Policy brief: Reforming carbon accounting to support of nature-based solutions

The core problem is that data reported under the UNFCCC for net emissions and removals related to human activities are insufficient for the understanding of the carbon dynamics of ecosystems. Hence, nature-based solutions for mitigation activities do not reflect their full potential.

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The inadequacies of current carbon accounting create perverse outcomes, which encourage forest degradation, including the:

• converting carbon-dense forests and peatlands into fast-growing plantations, which merely appear to sequester carbon;
• preventing re-growing forests from reaching maturity because of the false accounting preference for young,
  fast-growing forests;
• harvesting forests for wood products and bioenergy, which results in loss of carbon stocks where replacement of
  these stocks will only occur decades into the future, thus creating a carbon debt; and
• erroneously considering carbon stocks in reservoirs of different longevities and risk of loss as equal in value.

Accounting for carbon stocks in ecosystems as their long-term average at the landscape scale remains the key metric by which to assess the exchange between the biosphere and atmosphere. Monitoring variability in flows of emissions and removals over time is not adequate.

Climate change depends on the total stock of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the increase that has occurred due to transfers from the geocarbon and biocarbon reservoirs - not that which is only recorded in existing UNFCCC inventories.