REDD+ in 2024: The State of Forest Carbon After Paris Rulebook Finalisation
July 16, 2024
Forestry carbon projects have faced persistent credibility challenges — from over-crediting scandals to independent analyses questioning whether some flagship REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) projects delivered anywhere near their claimed reductions. The finalisation of the Paris Agreement’s Article 6 rulebook, alongside tightened methodologies from major registries like Verra, marks an attempt to rebuild that credibility from the ground up.
What went wrong
The core criticism levelled at first-generation REDD+ projects centred on baselines: many were approved against counterfactual deforestation rates that, with hindsight and better remote-sensing data, look implausibly high. If a project claims credit for preventing deforestation that was never going to happen at the rate assumed, the resulting credits represent little or no real atmospheric benefit — regardless of how rigorously the on-the-ground conservation work was actually carried out.
Permanence and leakage compounded the problem. Forests protected under one project boundary sometimes simply pushed logging and land conversion pressure into neighbouring, unprotected areas, while political or economic shocks occasionally reversed protections that credits had already been issued against.
What’s changing
Newer methodologies lean more heavily on jurisdictional and regional baselines rather than project-specific ones set by the developer benefiting from a higher baseline — reducing the incentive misalignment that drove over-crediting. Remote sensing and satellite-based monitoring have also matured substantially, making it far harder for a baseline to diverge quietly from observed reality over a project’s lifetime.
Article 6’s corresponding adjustments mechanism adds another layer of discipline: when credits are used toward another country’s Paris Agreement target, the host country must adjust its own emissions inventory accordingly, preventing the same reduction from being counted twice. This forces host-country governments to engage more directly with the integrity of projects operating within their borders, rather than leaving verification entirely to the project developer and a registry.
What this means for buyers
The REDD+ market isn’t disappearing — forest protection remains one of the most cost-effective near-term levers available for reducing emissions and protecting biodiversity simultaneously. But buyers now need to look past registry approval and examine baseline methodology, monitoring cadence, and jurisdictional context directly. Projects built on the newer generation of methodologies, with conservative baselines and continuous monitoring, are better positioned to withstand the scrutiny that undid many of their predecessors.