The carbon credit system is getting an upgrade: mega-scale forest protection programs.
REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) projects are singular forest conservation projects in which communities or project developers protect a forest from deforestation and sell carbon credits to corporate buyers for compensation. This patchwork system is mediocre, saving some trees in some areas but moving deforestation to others, and the scale is too small to meaningfully combat systemic deforestation.
Despite preliminary data for 2025 showing that global rates of deforestation are slowing, forests are still disappearing due to intentional clearing and increasing wildfires. Forest loss is rapidly erasing habitats, threatening communities and emitting carbon dioxide — a key driver of climate change.
“We need all the solutions and we need them to work fast,” said José Otavio Passos, Brazilian Amazon senior director at The Nature Conservancy. “We need to make everything right, but we don’t have a lot of time, so we need to keep doing it and improving the system as we go.”
Now, jurisdictional approaches to REDD projects, where entire countries or states are covered by a forest conservation program instead of small sections, are emerging as an evolution of the patchwork system, potentially improving the results.
The growing threat of deforestation
From 1990 to 2020, the world lost about 420 million hectares of forests by converting forested land to agribusiness, housing, infrastructure, mining and other human activities, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. That’s about 43 percent of the size of the United States.
Increasingly frequent and intense wildfires are also making an impact. In 2023, an estimated 384 million hectares of land surface were burned, according to research from the University of California, Merced. Forests lost to wildfires eventually regenerate over the span of a few decades, but forests lost to human-induced deforestation do not.
Deforestation accounts for up to 9 percent of human-caused carbon emissions globally, according to the latest assessment by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Along with carbon emissions, deforestation drives massive habitat and biodiversity loss, disrupts natural water cycles, and erodes soil.
Scaling up forest protection to a jurisdictional level, like what’s happening with the REDD approach, provides governments with incentives to enact policy that protects forests. In exchange for protecting forests, and thus reducing emissions, governments can sell an equivalent number of carbon credits. A single carbon credit equals 1 metric ton of reduced emissions connected to deforestation prevention.
A new approach
Individual forest protection projects using the REDD approach are the largest source of carbon credits, making up roughly 25 percent of the voluntary carbon market. But how deforestation-related emission reductions are calculated varies from forest to forest.
At the individual project level — where forests, not jurisdictions, are protected — each hectare of prevented deforestation is estimated to avoid up to 10 metric tons of carbon emissions. At the jurisdictional level, emissions reduction projections are generally more conservative.
Individual projects do not have the scale needed to truly combat deforestation, and their effectiveness has been contested by many experts. A 2023 investigation by The Guardian, for example, found that almost all of the REDD projects certified by Verra, one of the leading certification bodies for forest carbon credits, were overestimating their impact fourfold on average, and only 6 percent of Verra’s forest carbon credits benefited the climate. Verra strongly refutes these findings.
But the jurisdictional system claims to do things like improve scale, reduce the potential for deforestation to move to an area adjacent to the protected area, assure that forests in a project are protected above and beyond the status quo, and ensure carbon emission reductions are permanent and the forest is not cleared shortly after generating the credits.
The jurisdictional approach “addresses the permanence risk through the use of a shared buffer pool,” said Christina Magerkurth, managing director at ART, the preeminent certifier of jurisdictional programs. “In the event of a reversal, an equivalent number of credits are retired from the buffer pool.”
Instead of selling all the credits generated from the conservation efforts, a portion is donated to the buffer pool, where they can be used to offset emissions from fires or illegal logging.
$180 million of credits sold in Brazil
Large corporations looking to reduce their environmental impact and transition toward net-zero emissions are already pooling funds together to buy carbon credits from jurisdictional programs.
The LEAF Coalition — which includes companies like Amazon, Walmart and Bayer — committed to buying $180 million of carbon credits from the Brazilian state of Pará.
Pará, home to the approaching 2025 United Nations climate talks, is at the epicenter of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. The state is three times as big as California, and possesses a quarter of the Brazilian Amazon. Up to 2024, 34 percent of all Brazilian Amazon deforestation has occurred in Pará, according to the research nonprofit Amazon Institute of Man and Environment. In 2024 alone, the nonprofit estimates about 900 square miles of the Amazon in the state were deforested.
Countries like Ecuador, Costa Rica, Ghana and the Brazilian state of Acre have also launched jurisdictional programs.
Challenges to the jurisdictional system
Setting up a jurisdictional program to prevent deforestation is a lot of work. In Pará, it involves one of the largest community consultation efforts in Brazil’s history. The $180 million agreement caught the attention of Brazil’s public prosecutor, who is challenging the deal in Brazilian court, saying that Pará cannot sell carbon credits before the emission reductions are actually generated and verified. The prosecutor also cites a lack of Indigenous community consultation in the lawsuit.
While this plays out in court, the organizations involved in the deal maintain that no sale has been made, just an agreement for if and when the credits are generated, and that consultation processes are still ongoing.
“Understandably, governments embarking on these monumental programs want to be confident from the start that some committed partners will be there to pay for the reductions in deforestation achieved before they step up conversations with all these people, raise expectations, and discuss what they would do with the money when they receive it,” said Sean Frisby, chief partnerships officer at Emergent, the organization that buys carbon credits on behalf of the LEAF Coalition.
Meanwhile, another Brazilian state, Acre, completed its community consultations and agreed that 72 percent of the revenue from carbon credit sales will be split between Indigenous groups and forest communities.
Despite the promises of these jurisdictional forest conservation programs, some experts still raise concerns. David Skole, professor in the Department of Forestry at Michigan State University, acknowledges the advantages of a jurisdictional system, particularly because it ties forest conservation activities to governance and policy, but he also sees shortcomings in the system.
Skole mentioned the challenge of reconciling jurisdictional emission estimates with localized estimates, which often differ. Degradation, a process in which the forest is not cleared but individual trees are removed or damaged, is also often overlooked in jurisdictional deforestation mapping, he said.
“Degradation is turning out to be very important, and as far as I can see, most of the enthusiasm for jurisdictional approaches comes from an assumption that the main baseline is deforestation, which may be very underestimated,” Skole said. “The local, project-based estimate of degradation may be better.”
Despite these differences, one of the goals of the whole REDD system is to bring individual projects and jurisdictional programs together, where smaller projects can be nested within the larger programs.
“People often talk as if they are two things that don’t mix,” The Nature Conservancy’s Otavio Passos said. “With the urgency to contain deforestation, we shouldn’t be talking about whether we should do A or B. We should be doing A, B, C, D, E, et cetera.”
Image credit: Agnieszka Stankiewicz/Unsplash
