ncx-gitbot
commented
1 year 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.
Commenter Organization: Bluesource LLC
Commenter: Ben Parkhurst
2021 Deferred Harvest Methodology Section: No Section Indicated
Comment: Feedback on 1 Year Projects Utilizing Tonne Year Accounting
Proposed Change: The primary concern around the current proposed TYA approach is the lack of a minimum crediting period for some projects. Forest management decisions are considered over the course of many decades, and therefore any reputable forest carbon project should also be maintained over a similar time scale. Where long-term management is concerned, it is unreasonable to determine additionality of a management change in any single year. However, over a multi-decadal timeframe, we can establish much greater confidence in the reasonability of the counterfactual scenario outlined in each project’s baseline. This is one of the reasons why current Verra AFOLU projects require a minimum 20-year crediting period: over a multi-decadal time-frame market participants have significantly more confidence in the additionality and permanence of emissions reductions. We advocate that this methodology require that instances require a minimum time commitment of at least 20 years, consistent with the VCS Standard.