Forest Carbon Credits as a Nature-Based Solution to Climate Change?

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Background

The recently released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (IPCC WGI Assessment Report 6) makes clear the need for urgent action to mitigate climate change. Models achieving mitigation targets at the lower end of the temperature increase range (1.5 – 2 degrees C by the end of the century) rely on significant amounts of natural carbon stored in and sequestered by forests. One mechanism to incentivize such carbon stock maintenance and sequestration within the suite of “Nature-Based Solutions” is forest, and possibly forest products, carbon credits. These forest carbon credits, or can be used by countries, corporations, foundations, non-profits, investment managers or individuals seeking to counter their emissions and to enhance climate ambition. In general, credits could be used as part of a requirement or mandate for emissions reductions (as compliance offsets) or done to demonstrate or implement sustainability measures on a voluntary basis (as voluntary offsets).

Proponents of forest carbon credits point to the need to create financial incentives for avoided deforestation, forest management and reforestation, the benefits that carbon credits can provide in terms of reducing the global costs of mitigation and enhancing climate ambition, and the ancillary benefits that can arise from action to preserve or plant forests (e.g., biodiversity, water quality, indigenous rights, etc.). Detractors of credit programs point to issues around whether the carbon stored or sequestered is “additional”, the duration/permanence of such credits based on long-term forest management, potential leakage, risks of reversals, and the risk that allowing offsetting of emissions inappropriately detracts from a focus on the need to implement emissions reductions at source. As the need for rapid reductions in carbon emissions and the difficulty of meeting emissions targets without land-based solutions become even more starkly clear, it is necessary to address these questions around forest carbon credits. We invite papers that cover a variety of issues within the forest, and forest products, carbon credit space to better understand under what conditions they might contribute effectively and equitably to climate change mitigation.

Specifically, we invite contributions related to:
- the role of forest carbon credits in compliance and voluntary markets;
- the role of forest carbon credits in net-zero emissions pathways;
- the longstanding challenges of baseline/additionality, duration/permanence, leakage of forest carbon credits;
- The challenge of ‘carbon cowboys’;
- The conditions under which forest carbon credits can be a useful tool to accelerate ambition;
- The building of trust in compliance and voluntary markets;

Papers regarding implementation issues around forest carbon credit programs are covered by the related Research Topic 'Implementing Forest Carbon Credits as a Nature-Based Climate Change Solution: Scaling Up for Impact' which is launched in parallel.

Keywords: carbon, nature-based solutions, markets, climate change

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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