Legal perspectives on integrity issues in forest carbon

This is an idea proposed in 2024 as a postdoctoral project, and has been completed by Sophie Chapman. It was co-supervised with Eleanor Toye Scott.

Carbon finance offers a vital way to fund urgently needed forest conservation, but there are integrity issues on the supply side. Besides the known issues with carbon quantification, carbon credits are often poorly designed and implemented from a legal perspective. Specifically, in the absence of a clear legal framework for forest carbon credits, contracts tend to conceptualise credits in similar terms to the products of extractive industries, such as mineral mining. This is a factually inaccurate model for carbon credits, since the carbon is not extracted but on the contrary is stored in the trees which remain part of the landscape. This inappropriate model then leads to misunderstandings and misallocations of the rights of the various stakeholders in carbon finance projects and militates against just benefit-sharing arrangements.

This project is exploring a novel legal framework for forest carbon credits which separates carbon tenure (i.e. title and associated property rights to the land and trees which store the carbon) from the carbon rights (i.e. title and associated rights to monetise, sell, count and retire the credits which symbolically represent the carbon stored in the trees), while also specifying the relationship between the carbon tenure and the carbon rights.

This paper was subsequently published in Climate Law Review and is available to read as "A Legal Perspective on Supply-side Integrity Issues in the Forest Carbon Market".