer and utilize their collective lands enabled municipalities to enter into Payments for Ecosystem Services “PES” contracts with municipal and community forests.

Forestry vs Farming

Given the abundance of land with steep slopes, Guatemala’s Western Highlands are well-suited to forestry.  The land produces clean water, timber, non-timber forest products and fuel wood, a principal energy source.

But small-holder agriculturalists, population growth and lack of access to more appropriate land induced changes in land use from forest to agriculture, especially in areas with steep slopes, according to a study by Edwin Castellanos and Claudia Flores and their respective teams from Universidad del Valle de Guatemala and CARE Guatemala.

Other causes of deforestation or forest degradation uncovered by CARE’s technical- assistants include intentionally set fires, unchecked pests, human infrastructure, legal and illegal exploitation of fuel wood and poorly defined forest boundaries.
The deforestation rate in CARE’s carbon sequestration project area averages 1.6% per year according to the latest available national statistics on forest cover from the Universidad del Valle and two forest-related government agencies, the Consejo Nacional de Areas Protegidas (National Council of Protected Areas or CONAP)and Instituto Nacional de Bosques (National Forest Institute or INAB)

CARE Collaborates with AES

CARE executives recognized the value of the ecosystem services this endangered forested land provides, particularly in terms of forests’ ability to sequester carbon. They served as a conduit between the AES Corp. that was building a new power plant that would emit carbon into the atmosphere and the indigenous Maya people, encouraging payments for ecosystem services in exchange for forest preservation.

This collaboration with AES consists of two 10-year phases. Phase 1, running from 1989-1999, emphasized agroforestry that integrates the benefits of combining forests with farming, such as sheep herding, and afforestation that plants seeds to create and restore forests.

In Phase 2 that ran from 1999 until 2009 , collaboration also included conservation of forests with communal and municipal tenure.  Dubbed “MIBOSQUE” –pronounced “me BAWskay” or “my forest” in English, Phase 2 helped set up municipal forest offices in 11 municipalities.  It staffed offices with technical experts.  And it supported improved forest-management efforts.  Initiatives included establishing and supporting community tree nurseries, regulating fuel-wood gathering and tree harvesting, expanding access to agroforestry systems and improving protection of the communal forests.

The Go-to Guy

In the Guatemala municipality called Cabrican, Trancito Lopez is known as the “go-to guy.” As director of one of Guatemala’s municipal forest offices he makes home visits to farmers interested in starting agroforestry systems to integrate the benefits of forestry and farming. He advises those curious about growing orchards and tree plantations.  He even serves as the local custodian for hundreds of hectares of forest in communal ownership.

His local, roll-up-your-sleeves approach personifies what many consider the key to CARE’s success with its Guatemala forest carbon projects.

Springboard to REDD

CARE initially funds the full cost of municipal forest offices and decreases funding over time.  It uses this strategy to illustrate the value of municipal forests offices and promote their long-term independence.

MIBOSQUE served as a philanthropic experiment that was financed through an endowment. No carbon credits were ever transacted.  Yet it had elements of a forest carbon project.  First, while monitoring was not stringent, AES and CARE attempted to increase the amount of carbon sequestered in biomass in the project area. Second, CARE and the Universidad del Valle jointly developed a methodology for estimating carbon stocks in the forest types found in the project area. And third, by applying this methodology to most MIBOSQUE communal and municipal forests, it established part of the carbon baseline for future projects.

These projects now serve as a springboard for CARE’s third-generation forest- carbon initiative, a REDD project covering 70,000 ha of communal forests spanning more than 100 separate forests in 40 municipalities. The project will apply the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Standard (CCBS) that CARE helped develop, a standard based on general design concepts that does not issue carbon credit certificates. It will also apply the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS) to issue carbon credits.

Leaping Hurdles

Creating a REDD project on the steep slopes of fragmented forests in a third-world country comes, of course, with significant hurdles. The project’s dispersed nature will create challenges during all project stages. Agents and drivers of deforestation will have to be determined.  A reference region will need to be selected. Accurate monitoring efforts will have to be enforced.  And a methodology for creating a Voluntary Carbon Standard will have to be developed.

Financing poses another significant challenge. Because of the project’s complexity, carbon finance funds by themselves may not be sufficient to cover administrative costs as well as funnel adequate funds for communities’ communal needs. To address this possible shortfall, CARE is seeking donors to fund municipal forest offices and their work in community forestry and agroforestry. Meanwhile, while some CARE staff says they are confident that granting unrestricted funds to communities will work well since this is often done in the context of the national forest incentive program, others say they fear these funds could create conflict within communities.

The issue of leakage – protecting one forest at the expense of another – will also have to be addressed. Regulating fuel-wood trade could prove daunting due to its extensive use and movement across the entire region.  Already communities have protected their own forests by importing fuel wood from neighboring regions with laxer regulation. To satisfy local demand for fuel-wood while shutting off leakage, the REDD project will need to improve regulation of fuel-wood collection, increase reforestation by leveraging community tree nurseries and volunteerism, expand agroforestry systems and introduce high-efficiency stoves that require less fuel.

Additionality provides a final challenge, particularly among the 11 municipalities where CARE worked in Phases 1 and 2.  Since many carbon sequestration measures including municipal forest offices and agroforestry systems remain despite CARE’s termination of financial support, efforts will have to be redoubled to preserve and restore additional forests that produce additional carbon sequestration. On the other hand, additionality will be easier to demonstrate and lessons learned from past initiatives will be easier to implement in the remaining 29 municipalities where CARE forest projects have not already occurred.

Promises Kept

As Tropical Storm Agatha’s devastation demonstrated, vulnerability to extreme climatic tendencies is staggering.  CARE hopes to leverage REDD as a key tool to make the communities and forests of Guatemala’s Western Highlands more resilient in the face of potentially devastating effects of climate change.  Its decentralized strategy could help overcome the significant challenges of poverty, resource loss and degradation over a large area with significant but patchy forest resources. If CARE’s REDD project continues as planned, at least 40 municipalities could be much better off economically and environmentally than they are today.“I’ve been told that the difference between us (at CARE) and some other organizations,” Chuc said,”is that CARE comes through on what it offers.”

NOTE: This article appeared first on EKO-ECO Blog.   You can view the original here.

18 February 2010 | Last week, Ecosystem Marketplace reported that a major formal voluntary carbon standard has verified its first carbon credits from projects that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD).

It’s the kind of mechanism that was pioneered and vastly improved in the voluntary carbon markets long before regulators felt comfortable enough to formally admit REDD mechanisms into an international compliance carbon market. Now, REDD is considered to be one of the few success stories at UN climate talks over the past few years.

Though small in comparison to the UN’s Kyoto (and post-Kyoto?) carbon markets, the US state of California’s cap-and-trade scheme is another program soon to hit the market, aiming to start in 2012. This market also employs protocols for project development that originated in the voluntary carbon market, adopting four protocols from the Climate Action Reserve (CAR) that can be used to generate early action credits. The program’s compliance-grade protocols will also be based on CAR’s designs.

Finally, voluntary third-party standards – including CAR, the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS) and their advisers – are engaging governments around the world to pioneer accounting systems for REDD projects and policies to co-exist within national and sub-national forestry efforts.

Now more than ever – and especially as compliance carbon markets face continued controversy – it is important to recognize and learn from these and other voluntary carbon mechanisms to foster market integrity as a whole.

But even as the voluntary carbon market becomes increasingly integrated with compliance markets worldwide, we continue to observe a niche of voluntary buyers who give the market its name and finance its frontier innovations – and will persist in the marketplace with or without government signals.

The Role of Voluntary Carbon Markets

Companies, organizations and individuals use the voluntary carbon market to set and achieve scientifically informed targets, using a combination of internal and external reductions (i.e. offsets). Companies can make and honor real commitments to significantly reduce their emissions.

The voluntary carbon market plays different roles in different countries and regions. In developed countries that are part of the Kyoto Protocol, the voluntary market makes it possible for companies and individuals who are not covered by existing climate legislation to receive carbon credits for significantly reducing their emissions.

Even companies with existing compliance obligations have made reduction commitments “above and beyond” their obligation by buying voluntary credits.

Companies located in industrialized countries that don’t have domestic cap-and-trade legislation (i.e. the U.S. and Australia) can also use the voluntary market for “pre-compliance purposes.” They learn how the carbon markets and impending legislation would work in practice – and hope to be recognized for taking “early action” to reduce emissions.

In the Global South, companies in middle income countries – particularly those involved in European supply chains – are also taking voluntary action to reduce their emissions.

The voluntary carbon market offers corporate leaders a unique opportunity to show real leadership through action rather than spouting empty rhetoric. Contrast this with business leaders who signed up to the Copenhagen Communiqué on Climate Change – which urged governments to sign a global deal at the 2009 Conference of Parties mandating deep, immediate reductions in emissions but didn’t see results.

While international and domestic climate negotiations stagnate, corporate leaders can actually lead. By voluntarily providing critical funding to emissions reduction projects in the developing world, corporations show true leadership ahead of being mandated to do so by governments. And they have already done so, to the tune of US$387 million invested in voluntary carbon credits in 2009. Indices like the FTSE4Good and the Dow Jones Sustainability Group Index have significantly incentivized corporates to become involved in the voluntary carbon market. This involvement has had a direct impact on the companies’ market capitalization.

But the global financial crisis threw a wrench in the voluntary carbon market’s previously unstoppable expansion. You see, companies that aren’t legally required to reduce their emissions do so voluntarily and these commitments are often integrated into a company’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and marketing budget – which is ultimately discretionary. And tough business climates squeeze discretionary budgets first.

In countries without a cap-and-trade programme in sight, pre-compliance activity is slowing down in the voluntary carbon marketplace. There is a limit on how much preparatory action can be taken under continued uncertainty and these countries have been in pre-compliance mode since as early as 2008!

How can the Voluntary Carbon Market Meet these Challenges Head on?

Despite the slow-down in pre-compliance activity, the voluntary carbon market is still equipped to achieve exponential growth if it is able to recognize and communicate its assets – like high quality independent, robust third-party standards which require independent validation and verification to ensure that the offset credits certified are permanent, additional and real.

Standards like CAR and VCS – and also the Gold Standard and CarbonFix forestry standard, among others – have independent registries so that the offsets can be tracked from origination to retirement. This helps create a more transparent and accountable market.

High quality VER standards also demonstrate how the voluntary carbon market is creating the types of projects which were envisaged with the creation of the Kyoto Protocol: emission reduction projects that are delivering real carbon reductions and social and development benefits.

For example, offset projects in the voluntary market are much more likely to be located in poorer regions which haven’t benefited as much from the compliance market’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). In these countries, high quality voluntary market offset projects are making tangible contributions to poverty alleviation, sustainable development and helping achieve the somewhat elusive Millennium Development Goals.

The voluntary carbon market’s high quality VER standards provide some specific and unique benefits: CAR focuses on the North American market. The Gold Standard provides premium development benefits. The VCS is renowned for its innovation particularly with its AFOLU forestry and land use programme and its tagging system which combines Voluntary Carbon Units (VCUs) with SOCIALCARBON sustainable development or CCBA biodiversity standards.

The development of forestry standards – ala VCS REDD methodologies – are a great example of where the voluntary market reaches sectors that other markets cannot reach. The compliance carbon market is now trailing as the voluntary market leads on developing standards to certify high quality and permanent forestry offsets which are combined with robust insurance mechanisms.

The voluntary market is creating innovative new programs, such as the Gold Standard VER methodology for cook stove projects, which significantly reduces deforestation and alleviates respiratory health issues. This market is developing projects that are adaptable and flexible and provide the range of benefits that customers are looking for when they voluntarily reduce their emissions.

Who Else can Help Maximize the Voluntary Carbon Market’s Potential?

Governments, NGOs and the media around the world can continue to provide support, guidance and constructive criticism for the voluntary market – joining organisations like ICROA, with its self-regulatory, externally audited Code that helps promote best practice.

NGOs in particular will benefit from embracing carbon finance from the voluntary carbon market as a solution to their objectives for increasing sustainable development and reducing environmental degradation.

Companies that make emission reduction commitments using the voluntary market must also be duly recognised so that not making these commitments becomes the rare exception. Responsible voluntary market players need to continue promoting transparency and accountability by using high quality offset credits.

The voluntary carbon market has spent a lot of time apologising for the small percentage and often historical instances of project failure. The market now needs to spend more time capitalising on the unique benefits and value that it provides.

In these times of hesitation and delay, the voluntary carbon market is providing a viable alternative to the international and domestic legislative gridlock. In many countries, the voluntary market is the only option for companies that do not yet have legal carbon reduction requirements but that want and need to take action. Describe last year as “the size of a mouse [with] the roar of a lion,” the voluntary carbon market must be championed so that in the coming years it will also become the size of a lion.