Features of the NFS

The conservation and restoration of natural forests provides vital biodiversity and social benefits which should be reflected in the value that is attributed to carbon certificates from natural forests. At present the credits issued by standards such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) and the America Carbon Registry (ACR), cover a range of emission reducing activities that do not adequately reflect this value. One of the aims of the Natural Forest Standard is to give attention to natural forests and reflect this special value in the market. The standard incorporates a biodiversity metric to quantify the biodiversity value associated with Natural Capital Credits.

The NFS addresses situations that are not fully represented in other standards. For instance, whilst the Plan Vivo Standard deals effectively with lands owned or managed by smallholder farmers and communities and the CarbonFix Standard applies to small and medium scale plantations, these standards do not apply to large parts of the natural forest estate owned or controlled by public bodies, ranging from municipalities to state-owned concessions. The Natural Forest Standard will focus on extensive areas of public and state owned forests that are not adequately protected or managed.  The Natural Forest Standard has strong social and governance requirements including Free Prior and Informed Consent to address potential risks to community access and use rights within these forest areas.

To address the risk that emission reduction certificates may be used to subsidise conventional commercial logging operations the NFS excludes commercial timber extraction operations from generating credits. The VCS and ACR, which do not exclude commercial timber extraction, use “additionality tests” designed to assess the threshold at which an emission reduction project goes beyond what is considered commercially viable within the local context. These tests are necessarily complicated and add a considerable burden to project validation. While it may be possible to have genuine emission reductions and additional carbon sequestration from commercial timber extraction, the NFS avoids the complexity of commercial additionality tests by excluding all commercial logging.

One of the most challenging and costly aspects of quantifying the carbon benefits associated with avoiding deforestation and degradation through planned project activities is the establishment of a baseline – representing the emissions that are likely to occur in the absence of the project. There have been numerous methods and approaches proposed for baseline setting, most of which are either highly data intensive or involve complex predictive models. The VCS is structured to allow different models to be used in different projects. While this arrangement may suit certain project developers, it makes project approval, systematic learning and gradual improvement more difficult. The NFS provides a standardised performance benchmark approach to baselines for activities avoiding deforestation and degradation, with performance baselines based on regional, national and global risk modelling; this approach will also help to link projects and national REDD+ baselines. The NFS is therefore focused on building on the body of knowledge and data relating to forest carbon at risk to make consistent and comparable risk map products available across all NFS projects.

The minimum size of NFS projects will be 20,000 hectares. This is because the NFS risk-based approach uses a statistical sampling basis, and project sizes below 20,000 ha will be insufficient to generate meaningful results.

The functionality of the Natural Forest Standard optimises the time requirements of bringing projects from initial implementation to credit issuance in the most responsive, efficient timescale possible, whilst also keeping the integrity and transparency that are essential criteria to the credibility of the Standard.  The ECO NFS is unique in its design as it has the project-developers needs in mind, whilst incorporating the integrity of stringent eligibility criteria with efficient third party validation and verification processes.