Forest Protocol Updates
The draft Forest Protocol update is the result of over a year of discussion by a dedicated workgroup. The multi-stakeholder workgroup began meeting with the explicit task of updating the forest protocols to:
- Allow greater landowner participation, particularly publicly-owned lands and industrial working forests.
- Make improvements that improve the protocols’ clarity, accuracy, conservatism, environmental integrity, and cost-effectiveness (where doing so does not infringe on other principles).
Additionally, the framework of the protocol update is designed to allow the protocols to be used beyond California’s boundaries with minimal additional analysis. The intent of this effort is to provide a forest protocol that can be applied to an extensive geographic area for generating high-quality GHG offsets for use in the voluntary market.
CCAR’s Climate Action Reserve uses a very rigorous, open, and comprehensive process for developing all of its protocols and is primarily focused on accuracy and conservative GHG accounting to ensure that the resulting emission reductions meet the tests of being clearly real, permanent, additional, verifiable, and enforceable. As a result, we believe that emission reductions registered by the Climate Action Reserve are of the highest quality. Notwithstanding the rigor of CCAR’s requirements, CRTs are not currently recognized as valid for compliance in any government-run trading program or regulatory system. In the future, only the government authorities in charge of designing such systems can decide whether CRTs will be recognized for compliance purposes.
Information regarding the current forest protocols:
- CCAR continues to fully support projects registered under the current version of the forest protocol and strongly believes that the emission reductions associated with such projects (known as Climate Reserve Tonnes or CRTs) will continue to meet the highest standards today and into the future.
- The California Registry’s forest protocols represent a sound rigorous approach to quantifying the benefits of voluntary forestry projects.
- The protocols are available now for project developers to the public to develop forest conservation, forest management, and reforestation projects in California.
- Voluntary projects that are registered under the current protocols will continue to be verified under the protocol in place at the time the project was registered for the life of the project for the purposes of generating voluntary credits for the voluntary market.
- Projects will be accepted for registration under the current protocols for a period of up to three months after an updated protocol is adopted by the California Registry’s Board of Directors.
Timeline
The California Climate Action Registry and its forest work group is now reviewing public comments on the draft protocols, and expects to prepare the next draft for consideration by the CCAR board of directors at their meeting in April 2009. Separately, the workgroup is continuing to consider accounting issues related to the treatment of harvested wood products, and a separate public comment period for any recommendations in this regard will be announced in the future.
Workgroup Participants
| Name | Affiliation | Substitute |
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<!– <!– | Beaty and Associates | None Identified |
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<!– <!– | US Forest Service | |
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<!– <!– | California State Parks |
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| California Forestry Association |
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<!– <!– | CalFire Representative | None Identified |
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<!– <!– | Sierra Pacific Industries | None Identified |
| Ann Chan | Pacific Forest Trust |
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<!– <!– | Environmental Defense Fund | None Identified |
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<!– <!– | World Resources Institute | None Identified |
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<!– <!– | Green Diamond Resources | None Identified |
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<!– <!– | Board of Forestry Representative | None Identified |
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<!– <!– | University of California | None Identified |
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<!– <!– | Air Resources Board Representative |
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<!– <!– | California Climate Action Registry |
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<!– <!– | Winrock International | Nick Martin |
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<!– <!– | U.S. Environmental Protection Agency | None Identified |
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<!– <!– | US Forest Service | None Identified |
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<!– <!– | The Nature Conservancy |
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<!– <!– | Scientific Certification Systems | Sterling Griffin |
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<!– <!– | Winrock International | None Identified |
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<!– <!–
| Cal Fire Representative | None Identified |
Protocols and Resources
The following is a list of GHG accounting protocols and https://caclimateregistry.org/resources that the CA Registry considers to represent or conform to internationally accepted accounting principles. All of the https://caclimateregistry.org/resources listed here were developed in transparent processes that allowed for stakeholder input. They will represent points of reference for the Registry’s workgroup as it engages in the process of revising and expanding the Forest Project Protocols. Workgroup member should attempt to familiarize themselves with these https://caclimateregistry.org/resources.