ACR’s IFM version 2.1 is fundamentally the same workable approach that has been applied to millions of acres of forest across the U.S. and Canada, with enhanced requirements for rigor and precision.

ACR recently developed a new blog post to focus on a few of the core innovations in the updated methodology, in particular Project-Specific Dynamic Baselines. The updated approach uses information from the project area to set a precise and conservative carbon crediting baseline, which requires projects to reassess and update baselines as necessary prior to each credit issuance. Read more.

ACR hosted a webinar about the innovations in IFM version 2.1 on September 19, 2024. Watch it here. 

In April 2024, ACR issued a policy update for ACR’s Methodology for the Quantification, Monitoring, Reporting and Verification of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emission Reductions from the Destruction of Ozone Depleting Substances (ODS) and High-Global Warming Potential (GWP) Foam (v. 2.0) (ODS Methodology), suspending all activities related to Canadian ODS destruction projects. ACR staff investigated the regulatory additionality of ODS projects in Canada considering Environment and Climate Change Canada’s (ECCC) Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Refrigeration Systems Protocol, Halocarbon Refrigerants Pollution Prevention Plan Notice, and Ozone-Depleting Substances and Halocarbon Alternatives Regulations. ACR has concluded the investigation and, per the details below, determined that regulatory additionality for ACR’s ODS Methodology remains intact. Effective immediately, ACR is resuming activities related to these projects.

Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Refrigeration Systems (RGGERS) (version 1.1) RGGERS offset protocol v. 1.1 was published in December 2023 and is part of Canada’s GHG Offset Credit System established under Part 2 of the GHG Pollution Pricing Act. The protocol allows for generation of carbon credits when an existing commercial or industrial refrigeration or air-conditioning system recovers and either reclaims or destroys high-GWP refrigerants and replaces them with eligible refrigerants, among other provisions. ODS refrigerants, including chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), are explicitly excluded from credit generation under the RGGERS protocol. In response to ACR staff’s inquiry regarding why ODS refrigerants are excluded, ECCC staff responded as follows:

“GHG emissions reductions under the Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Refrigeration Systems (RGGERS) protocol cannot be generated from destroying, reducing or replacing ozone depleting substances (ODS), such as CFCs and HCFCs, because these are not GHGs listed in Schedule 3 of the [Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing] Act. ODS are covered by the Montreal Protocol and are not reported in Canada’s National Inventory Report.”

Carbon credits issued for the destruction of ODS refrigerants in Canada under ACR’s ODS Methodology remain additional despite the exclusion from the RGGERS protocol because the exclusion of ODS under RGGERS is an accounting choice, not a determination of regulatory additionality.

Halocarbon Refrigerants Pollution Prevention Plan Notice (Notice) This Notice, which was published on May 21, 2016, is under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (1999). It requires manufacturers, reclaimers, and importers of CFC, HCFC, and hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants to develop a pollution prevention plan to “manage halocarbon refrigerants in an environmentally sound manner in order to minimize the release of halocarbons into the environment,” and to join or develop a refrigerant stewardship program. Each stewardship program (of  which Refrigerant Management Canada is the largest) must do the following, among other requirements:

• “develop annual targets (for calendar years) of halocarbon refrigerants recovered in Canada that are accepted in the stewardship program in order to be reclaimed or destroyed” (emphasis added), and
• “establish criteria to decide when a halocarbon refrigerant accepted in the stewardship program can be reclaimed, or when a halocarbon refrigerant must be destroyed.”

The Notice, which is administered by ECCC, does not include any mention of ECCC review and approval of these targets, criteria, or any other parts of the pollution prevention plans. Moreover, it does not include any requirement to meet recovery targets and does not include destruction- or reclamation-specific targets. Refrigerant Management Canada (RMC) criteria (from a 2017 implementation declaration) for determining what can be reclaimed versus what must be destroyed shows that they favor reclamation:

“the Collection Service Provider will determine if the refrigerant is to be reclaimed or destroyed … The exception to this specification is if the RMC tag/proprietary tracking system or customer states that they want the refrigerant destroyed, the Collection Service Provider will place the refrigerant in the program, regardless of whether the refrigerant can be reclaimed.”

Carbon credits issued for the destruction of ODS refrigerants in Canada under ACR’s ODS Methodology remain additional subsequent to the Notice because it does not include any requirement to meet refrigerant recovery targets, does not require destruction of any specific volume of refrigerants, and because refrigerant stewardship programs have broad authority to choose whether to reclaim (versus destroy) refrigerants.

Ozone-Depleting Substances and Halocarbon Alternatives Regulations (ODSHAR) ODSHAR is a federal regulation under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (1999) that was first published on March 21, 2015, and last amended on August 23, 2020. ODSHAR sets out rules concerning ODS, products containing ODS, and halocarbon alternatives to implement Canada’s obligations under the Montreal Protocol, including the Kigali Amendment. ODSHAR does not require the destruction of refrigerant ODS, but instead dictates the allowed possible fates of these refrigerants (e.g., reclamation, destruction, feedstock, limited uses).

Carbon credits issued for the destruction of ODS refrigerants in Canada under ACR’s ODS Methodology remain additional subsequent to ODSHAR because it does not require destruction of ODS.

Changes enhance specificity and ensure baselines adapt to dynamic forces in forest management

In an update to its Improved Forest Management (IFM) on Non-Federal U.S. Forestlands methodology, ACR has increased the precision of its requirements for developing and evaluating conservative baseline scenarios. The methodology provides assurance of the climate impact of forest management practices across the full range of organizations using the ACR methodology, from investment management organizations to conservation NGOs.

The Methodology for the Quantification, Monitoring, Reporting and Verification of Greenhouse Gas Emission Reductions and Removals from Improved Forest Management on Non-Federal U.S. Forestlands (Version 2.1) includes the following key updates:

• A new tool for evaluating baselines each reporting period, before carbon credits are issued, to ensure the underlying assumptions remain valid over time.
• A new baseline constraint, “Harvest Intensity,” that sets maximum baseline harvest levels based on one of three options: using a new tool for recently observed harvests on comparable properties, a qualified forest management plan, or a conservative removals-only baseline.
• Greater specificity in existing requirements for baseline development related to the evaluation of legality, site accessibility and operability, regional timber market capacity, third-party approval (such as for lands with easements that may require approval from the easement holder for plans) and silvicultural practices.

“The updates to ACR’s Improved Forest Management methodology respond to market demands for rigorous and dynamic evaluation of project impact,” said Dr. Kurt Krapfl, Director of Forestry at ACR. “They further ensure emission reductions and removals reflect changes in timber market and forest management conditions over time.”

ACR’s IFM methodology is used by projects covering nearly 2.4 million acres of U.S. forestland. To date, nearly 24 million credits have been issued to projects using the methodology. Version 2.1 introduces innovative concepts, building on the success of earlier versions of the methodology. In the updates, ACR balanced demands for precision and market-relevant information with an understanding that project developers and investors require predictability to make investment decisions about voluntary, market-driven climate action. ACR plans to adapt the tools to broaden their applicability as an option for projects developed under other ACR methodologies and previous versions of this ACR IFM methodology.

With the updated methodology, ACR also introduced two new tools – ACR Improved Forest Management Methodologies Tool for Comparable Properties Analysis and ACR Improved Forest Management Methodologies Tool for Dynamic Evaluation of Baselines – that contribute to the precision of baseline scenario development and provide practical guidance on how to carry out the dynamic evaluations based on observed conditions.

The methodology update was authored by ACR with contributions from Anew Climate. The methodology was originally developed by Finite Carbon, and significantly expanded by Matt Delaney and David Ford of L&C Carbon and Greg Latta of University of Idaho. Additional version updates are attributed to Bluesource, L&C Carbon, TerraCarbon, and ACR.

For more information, visit https://acrcarbon.org/methodology/improved-forest-management-ifm-on-non-federal-u-s-forestlands/.

ACR is pleased to announce that the Governing Board of the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) has approved ACR at the program level as “Core Carbon Principles (CCP) Eligible.”

This announcement represents the first step in the ICVCM process. It means that ACR will be able to label CCP-Approved carbon credits from CCP-Approved Categories of carbon credits as those approvals are earned in the next step of assessment.

“We appreciate this recognition of the rigor of our program and will continue to engage constructively with ICVCM to defend best practices in a world that is demanding not only carbon market integrity, but also inclusivity and urgency,” said Mary Grady, ACR’s Executive Director. “ACR’s mission is to create confidence in the integrity of carbon markets; to that end, ICVCM offers a pathway to harmonize standards around a global benchmark of quality. ACR will continue to bring our expertise and experience to the table by participating on the governing board and expert working groups.”

Since its founding in 1996 as the world’s first private greenhouse gas registry, ACR has innovated and operationalized key elements of carbon credit quality assurance, including scientific peer-reviewed accounting methodologies and well-accepted approaches to address additionality, leakage, and reversal risk mitigation; oversight of independent third-party verification; and operation of a transparent registry for the issuance and tracking of serialized credits.

ACR’s approach to program quality has earned approval to issue credits for use in regulated carbon markets, including the State of California’s Cap-and-Trade Program, the International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO) Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA), the State of Washington’s Cap-and-Invest Program, and towards compliance with Singapore’s Carbon Pricing Act.

To become approved as meeting CCP requirements, ACR submitted an extensive application to ICVCM for assessment. We provided evidence of being a CORSIA Eligible Emissions Unit Program, in addition to meeting the CCP’s additional criteria around effective governance, credit tracking, transparency, and robust, independent third-party validation and verification.

While ACR views this as an important step forward, we remain focused on earning CCP-Approved labels for our portfolio of carbon credits, which includes emission reductions and removals from industrial and nature-based solutions. In addition, ACR’s sister organization – the Architecture for REDD+ Transactions (ART) – looks forward to earning program-level and category-level approval from ICVCM. Ultimately, ACR expects that other leading carbon crediting programs will earn ICVCM approval, to provide confidence to buyers in credit quality and allow finance to flow to impactful climate solutions to support the goals of the Paris Agreement. The urgency of climate change demands nothing less.

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Rebellion Energy Solutions uses ACR methodology to finance climate action and restore tallgrass prairie in Oklahoma

LITTLE LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – ACR, an enterprise of Winrock International, announced today the first issuance of carbon credits from plugging orphaned oil and gas wells. Women-led Rebellion Energy Solutions generated the credits by plugging six orphaned wells in its Oklahoma Heartland Methane Abatement & Land Restoration Project. In 2023, ACR published the world’s first methodology to leverage carbon markets to finance the plugging of orphaned oil and gas wells in the United States and Canada. This is the first project to be issued credits under the methodology.

While oil and gas operators are required to plug wells at the end of their productive lives, more than 160 years of oil and gas operations has left a legacy of a huge number of orphaned wells in the United States and Canada, for which no operator exists.

Although the exact number of orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells in the United States is unknown, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates there may be 3.7 million across the country. Many of these wells are leaking methane, a potent greenhouse gas accounting for 12% of all U.S. emissions and approximately one-third of global warming to date. Orphaned wells can also negatively impact water quality and soil health, among other problems. Responsibility for plugging orphaned wells falls to states, federal agencies and Native American tribes, which lack the funding needed to address the problem in a meaningful way.

$4.7 billion in funding was made available through the REGROW Act (part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act). Yet, a Columbia University report estimates that the cost of plugging 500,000 wells – approximately 15% of the EPA estimate of orphaned and abandoned wells in the U.S. alone – could be as high as $24 billion. Carbon markets can provide financial incentives that complement other private, philanthropic, state and government-led initiatives, reducing greenhouse gas emissions more quickly.

“This first-of-its-kind issuance is a powerful example of the positive impacts of carbon markets to reduce potent, fast-acting, short-lived climate pollutants such as methane,” said Maris Densmore, Director of the Industrial Program at ACR. “The Heartland project also demonstrates the added environmental co-benefits of addressing water and soil pollution and removing safety hazards that prevent land from being used for recreation and other productive purposes for communities living nearby.”

ACR requires project developers to report contributions to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. In the case of the Heartland Project, benefits include improvements to rangeland production, health improvements for people living nearby, reductions to water pollution, and increased land resilience, in addition to the avoided methane emissions.

The decades-old, orphaned wells, located on cattle-grazing, bluestem prairie-grass ranches in Oklahoma, have no operator. Prior to being plugged, the wells leaked not only methane, but also oil into adjacent ponds and posed health risks to the families and livestock living nearby. In addition to plugging the wells, Rebellion Energy has also reclaimed the land, including native plants to help restore the prairie ecosystem.

“Rebellion’s Heartland Project was ideally positioned to become the first methane-abatement project to issue credits based on ACR’s new methodology,” said Staci Taruscio, Chief Executive Officer of Rebellion Energy Solutions. “By employing the economic incentive of carbon markets and our oil-and-gas expertise, we have a sustainable platform for environmental benefit, investment, and job creation.”

While the EPA issued new rules recently for oil and gas operations to reduce methane emissions, and the U.S. Government committed to the Global Methane Pledge at the COP28 Climate Summit, the funding gap continues.

The Heartland Project generated 80,782 carbon credits based on independently verified measurements of the methane leaking into the atmosphere from the six wells before they were plugged.

ACR Oversaw Listing, Verification and Issuance of Credits to A-Gas and Tradewater

LITTLE ROCK, AR—Yesterday, the Washington State Department of Ecology – the regulatory agency responsible for the state’s compliance carbon market – issued the first Ecology Offset Credits to two carbon projects. ACR was the Offset Project Registry for the two projects, issuing the serialized Registry Offset Credits that were converted to Ecology Offset Credits.

Both projects were verified for conformance with the California Air Resources Board Compliance Offset Protocol for Ozone Depleting Substance Projects, which was adopted by the Washington State Department of Ecology to generate the Registry Offset Credits. These credits can be used by covered entities towards meeting their emission reductions obligations in Washington’s program.

A-Gas (A-Gas 2-2023; Project ID: ACR902) and Tradewater (Tradewater ODS51; Project ID: ACR892) are the two carbon project developers who generated the Ecology Offset Credits. Each collected and destroyed refrigerants to permanently prevent the gases from contributing to climate change. Refrigerants and other ozone depleting substances are potent greenhouse gases that can warm the atmosphere 1,000 to 14,000 times more than CO2, which is why Project Drawdown ranked refrigerant management first in its 2017 list of climate solutions.

The Department of Ecology issued 109,180 Ecology Offset Credits to A-Gas and 139,956 Ecology Offset Credits to Tradewater after their project activities were independently verified by an accredited third-party verification & validation body, as overseen by ACR and Ecology.

“ACR is proud to be the first Offset Project Registry to issue carbon credits in support of the State of Washington’s commitment to climate action,” said Mary Grady, Executive Director of ACR. “Carbon markets offer the least-cost pathway to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while also supporting other priorities, such as clean air and healthy communities.”

In 2021, the Washington State Legislature passed the Climate Commitment Act, which created a market-based program (“Cap-and-Invest”) to cap and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the state’s largest sources of pollution, such as oil refineries. Funds from the program support new investments in climate-resiliency programs, clean transportation, and addressing health disparities across the state.

In addition to the State of Washington, ACR has operated as the leading Offset Project Registry for the California Cap-and-Trade program since 2012, issuing over two-thirds of the credits used by regulated entities towards their emissions reduction requirements. The Colorado Air Quality Control Commission’s Recovered Methane Rule also names specific ACR methodologies as recovered methane protocols in that state’s program.

ACR submitted our application to have our internationally recognized crediting program assessed against the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market’s (ICVCM) Core Carbon Principles (CCPs).

ACR shares ICVCM’s theory of change: “build integrity and scale will follow.” We will only meet the goals of the Paris Agreement with robust global carbon markets, so our collective work is central to our shared future on this planet.

ACR has a proven track record of developing and implementing rigorous science-based carbon accounting methodologies, which make us a strong candidate for approval by the ICVCM. Our technical qualifications are the basis of our role over the last decade as the leading Offset Project Registry for California’s flagship cap-and-trade program, for which ACR has issued 2/3 of the credits used by compliance entities towards their regulatory obligations.

ACR is also approved by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to supply credits to the world’s first global compliance offset market, CORSIA. The ICVCM Assessment Framework includes a “fast track” pathway for CORSIA-eligible programs. ACR and our sister organization, the Architecture for REDD+ Transactions (ART), meet this ICVCM requirement as we are both approved by ICAO to supply credits for the 2021-2023 CORSIA period, including post-2020 credits for this period and for the first CORSIA compliance period 2024-2026.

The ICVCM Core Carbon Principles (CCPs) are designed to give the market confidence in the integrity of carbon crediting programs and resulting credits.  ACR is confident that it meets criteria that crediting programs must meet to qualify for the CCP label. In addition to ensuring robust governance and transparent oversight of verification and registry processes, projects to reduce and remove emissions must be additional to BAU, robustly quantified, compatible with a transition to net zero, and durable in terms of addressing and mitigating risks associated with non-permanence of emission reductions.

As the ICVCM process progresses, ACR will remain engaged through ICVCM’s technical working groups, including those for category assessments and continuous improvement. Mary Grady, executive director of both ACR and ART, serves on the ICVCM Governing Board; noting that she is a non-voting Board member and will not be involved in decisions ICVCM makes about any crediting programs, including ACR and ART.

ACR and ART are enterprises of Environmental Resources Trust, which is a wholly owned nonprofit subsidiary of Winrock International.

In January 2024, ACR will publish for public comment a draft methodology update, “Improved Forest Management (IFM) on Non-Federal U.S. Forestlands version 2.1.”

Ahead of that time we wanted to highlight a few key parts of the proposed revision.

First and foremost, this update includes a framework for periodic baseline reassessment. Rather than relying on assumptions made at project initiation for the crediting period duration, projects developed under version 2.1 will require periodic baseline reassessment – and recalculation when relevant – at intervals not to exceed five years. This proposed change is aligned with accounting under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.

In addition, the revised methodology requires that baseline setting explicitly consider “common practice silviculture” in the region where the project is located. This includes substantiating the baseline silviculture and harvest intensities based on actual harvest activities occurring on comparable lands in the vicinity of the project. The methodology will allow a range of tools, including remote sensing, to guide the common practice silviculture assessment.

The methodology will prescribe a practical checklist to validate the assumptions underpinning the baseline over time. This checklist will consider changes in legality, operability and access, financial feasibility, forest products market capacity, and common practice silviculture. Baseline recalculation would be required in intervening reporting periods if the baseline cannot be substantiated by the assessments above.

When the methodology update is final, ACR will also publish an optional tool compatible with previous methodology versions that existing projects can use to implement the new approach to baseline setting as desired.

ACR recognizes that projects developed under our methodologies require long-term commitments from landowners. We undertake the revision with this understanding clearly in mind, which is why we are providing advanced notice about the public consultation and proposed changes.

ACR sincerely appreciates engagement from stakeholders to ensure the final methodology delivers high-quality, high-value credits into the carbon market.