United States legislative proposals on forest carbon

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the role of managing forests to store carbon in the efforts to adopt U.S. climate legislation at the national level (as of September 2010). While the U.S. has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol or adopted national climate legislation yet, considerable efforts have been underway to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses at the regional (Northeastern U.S.), state (California), municipal, corporate, and individual levels. The issue of storage of carbon in forests and farmland has played a major role in U.S. emission reduction efforts, particularly in the voluntary carbon markets. As the demand for land-based carbon offsets has grown, so too has the demand for rules to define high quality, real offsets. The U.S. market has responded with a range of such rules, from those directly supported by governments, to those that are purely voluntary. Some of these rules cover how best to account for carbon in forest systems, such as: the types of forests/forestry operations covered; the pools of carbon in the forest that are included; the location of acceptable projects; and the /business as usual/baseline emissions to be considered. Others go more directly to the quality of the offset produced, namely, whether the emission reductions are truly "additional" to those that would have happened anyway; how best to monitor and verify that the promised storage has occurred; how to protect against - leakage; and how to ensure that the storage is permanent or how to protect against potential releases in the future.