The Brighter Planet Blog

In our January survey, we asked the Brighter Planet community what types of offset projects they were most interested in supporting. Almost 90% were interested in forestry projects that suck CO₂ out of the atmosphere by planting new trees or allowing trees to grow for longer before harvesting.

Forestry projects are the only type of offset project that actively removes CO₂ from the atmosphere, rather than prevents its release. They also have tremendous environmental co-benefits, from providing wildlife habitat to controlling erosion and reducing flooding. But we didn’t jump on adding forestry projects to our portfolio because we were concerned by the risk that captured CO₂ could later be released by disease or fire, eliminating any climate benefit. One of the first requirements of our carbon offset policy is that projects must create offsets that cannot be invalidated by future events.

That’s why we’re excited by last week’s release of a new version of the Climate Action Reserve (CAR) protocol that sets the standards forest projects must meet to sell CAR-certified offsets. Under the new protocol all forest projects contribute a percentage of the offsets they generate each year into a buffer pool. Projects that are more risky contribute a higher percentage than low-risk projects. If a fire or other event releases some of the carbon a project had captured, offsets are taken out of the buffer pool to cover the loss. This is exactly the kind of insurance mechanism that forest projects need to provide confidence that their offsets are real and cannot be invalidated.

This is big news because CAR is the pre-eminent offset standard in the US. Many observers expect that CAR-certified offsets will be officially recognized by federal climate legislation. The new forest protocol also expands coverage to the entire US (previously only California forests could register as offset projects). With this expanded scope and increased credibility we expect to see a lot of new CAR-certified forestry projects in the coming years. We’ll be on the lookout for any that satisfy the remaining requirements of our offset policy.

-Ian