Forests

Landscape-scale | Protecting Biodiversity, Supporting Communities

Stop massive amounts of stored carbon re-entering the atmosphere.

Establish a monetary value for keeping the forest standing.

Help community and infrastructure development.

Maintain traditional customs and lifestyles.

Transform local forest-based economies.

Improve social equity.

Protect biodiversity.

Forest-based projects protect, restore or enhance forests and their ecosystem functions.

The forest, its biodiversity and the myriad of services it provides to the local people are maintained.

These projects act on the terrestrial carbon sink which is sequestering (extracting and holding) carbon from the atmosphere.

When you buy a carbon offset from the Forests theme, you are buying a tonne of verified climate benefit that drives many sustainability outcomes

Forests | Project Types

Forests | Sustainability Beyond Carbon

Projects creating Forests carbon offsets:

• Help transform local forest-based economies and sustain local communities to remove deforestation drivers.
• Often help improve land tenure, social equity and resilience of poor regions which reduces the pressure to shift into new forests.
• Provide community and infrastructure development by using carbon finance to fund schools, health centres, ecotourism ventures, ranger stations and anti-poaching patrols.
• Protect biodiversity and ecosystem functions in habitats that feature many iconic species (often endangered) and hundreds of others that are under threat from deforestation and degradation.
• Work to maintain traditional customs and lifestyles, especially for indigenous and traditional owners.
• Establish a monetary value for keeping the standing forest rather than chopping it down or degrading it.
• Supply training on food security, sustainable land management, agroforestry and non-timber forest products to provide alternatives to clearing the forest.

Forests | Real and Verified, not Future and Promised

Forests carbon offsets sold by Beyond Neutral’s Carbon Shop are based on a project’s actual, verified non-release of stored carbon from a forest area, or its sequestration of carbon into the landscape.

We do not sell future sequestration or avoided emissions based on expectations of future performance

The Scale of Deforestation and Degradation

Annual deforestation between 2015 and 2020:
10 million hectares

 Forest converted to other land uses since 1990:
420 million hectares

Tropical deforestation (2000-2010):

• 40% of this was caused by large-scale commercial agriculture.
  • Mostly cattle ranching, soya bean cultivation and oil palm plantations.
• Subsistence agriculture accounted for 33% of deforestation in tropical forests over the decade.

World’s Forests

2/3 of the world’s 4,000 million ha of forests are found in 10 countries.

About 80% of the world’s forests exist in patches larger than 1 million hectares.

• The rest (about 800 million ha) occurs in over 34 million patches with the vast majority being under 1,000 hectares in size.
• The average size of these small forest patches is 23.5 ha

Primary forest (never logged nor cleared) makes up more than 1/3 of forests.

Worldwide, there are over 80 million hectares less primary forest today than existed in 1990

Primary forests are naturally regenerated forests of native species, where there are no visible indications of human activities and the ecological processes are not significantly disturbed.

FAO’s State of the World’s Forests, 2020

Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2021) – “Forests and Deforestation”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/forests-and-deforestation’ [Online Resource]

Why Does Deforestation Occur?

Deforestation is driven by both illegal activities and legal operations sanctioned by government.

The causes of deforestation include:

• Poverty;
• Shifting subsistence agriculture;
• Clearing for pasture (e.g. cattle), plantations (e.g oil palm) or cropping (e.g. palm oil or soy bean);
• Fuelwood and charcoal production;
• Logging for timber;
• Infrastructure (e.g. roads, powerlines, dams, urban areas etc);
• Mining (gold, diamonds, cobalt, other rare earths); and
• Migration and population pressures.

Access carbon credits from certified and independently audited forest-based projects from around the world

REDD+ | Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation

Standing forest contains vast stores of carbon in the trees and the soil under them.

Deforestation sees this stored carbon released quickly during a change in land use:

• When the forest is removed and the land converted to agriculture, pasture, mining, urban areas.

Degradation of the forest is “death by 1000 cuts”:

• each load of fuelwood or charcoal etc reduces the carbon stored by a forest ecosystem but the land isn’t converted to some other land use

Both processes impact an ecosystem’s function and consequently, the biodiversity and the services it provides to local people.

Both processes impact an ecosystem’s function and consequently, the biodiversity and the services it provides to local people.

REDD+ reduces emissions, empowers communities and supports biodiversity

REDD+ projects protect some of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems and support some of the world’s poorest communities

What is REDD+?

“REDD+ is a framework created by the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) to guide activities in the forest sector that reduces emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, as well as the sustainable management of forests and the conservation and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries.”

(UNFCCC)

The REDD+ framework is known as the Warsaw Framework for REDD+ as it was adopted at COP 19 in Warsaw, December 2013.

REDD+ is also recognized in Article 5 of the Paris Agreement.

REDD+ projects are located in areas where deforestation and/or forest degradation is actively occurring and is expected to severely impact the standing forest into the future.

The projects are located in biodiversity hot-spots which are under immediate threat.

They work with local communities made up of some of the world’s poorest people living in and around the forest.

The projects use established and accepted methodologies developed by VCS and verified by accredited third parties.

Additional accreditation of the project’s sustainability co-benefits is provided by Climate, Communities, Biodiversity Standards (CCB).

All REDD+ projects generating VCS carbon offsets have addressed key criteria like:

• permanence and additionality;
• leakage;
• being real yet conservative in claims; and
• measurable and verifiable.

Every REDD+ project has to set aside a risk-adjusted percentage of their verified credits into the VCS buffer pool to manage the risk of a release of sequestered carbon (reversal).

At the beginning of 2022, there were over 58 million tonnes held in the buffer.

If a reversal occurs in a project that cannot be recovered, that amount of credits can be cancelled from the buffer pool.

Forests | Reforestation

Reforestation involves the establishment of vegetation across a landscape that was cleared historically and has been used for another purpose (e.g. cropping).

The land cannot have been cleared recently.  This avoids the perverse incentive to clear forest to then replant it and claim carbon credits.

These types of forest-based projects develop a carbon sink, sequestering (extracting and holding) carbon that is already in the atmosphere.

They generate other environmental benefits associated with increasing tree cover, especially if the planting is species rich:

• Biodiversity enhancements;
• Decreased soil erosion; and
• Improved micro-climates.

Projects have to meet the typical criteria for all quality carbon credits, addressing the same issues as REDD+ projects.

Risk management plans are required to avoid the loss of stored carbon along with the allocation of a proportion of the credits issued into a buffer.

The pooling of various locations under one project helps to spread risk spatially.

Forests | Improved Forest Management (IFM)

Improved Forest Management involves changes to the management regimes of a forest.

It often involves:

• Changing from regular logging to protecting the existing forests.
• Removing any logging rights.
• Suppressing illegal logging activity.
• Managing the forest in a way that enhances its growth and health.

The same criteria need to be met as the other types of forest-based carbon credits.

Buying carbon offsets from Beyond Neutral is easy