Not all forest carbon credits are created equal: High integrity programmes and conditions for success

Concerns about the environmental and social impacts of carbon markets have sparked an effort towards higher integrity. However, greater clarity is needed regarding the different definitions and benchmarks of high integrity carbon (HIC), where these come from, and how they are interpreted and why, to understand their potential.

This Occasional Paper reviews the grey and scholarly literature to understand the main trends in HIC definitions, benchmarks, and use. The review finds more uniformity in perspectives on environmental integrity than in social integrity; there are differences in emphasis regarding HIC programme governance and on how to monitor integrity. Furthermore, despite the varied understandings of social integrity, with regard to the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPs and LCs), the bottom line across reviewed documents remains tied to a “do no harm” standard; this should be considered as a minimum requirement that does not rise to the high ambition expected for high integrity.

Based on our review, we define HIC credits as emissions reduction or removal units supplied by programmes that bring together high quality and high ambition, in both ecological and social dimensions. Concerning high social integrity, we are particularly influenced and inspired by the perspectives and demands from IPs and LCs themselves. Social integrity needs to be taken as seriously as environmental integrity, conceptualized, and practised as going beyond safeguards that ‘do no harm’, and with greater attention to the financial investment and specific guidelines, methods, tools, and capacities required to make it achievable.

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