Options for addressing the risk of non-permanence for land-based mitigation in carbon crediting programmes Options for addressing the risk of non-permanence for land-based mitigation in carbon crediting programmes Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Rome, 2024 REQUIRED CITATION: FAO. [...] The designations employed and the presentation of material in this information product do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) concerning the legal or development status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its f. [...] 1 What reversals are and why they matter for carbon crediting The risk of “non-permanence” is intuitively easy to understand: carbon stored as a result of a mitigation activity, such as tree planting, could be released to the atmosphere in the future, undercutting the activity’s contribution to slowing climate change. [...] The project, developed by the Green Diamond timber company, was designed to both avoid forest carbon emissions and enhance removals by slowing the pace of logging.a The fire caused around 3.3 million tonnes of CO2 to be emitted to the atmosphere, completely reversing all the avoided emissions previously attributed to the project, which were about 1 million tonnes (relative to the project’s baselin. [...] 31 Options for addressing the risk of non-permanence for land-based mitigation in carbon crediting programmes ↘ Methodological approaches for estimating carbon stock losses in the baseline scenario: The possible methodological approaches for estimating how many carbon stocks would have been lost in the baseline scenario due to a disturbance may differ in their robustness and conservativeness.
- Pages
- 68
- Published in
- Germany
Table of Contents
- Options for addressing the risk of non-permanence for land-based mitigation in carbon crediting programmes 1
- Options for addressing the risk of non-permanence for land-based mitigation in carbon crediting programmes 3
- Contents 5
- Acknowledgements 8
- Abbreviations 9
- Executive summary 10
- Introduction 13
- What reversals are and why they matter for carbon crediting 15
- What reversals are and how they can occur 16
- What factors contribute to reversal risk 26
- Possible approaches for crediting non-permanent mitigation 30
- How carbon crediting programmes manage reversal risks 33
- Overview of approaches used by carbon crediting programmes 34
- Assessing and reducing reversal risk 38
- Crediting based on monitoring and compensation for reversals 41
- Temporary crediting 45
- Crediting based on issuance deductions 46
- Tonne-year accounting 47
- How reversal risk creates potential liability for host countries 49
- A potential misbalance between current benefits from emission reductions or removals and future responsibility for reversals 51
- How host countries have ultimate responsibility for reversals despite carbon crediting programmes reversal risk management 53
- How host countries can strategically manage reversal risk 57
- Conclusions 61
- References 65
