Around the globe, governments and multilateral institutions have implemented policies and measures supporting climate change mitigation, which have brought a diversity of actors and approaches together across a wide range of geographic scales, blending governance structures, societies, and cultures.

The voluntary carbon market emerged from these efforts to allow unregulated actors to offset emissions that they find difficult to reduce through other means. With vital world forests facing deforestation, degradation, and fragmentation, natural climate solutions (NCS) play an important role the voluntary market in that they provide market participants with an attractive and easily understood mitigation pathway, while generating numerous social and environmental co-benefits.

However, NCS activities have been subject to critiques because of risks associated with the “permanence” of the offsets that they generate, as well as their feasibility and potential impacts on the environment and social justice of climate mitigation efforts that focus on terrestrial carbon storage.

The authors examine some of the concerns that have been raised about NCS projects by studying permanence with a particular focus on forest fires – a key threat to permanence in NCS projects. They studied six REDD+ projects that have been certified under the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) Program. The approach uses mixed methods, including analysis of remote sensing data, close study of project documentation and reporting, and surveys of project implementers to understand how projects have performed in the face of fire risk. The authors also estimate projects’ additional fire-mitigation benefits, beyond crediting requirements.

The paper contributes preliminary findings and a novel methodology to assess the risk that fires pose to NCS activities and permanence. Some loss events and one reversal were found among the six projects, but no risk to credit permanence, given that an adequately capitalized buffer pool is in place to compensate for reversals.

The authors argue there is potential for NCS projects to generate fire mitigation beyond the minimum requirement for carbon crediting that could be extended to other projects.