# Legal perspectives on integrity issues in forest carbon *2024-01-01 — idea* Carbon finance offers a vital way to fund urgently needed forest conservation, but there are integrity issues on the supply side.[^1] Besides the known issues with carbon quantification,[^2] 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. [^1]: See the note on [Nature Sustainability commentary on carbon and biodiversity credits](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/nature-crossroads) [^2]: See the [Trusted Carbon Credits](https://anil.recoil.org/projects/4c) project and related papers. 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](https://anil.recoil.org/papers/2024-cclr-carbon)". Status: Completed Level: postdoctoral Year: 2024 Project: Trusted Carbon Credits Supervisors: Anil Madhavapeddy, Eleanor Toye Scott Students: Sophie Chapman ## Related - [Published a legal perspective on high integrity forest carbon credits](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/2024-cclr-carbon-1) (note, 2024-11-01) - [A Legal Perspective on Supply-side Integrity Issues in the Forest Carbon Market](https://anil.recoil.org/papers/2024-cclr-carbon) (paper, 2024-11-01) - [Nature Sustainability commentary on carbon and biodiversity credits](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/nature-crossroads) (note, 2024-08-15) - [Trusted Carbon Credits](https://anil.recoil.org/projects/4c) (project, 2021-01-01) --- Canonical: https://anil.recoil.org/ideas/legal-aspects-of-credits Type: idea License: CC BY 4.0 Tags: forest, nbs, economics, legal, carboncredits