28 September 2010
The American Carbon Registry (ACR) has raised the bar for the level of carbon that landowners must sequester under its forestry programmes in a move that it claims will stimulate the carbon offset market.
It has approved an Improved Forest Management (IFM) methodology for quantifying greenhouse gas removal and emissions reductions, targeting privately-owned industrial timberlands in the US already managed under a commercial timber harvesting programme.
ACR said that the methodology unleashes groundbreaking possibilities in the market, partly because it applies conservative assumptions to ensure that no additional activities are credited, a flaw that has plagued existing IFM methodologies.
Under the new methodology, which is the first to specifically target industrial timberlands, landowners must make a long-term commitment to sequester carbon on their properties above and beyond what would normally occur under an institutional timber owner’s typical business-as-usual management.
‘The Finite Carbon IFM methodology fills a critical gap in the US forest carbon market by providing a straightforward and scalable framework for commercial timber land managers to develop high-quality IFM projects,’ said Nicholas Martin, ACR’s chief technical officer.
To date, only five forest carbon projects have been registered and verified, four of which are California-based projects registered under the Climate Action Reserve, and the fifth is a large multi-state project registered on ACR.
ACR said that the methodology has been included as an eligible project type under both House and Senate cap-and-trade bills.
It is also consistent with pre-compliance recognition in recent federal bills and state programmes, making projects formed under the standard appealing for corporate social responsibility buyers.
ACR said it plans to complement the methodology in the future with additional methodologies for non-industrial private forests and public land.
‘The end result is a methodology that balances concerns of commercial operability, environmental integrity and cost, all of which are crucial for high-quality projects to be developed on a scale that will have an impact,’ said Finite Carbon president Scott Nissenbaum.
ACR was founded in 1996 as the US GreenHouse Gas Registry by the Environmental Defense Fund and Environmental Resources Trust.
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