Quality Standard

Forest Moor is committed to delivering projects of the highest standard. To provide assurance of quality, all our projects are certified under the CCB standard (see below). In future we aim to register projects under the UN's 'Land use, land-use change and forestry' (LULUCF) scheme and the 'Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation' (REDD) scheme when this has been developed. This will enable us to sell offsets in the regulated market.

There has in the past been some controversy around the use of forestry plantation carbon sinks. Issues have been raised about permanence, establishment of monocultures, use of non-native trees, impact on local communities and the possibility that sequestration is a way of avoiding the need to reduce emissions.

Forest Moor is fundamentally interested in biodiversity and sustainable development. Therefore our choice of projects is driven by the same criteria that mark out good quality projects under the best standards. This means that money spent on reducing carbon emissions and creating carbon sinks is also benefiting local people and their environment in very direct ways.

Forest Moor criteria for projects

Sustainable Development

Projects are managed sustainably and promote the sustainable development of the locality. The projects invest in local communities and involve local people in the projects.

Additionality

We demonstrate that the carbon sink or storage benefits are additional to any that would have occurred without the project. We use a baseline scenario and compare emissions that would occur without the project with those that occur with the project.

Leakage

An increase in emissions occurring outside the project area but resulting from the project activities are defined as negative leakage. There is a risk of leakage in forest protection or reforestation projects, as farming activities displaced by projects move to surrounding areas and cause further deforestation. Leakage from forest projects are assessed by monitoring and compensated for by maintaining areas of forest set aside to account for any leakage that occurs. Projects can reduce leakage by providing training and alternative sources of income. Our reforesting projects in Brazil minimize the risk by including productive agroforestry plots and training to provide increased productive capacity to local producers.

Monitoring

Monitoring of baselines and project areas is carried out to give figures for carbon emissions reduction and carbon absorbed.

Permanence

As forests are subject to natural disasters such as fires and disease, along with human pressures that could remove the carbon store, there will always be an element of doubt about the permanence of biological carbon stores. However, as we discuss in the 'Review of energy and land use projects' section on our Carbon Stores and Sinks page, this doubt over permanance also applies to mineral carbon stores such as fossil fuels. The carbon stored in Forest Moor projects is intended to be permanent and we maximise the chance of achieving permanance by attention to land tenure. All projects take place on land owned by NGOs which have forest protection and nature conservation as their primary objectives. The exception is with our native forest establishment projects in Great Britain, some of which are carried out on privately owned land. Permanance is ensured in this case through the national laws which prevent deforestation. In addition to these measures, Forest Moor makes an allowance for permanance and leakage issues by setting aside components of each project which are not sold as offsets. On average this amounts to about 20% of the carbon stored.

CCB Standards

The CCB Standards were created by the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance to foster the development of projects that deliver credible and significant benefits in an integrated, sustainable manner. The CCB Standards are designed primarily for climate change mitigation projects. To achieve approval under the CCB standard, it is necessary to demonstrate benefits for the climate, for the local community and for biodiversity. The criteria are as stringent as the CDM standards for the regulated market, but applicable to a wider range of land use projects. See www.climate-standards.org for more detail.