United Nations urged to adopt EDF’s proposals to improve carbon accounting in forestry

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How can we solve LULUCF accounting?

CAN’s basic principle is simple: a long-term average is the best approach to measure changes in net emissions.

Using alternatives to a long-term average presents two major issues:

1. A projected reference level is designed to measure deviation from planned growth, and does not accurately reflect changes in emissions relative to the current state of the atmosphere.
2. LULUCF rules will undermine economy-wide ambition if they fail to account for increased net emissions from forest management from historic levels.

Using a long-term average offers a number of advantages:

• It allows better characterization of uncertainty.
• It smoothes effects of economic cycles or transitions.
• It evens out effects of interannual variability.
• It minimizes winners and losers: everyone is treated equally.
• There’s no opportunity for choosing convenient years to maximize credits.
• It serves as the best reflection of historical impacts on the atmosphere.

Can we say all this in five sentences?

Yes.

1. Historical average baselines are the best reflection of changes in emissions to the atmosphere.
2. All other alternatives create an accounting ‘gap’.
3. This gap is largest for proposed reference levels.
4. The accounting gap from proposed reference levels would be reduced if historical harvest levels were used instead of projected increases.
5. The best baseline to capture net changes in emissions is a long-term historical average from 1990-2008.

You can read more about our work with and analysis of LULUCF and forestry policy on the EDF Climate Talks blog and EDF’s Forestry and Land Use Policy 101 [PDF].