REDD+ is world's best hope of saving standing forests - Everland
Quantum Commodity Intelligence - A UN mechanism that has been highly criticised by civil society is the world's best hope of saving standing forests and should be better appreciated for its success, says Joshua Tosteson, President at US carbon firm Everland.
In June, Everland unveiled the Forest Plan, a roadmap to finance 75 REDD+ projects that could yield 800 million metric tonnes (mt) of carbon offsets by 2030.
The company, which was born out of project developer Wildlife Works, sells carbon credits on behalf of six REDD+ projects situated in Indonesia, Peru, Kenya, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Guinea Bissau.
It describes itself as a carbon offset marketing firm and admits it is unusual in the world of carbon market intermediaries.
"We're not a broker of carbon... We're an outsourced sales and communications unit for project developers," Tosteson told Quantum in an interview.
Scarce REDD+ skills
Deforestation is widely recognised to be the fourth largest contributor to climate change.
At the COP26 conference in Glasgow, 141 nations pledged to end it by 2030, but Everland says few concrete initiatives exist on the ground other than REDD+.
"Economics drives forest loss, the solution is some kind of a plan that provides economic opportunities... We need to work with solutions that are proven to work."
To date, the carbon sector has operated at a level akin to artisanal scale, but it needs to grow significantly in order to have a material impact on emissions.
Joshua Tosteson, who has more than 20 years of experience in forestry and sustainable agriculture in both the non-profit and private sectors, says that few organisations currently possess the skills to bring a REDD+ project to fruition.
Forestry carbon projects are notoriously difficult to implement and often take a long time and significant upfront investments.
"REDD+ projects require a variety of competencies... very few organisations possess all of them and in the near term, they're fully booked out or are about to be," he says.
Everland says the Forest Plan represents the largest single voluntary carbon finance intervention in history, with over $2 billion in long-term contractual commitments to projects and communities already in hand.
It hopes to develop a network of actors with a stake in REDD+ projects and knowledge of the sector, with plans for a task force and, possibly, a summit held every year.
The platform plans to merge expertise in both jurisdictional and project-based REDD+ and involve actors "from the grassroots to the tree tops."
"It's a bit of a glimmer of hope. There can just be this cynical reaction that things aren't going well... But we've gotten a lot of inbounds... the response has spoken to that."