Forest carbon farming refers to the deliberate management of forests to increase the amount of carbon stored in vegetation and soils over time. This can include protecting existing forests, restoring degraded land, or establishing new forest cover where ecologically appropriate.
Among all available carbon removal approaches, forest carbon farming stands out for three reasons:
As a result, forests are expected to play a central role in any realistic pathway to meeting climate targets.
Forest carbon projects generate carbon credits by demonstrating that management actions have increased carbon storage relative to a baseline scenario. Carbon is stored in:
Projects earn credits based on measured or modelled increases in these carbon pools over time. Credits are then sold to governments or companies seeking to offset residual emissions.
In principle, this system aligns financial incentives with climate outcomes: capital flows to activities that increase carbon storage, extending the remaining carbon budget.
Source: https://phys.org/news/2024-07-forests-carbon-regional-pressures-reveals.html
Voluntary and compliance carbon markets have grown rapidly over the past decade, with forest-based credits forming a large share of traded volumes. These markets promise:
However, forest carbon farming operates on a fragile foundation. The climate value of a credit depends entirely on measurement credibility. If claimed removals are overstated or uncertain, the climate system does not benefit, even if markets do.
Recent scrutiny has exposed systemic weaknesses:
These issues have led to growing scepticism among buyers and regulators, contributing to recent declines in prices and volumes in forest carbon markets.
Unlike industrial processes, forests are living, dynamic systems. Carbon stocks fluctuate due to:
This means forest carbon is best understood as a flux, not a static quantity. Measuring this flux accurately, especially year-to-year change, is essential for credible accounting.
Small biases compound over time. A project that overstates removals by even a few percent each year can generate large cumulative errors across decades.
The fundamental constraint on forest carbon farming is not biological potential or market demand. It is measurement fidelity.
As long as uncertainty remains high, markets must rely on:
These mechanisms increase cost, reduce trust, and limit scale.
Improving measurement does not just strengthen existing projects. It expands the feasible solution space, enabling higher-confidence credits, tighter baselines, and larger deployable capital pools.
To understand why current approaches struggle, and why uncertainty remains so high, we need to examine how forest carbon flux is measured today, and where those methods fall short.
That is the subject of the next section.