Publication
Fauna & Flora’s priorities for COP28
This report highlights the five key areas we would like to see progress in at COP28, and offers a way forward. Cut emiss...
The science is clear and unequivocal: there is no pathway to meeting the Paris Goals without the protection and restoration of nature, and the empowerment of local people on the frontline of this effort is vital.
Nature-based solutions to address climate change (also known as natural climate solutions, or NCS) are a critical tool in the international response to the twin biodiversity loss and climate crises, and the voluntary carbon market is an important mechanism to channel finance to these solutions. We need to leverage all available tools to reach net zero, and nature can provide one-third of the emissions reductions needed by 2030.
We recognise that the voluntary carbon market, as it currently stands, is not perfect, and we welcome the significant efforts underway to improve its governance, practise and transparency. While there are current challenges in the market, when delivered with high integrity, nature-based carbon credits can and should play a key role in accelerating progress towards net zero.
Fauna & Flora supports the use of high integrity reduction and removal credits during the transition to net zero to counterbalance unabated value chain emissions – those that remain after all efforts to remove and reduce. But, it is critical that credits should not substitute or delay emissions reductions; they can only work alongside rapid decarbonisation, otherwise they are a tool for greenwashing.
To this end, nature-based credits must have high integrity with respect to climate change mitigation and must be independently validated and verified to internationally recognised standards as doing so. Projects must show emissions reductions and removals to be real, additional, monitored, reported and verified – based on realistic and credible baselines – and must address leakage and permanence.
© Daniel Mîrlea / Fauna & Flora
In addition, if the carbon market is to enable the desired outcomes for climate and nature, it is critical that all stakeholders and rights holders are empowered actors at each stage of the development and implementation of NCS. NCS projects and jurisdictional programmes must seek and fully respect the free prior and informed consent (FPIC) of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and effective engagement with these groups must be adequately resourced.
COP28, and the resolution of outstanding details of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, offers a historic opportunity to provide an improved structure for the carbon market and to finalise carbon rules and guidance in the right way. As always, high integrity is essential. Article 6, which allows countries to invest in reducing emissions in other countries to create carbon credits, needs to establish appropriate guardrails, standards and transparency measures for the market, building on lessons learned from the voluntary carbon market processes, and with Indigenous People and local communities as the core beneficiaries.
Now more than ever, we need a commitment to high integrity, transparency and accountability on both the supply and demand sides of the voluntary carbon market and forest carbon transactions within the UNFCCC framework - it is the only way we can ensure a just and sustainable future.
Fauna & Flora supports robust guidance such as the Tropical Forest Credit Integrity Guide (TFCI), which outlines threshold criteria that tropical forest carbon credits should meet to be considered high quality. While developed with a focus on the voluntary carbon market, the guidance is as relevant to forest-carbon based cooperative approaches under Article 6.
Now more than ever, we need a commitment to high integrity, transparency and accountability on both the supply and demand sides of the voluntary carbon market and forest carbon transactions within the UNFCCC framework – it is the only way we can ensure a just and sustainable future for this approach. Importantly, it is not the time for action to stall; we need to leverage all available tools if we want to halt and reverse nature loss, and maximise its contribution to climate change mitigation, by 2030, and reach net zero by 2050.
Read the joint statement from Fauna & Flora, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and others urging Parties to apply TCFI to strive to ensure that all forest carbon credits transacted are of the highest quality.
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