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ncx-co / ifm_deferred_harvest

Documents, Data, and Code. The NCX Methodology For Improved Forest Management (IFM) Through Short-Term Harvest Deferral.
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Public Comment: 239 (Cindy Chiang) #239

Closed ncx-gitbot closed 2 years ago

ncx-gitbot commented 2 years ago

Commenter Organization: Carbon Solutions Lead, Pachama Inc.

Commenter: Cindy Chiang

2021 Deferred Harvest Methodology Section: No Section Indicated

Comment: Tonne-year accounting introduces confusion. Taken together, our prior concerns highlight the fact that tonne-year accounting is a black box of assumptions. The market cannot scale nor survive in the long-run without trust, transparency, and standardization. This is evidenced by the reality that there is little to no uptake of the protocols with tonne-year accounting options in the Western Climate Initiatives in Quebec. While there is uptake in Climate Action Reserve's Mexico Forest Protocol (MFP), it is worth highlighting the MFP employs tonne-year accounting based on 30-year contracts, that are renewed annually. Further, the tonne-year accounting mechanism in the MFP addresses a specific challenge unique to rural and indigenous landowners in Mexico who are not legally able to sign land management contracts longer than 30 years. The assumption that a 1-year crediting framework through tonne-year accounting will generate enough financial benefit for landowners to engage is simply not observed today in existing protocols with similar mechanisms. Demonstrating that tonne-year accounting is insufficient to address the main pain point the methodology seeks to solve for.

Proposed Change: No Proposed Change

ncx-gitbot commented 2 years ago

NCX response: A tonne-year is simply a unit of carbon account like a kilowatt hour is to a kilowatt for electricity, a unit of volume over time. While tonne-year accounting may not be used widely today in the voluntary carbon market, it has been supported as an alternative to traditional carbon accounting in the scientific literature for many years. One cannot adequately know the full benefit of a solution without adding in the time or duration term. Fundamentally, tonne-year accounting allows for the delivery of realized impact, not presumed future impact on timescales incongruent with the variability of natural systems. Furthermore, tonne-year accounting allows the direct comparison of benefits of different carbon offsets approaches over many different time scales and technologies.