Verra takes on 100-year burden of monitoring future forest health

Quantum Commodity Intelligence - US registry Verra has said it is willing to take on the task of monitoring the future health of forests generating voluntary carbon credits under its programme for the next 100 years or more, using remote sensing technology.

The issue of permanence goes to the heart of carbon markets. Projects in the agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU) sector typically cannot guarantee that the credits they generate will not be released back to the atmosphere at a later date.

These can take the form of forest fires, widespread tree loss caused by disease or even encroachment by other actors and are typically called 'loss events' in industry jargon.

Currently, any project in the AFOLU sector needs to set aside a certain amount of credits as part of a buffer pool, which is a form of insurance against future loss.

All the buffer credits generated by AFOLU projects are pooled together and cannot be traded. And, while developers are required to report loss events to Verra during the crediting period of the project, the task becomes much more difficult once the project is no longer active.

The current available buffer in the Verra registry is just under 60 million tonnes CO2e, or around 15% of all the AFOLU credits issued to date.

"There is no ongoing monitoring of the underlying carbon stocks after the project ends. However, without long-term monitoring, there is no way to know how individual projects, and the VCS AFOLU portfolio at large, perform over the long term and whether the cancelled buffer credits cover future reversals that may occur," said Verra.

"This undermines confidence in the buffer approach and the permanence of AFOLU VCUs."

Executives from Verra said in a webinar held Wednesday that the organisation was willing to guarantee future monitoring of AFOLU projects for 100 years after the end of a project, using satellite imagery.

The nonprofit is currently looking at a range of providers and options but says it will launch a tool sometime in 2022 to track loss events from current projects.

Sometime in 2023 or after, it hopes to unveil a public platform for some types of projects and, after 2025, operate a fully-fledged automated system for all projects.

In the call, the Verra executives acknowledged some "limitations" with current remote sensing technology, such as the ability to monitor change in dryland ecosystems, which do not typically have a high forest canopy.

Optical imagery also struggles in moist regions such as the Amazon, which is cloudy most of the year, while the loss of the Sentinel-1B satellite in December 2021 has dramatically cut the volume of open-source radar data available.

But data availability – both radar and optical – is widely expected to grow rapidly and costs are expected to fall with the launch of new constellations of satellites from the likes of ICEYE and Capella Space over the next few years.

The consultation on this topic was released last December and runs until February 14, and is available here.