Jurisdictional REDD+, restoration, and nature and carbon claims

Jurisdictional REDD+, from the science to the sale of the credits

In my experience, the path from forest data to a credit that sells tends to break where one step hands over to the next. A reference level can be scientifically sound and still not hold up in an audit, a programme can be designed in a way the standard does not recognise, and a commercial strategy is often written before anyone knows what the credits will be worth. High forest, low deforestation countries face questions that the main methods are still working through.

A programme that validates, credits that find buyers, and a strategy a government or a company can stand behind.

I work in English, French, Italian and Dutch, including with government teams at ministerial level.

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One of the questions I work on is how we grow back, and not just plant, trees and forests that can adapt to a changing climate. That question looks different in a tropical landscape, a Mediterranean one and a hyper-arid one, and I work on all three, including in the Gulf and the wider Middle East. Restoration lasts when it brings back biodiversity as well as tree cover, and when the local communities and Indigenous Peoples who depend on the land are part of it from the start.

Restoration planned by the hectare and the landscape, measured against a real baseline, with the finance to keep it going.

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Most companies now say something about forests, nature or carbon credits in their reporting, and the rules on what can be said have tightened. The European Sustainability Reporting Standards ask how a neutrality claim rests on credits, European consumer law has banned offset-based "neutral" claims on products since September 2026, and the Science Based Targets initiative now keeps credits out of a company's own target and treats them as climate contributions, an ongoing responsibility beyond the value chain.

The weak point is rarely the arithmetic, I think. It is the claim behind the credit, and how the credit will be used: whether reduced emissions are being described as removals, whether a forest programme's baseline would hold against the host country's own accounting, whether a jurisdictional credit was authorised by the country that issued it, and whether the people living on that land were consulted. I read the claim against the standard it cites, before it is published, and say what stands and what does not. Where a company is choosing credits, I combine the Integrity Council's Core Carbon Principles label with the rating agencies' assessments and with what the company itself wants the credits to do, so that "high quality" means something specific.

I also follow the emerging market for biodiversity credits. I think it faces the questions carbon credits have already had to answer: what the baseline is, whether the gain would have happened anyway, how long it lasts, and who was consulted.

A claim you can publish and defend, with the evidence behind it.

The views on this site are my own.

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