Presented by Kevin Brown (WCS) at "Bonn Climate Change Conference (SB58) side event: High-integrity forest carbon markets: from global stock-taking to advancing science" on 8 Jun 2023

2. Realizing the promise of high-
integrity REDD at scale
Kevin Brown
Lead - Technical Standards for REDD+ and Nature Based Solutions
Wildlife Conservation Society
kbrown@wcs.org
June 8th 2023
Bonn

3. How can the world realize the potential of REDD after 15+
years?
1. Why WCS believes in nature-based offsetting
2. How to balance integrity of environmental claims with need to quickly scale
3. Technical advancements in the voluntary carbon standards

4. Wildlife Conservation Society and REDD
• 15+ years of VCM project development – Makira, Madagascar and
Keo Seima Cambodia
• Field-led with staff in over 40 countries
• Staff include authors of multiple past and forthcoming Verra VCS
REDD methodologies
• Why WCS believes in REDD
• Predictable, long-term financing of conservation
• Makes carbon owners market participants
• Only mechanism with potential to scale to address need in near
term

5. Increasing scrutiny of claims from REDD projects
• 15+ years into REDD, opportunity for evaluating impact
of the mechanism
• Many groups trying to define integrity in different ways,
generally grouped by:
• 1) Atmospheric
• 2) Equity

6. High integrity at scale -
Getting the balance right
Three kinds of failures possible:
• Financial viability without atmospheric
integrity can scale, but with atmos. harm
• Atmos. integrity and scale without equity –
REDD payments are squandered and do
not result in transition to lasting
sustainable economy
• Atmos. integrity without financial viability
can’t scale: a global failure to conserve
forests
Need to balance against risk of each
failure.
Financial
Viability
Atmospheric
Integrity
Equitable
outcomes
Atmospheric
harm
REDD
doesn’t scale
No sustainable
transformation
of economy
High
integrity
REDD at
scale

7. Financial viability
• Donors now expect private sector to finance REDD
• Large upfront costs, multi-year setup
• 5, 10, or more years to achieve any net ‘profit’
• Large opportunity cost of foregone alternative land uses
• High Risks for project investors and carbon owners:
a) Project performance against baseline
b) VCU price volatility
c) Regulatory environment around carbon trading
d) Risk of poor ex post evaluation of additionality
• a-c can be mitigated, not d

8. Transition to Jurisdictional Programs
• Consensus is we need scale, and jurisdictional is a good goal. But how
to get there?
• Nesting discussed for 10+ years, very few examples of it being
successfully applied
• Missing: Financially viable pathway to scale
https://verra.org/wp-
content/uploads/2021/04/JNR_Program_Guide_v4.0.pdf
https://www.artredd.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/CLI0002_ART_TREES_INFOGRAPHIC_Nesting_L6.pdf

9. Financially Viable Pathway to Jurisdictional
REDD “Generation
1.0” ~2009-2022
REDD “Gen. 2.0”
Jurisdictionally
Aligned Projects
Jurisdictional
Programs (ART,
JNR, FCPF)
Project Scale
accounting
Project-specific
baselines and
MRV
Baseline activity
data is nested
to jurisdiction
AD
Full alignment
of emissions
accounting –
Many models of
nesting
National Scale
accounting
FRELs, national
MRV
May align FREL
with project
baseline
Nested
Safeguards,
benefit sharing
Not required Not required Required
Not realistic leap in
many countries.
Massively underfinanced!
Make something
work well at one
scale,
then expand
stepwise

10. ‘REDD generation 1.0’ approach for VCM
• ‘Reference Region’ acts as proxy for project
• Historical reference region rates projected into future
• Projects develop baseline; 3rd party validates against rules of
methodology
Why was this the approach?
• Data situation much different 10-15 years ago! No global
forest maps, no cloud-based remote sensing.

11. ‘REDD generation 2.0’
VCS consolidated REDD methodology
Increasing integrity of atmospheric claims
• All projects allocated a baseline deforestation rate from a shared
jurisdictional estimate
• No more use of trends: historical average only
• Shorter baseline period, reassessed every 6 years
• Conservative adjustments applied to both activity data and emission
factor uncertainty
• Shared jurisdictional risk map used to localize deforestation rates to
project areas and leakage belts
• Project proponents still responsible for developing emission factors

12. New VCS consolidated REDD methodology
- Advantages for achieving scale
• Removes cost and time barriers to project startup
• Increases carbon owner and investor confidence in revenue
projections
• Many investors want to work at site level only – few pathways to
invest through jurisdictional programs now.
• Removes perceived (rightly or not) conflict of interests
• Builds momentum towards self-sustaining jurisdictional programs
• Encourages cooperation between project developers, and between
VCM and national REDD programs

13. Summary
• REDD is by far the most mature market-based mechanism to address
tropical forest conservation at scale
• Forests don’t have luxury for world to find “shiny new objects”
• Ex post evaluation of additionality has critical role:
• Appropriate – informing evolution of carbon crediting standards
• Inappropriate – applying ‘20/20 hindsight’ to reasonable ex ante
predictions of a project/program otherwise followed rules of a standard
• REDD isn’t a utopia – it’s an emergency response. Questions of scale
and speed are equal to integrity.
• New VCM approaches dramatically advance prospect for integrity at
scale
• Countries should be looking to how they can leverage new standards to
reach financially viable scale without delay

14. Thank You – Gracias –
Merci – Danke