The world is currently confronted with the fast-moving and interlinked crises of climate change and global biodiversity loss. As the world races to develop the technologies that will cost-effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions and remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the conservation and restoration of nature remains by far the most efficient and scalable technology to limit atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in the near term. Even assuming the world is successful in limiting and reducing atmospheric GHG concentrations, there remains the need to keep ecosystems healthy now and through this transition, so they are available to stabilize the climate, support livelihoods, and sustain biodiversity in the future.

Readers in this space are likely aware of recent media criticisms of the climate mitigation impact and social equity of nature-based carbon crediting projects in the voluntary carbon market (VCM). These critiques have left many well-intentioned companies and environmental champions reevaluating their use of market-based approaches to protect nature and limit climate change. Abandoning the VCM would be a huge mistake at a critical moment for the planet. While there is still room for improvements, the VCM is supported by many leading scientists and environmental organizations, as represented by this letter. Indeed, what could possibly incentivize the required near-term actions for nature and climate at scale in the absence of voluntary markets?  While the numerous benefits of nature to humans are widely recognized, history has shown that this understanding alone rarely translates into a mobilization of the significant resources and the political will needed to protect and restore nature.

At this moment, the VCM offers the best, most mature suite of tools available for injecting private finance into nature conservation. It represents the fruit of decades of painstaking negotiations and research within UNFCCC signatory states. Dating as far back as the run-up to the Kyoto Protocol’s ratification in 1997, developing countries have been repeatedly promised monetary compensation in exchange for curtailing emissions, including through ending deforestation. While UNFCCC signatory states continue to make progress towards negotiating more enforceable climate agreements, the private sector already uses a workable mechanism, while the planet critically needs it. Rather than be seen as an alternative to the UNFCCC process, the VCM provides a clear avenue for countries to finance their climate mitigation ambitions now and build momentum for more broad sectoral policies.

As much as the VCM has earned some justified criticism, it is important to consider an alternative world where we have no global performance-based system in place for funding nature conservation and restoration. In such a world, nature conservation is left with one less tool for offsetting the opportunity costs of a developing planet. Though philanthropic conservation can be a critical lifeline to specific landscapes, it is not likely to mobilize sufficient resources to systematically address the loss of nature and the climate consequences of degraded or deforested landscapes. A world that depends on only one kind of financing solution for conservation is one that is not enough to sustain natural systems to buffer the worst effects of climate change, as evidenced by our current predicament.

While technical critiques of the nuances of different carbon accounting approaches are valuable, this process of continuous improvement should occur alongside investing and strengthening the systems that are currently in place.

Integration of Science and Practice

Science has an important role to play in strengthening trust in the climate impact claims of nature-based carbon projects. Science is a dynamic process that has built the underpinnings of the current data streams, tools, and methods we rely on today for carbon accounting. Because science is always evolving—constantly generating new data, new tools, and refined methods—the challenge we face is thoughtful integration of scientific advances into existing systems and structures. We need to responsibly balance commitment to integrity in attribution and quantification of impact with creating workable solutions that are proportional to the scale and urgency of the climate crisis. These dual imperatives of integrity and urgency are sometimes framed as incompatible, but we can and should build communication pathways that create a community of practice that can co-develop research priorities, ethical norms, and cultivate integrity and efficiency in adapting to scientific advances.

In April of 2024, a group of leading global scientists and forest carbon practitioners gathered at a workshop convened through the Yale Applied Science Synthesis Program and Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture to explore new research directions to improve the transparent and efficient quantification of nature-based carbon credits. Though we did not find agreement on every thorny technical issue, we did come to an important consensus: we are united by a common conviction that carbon crediting is a vital tool that must be rapidly scaled in tandem with other financing to meet global climate goals and conserve nature. Our research efforts must ultimately be judged based on the scale, quality, and equitable sharing of climate and conservation benefits that we enable. We are working to continue the discussions started in April to foster a more intentional collaboration between science and practice that can co-evolve together in ways that will increase the number and scale of activities that will benefit forests and climate.

Acknowledging this agreement has led us to commit to two first steps towards becoming a more effective community of practice. First, we will identify and elevate the most pressing interdisciplinary research questions that help the market get to quality at scale. Second, we are articulating a series of professional norms that help us mediate our own efforts and communicate their results. Through future engagements, including the one already planned for December of 2024, we plan to chart out how we will operationalize these steps across our represented institutions.

Guiding a purposeful research agenda

The next generation of researchers hoping to address climate change seek guidance on the most pressing questions to consider. At the same time, governments increasingly will need to fund the science that guides their accelerating efforts to decarbonize their economies, which includes setting rules that allow carbon markets to grow. Designing effective policy tools for scaling nature conservation and restoration requires us to better integrate historically well-represented fields of forestry and remote sensing with economic, social, and other natural sciences. As a group of researchers and practitioners, we are uniquely positioned to co-develop interdisciplinary research questions that can consider the political and economic constraints of various carbon crediting approaches while also integrating new data streams, tools and methods, and to advocate for such a purposeful research agenda among research institutions and governments.

Promising research priorities have already emerged. One such topic is to clarify the practical consequences of incorporating ex post information when evaluating what would have happened in the absence of carbon finance (i.e. the baseline scenario). Another focus is how to design cost-effective, accurate accounting approaches that satisfy the different, sometimes conflicting, requirements of the developers, buyers and countries participating in emerging UNFCCC-structured compliance markets. Better approaches to demonstrate positive development outcomes for Indigenous peoples and local communities are needed.  Finally, we need better frameworks to assess the practicality and financial viability of various crediting approaches, considering what we know about how actors and businesses make economic decisions around resource use in context of uncertainties. These priorities must be clearly articulated with other emerging themes and broadcast to the wider research community in order to accelerate the scale, viability, and integrity of market-based approaches.

A community guided by principles

Productive research topics are important, but they are not enough. We need to ensure we are acting ethically with laser-focus on the goal of financing climate action at scale. To take an analogy from the medical field, there are established professional norms that mediate how experimental research interfaces with evolving guidance to medical practitioners. See the National Institute of Health’s “Guiding Principles for Ethical Research[1]” as an example. To safeguard the public from the risks of bad medical advice, the field has evolved institutions and norms to help the public, media and governments filter out the noise. While the science of carbon crediting has yet to see the emergence of a formal professional body, we have started to outline five guiding norms that can help us to self-regulate our activities and provide a principled framework to collectively move forward with science and practice in-step. The first is urgency, that we must consciously move at the speed of the crisis. The second is practicality and patience in the integration of new research findings into current practice. The third is science-based, which guides us to focus on grounding our guidance in empirical evidence. The fourth is to maintain an evolutionary mindset, always recognizing that scientific learning, practitioner learning, and government responses are continually co-evolving together and that improvements to carbon projects and markets must occur at a pace that can be realistically absorbed by existing systems. The fifth and final is accountability to nature, local communities, and the planet, such that we take responsibility for real-world ramifications of our actions and words.

Conclusion

The undersigned see that science and practice have reached an important inflection point in carbon crediting. Time is running out for the world to meet ambitious climate goals and we need to accelerate, not decelerate, large-scale climate action. A world without nature-based carbon crediting is one that will be further off track to meeting climate targets, and one where we will all suffer the consequences of a rapidly warming planet.

Collectively we need to find a way to engage productively to urgently scale nature-based solutions to meet global climate goals. This will mean that all participants need to think about how we can contribute to strengthening the functionality, build confidence in the outcomes of the processes embedded in carbon markets, and advocate for workable system that can release the climate finance necessary to make the monumental changes we need to see right now. This work will not be done without partnerships, bridge building, and more discussions that involve and utilize our guiding principles.

We hope that through these early steps, we have planted the seeds of a stronger community of practice, and that we can continue to strengthen it through future engagements. We believe that upon reflecting on the urgency of the task, more will join our cause in helping these principles and practices prevail.

Kevin Brown* & Sarah M Walker*, Wildlife Conservation Society
Sebastien Costedoat* & Guy Pinjuv*, Conservation International
Alejandro Guizar Coutiño*, The Biodiversity Consultancy
Rebecca Dickson, John Furniss, & David Shoch, Terra Carbon
Peter Ellis*, The Nature Conservancy
Jeremy Freund* and Vincent Haller*, Wildlife Works
Kurt Krapfl, ACR
Sara Kuebbing*, Yale University
Spencer Meyer & Linus Hiscox, BeZero Carbon
Ed Mitchard, Space Intelligence
Spencer Plumb* & Naomi Swickard*, Verra
Lynn Riley, American Forest Foundation
Ian Starr & Cyril Melikov, EP Carbon
Joshua Strauss, Anew
Tom Swinfield*, University of Cambridge
Sarah M Walker*, Wildlife Conservation Society

* These individuals support this statement independently. Any affiliations mentioned are for identification purposes and do not signify organizational agreement.

[1] Guiding Principles for Ethical Research | National Institutes of Health (NIH)

This opinion piece, which grew out of discussions at a workshop on REDD/IFM carbon crediting baselines that was hosted by the Yale Center for Carbon Capture earlier this year, was submitted by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

Any opinions published in this commentary reflect the views of the author and not of Carbon Pulse.

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