Integrity Council rules 58.4 million forest carbon credits cannot carry its quality label

The body that sets the quality benchmark for voluntary carbon credits has found that a forest crediting method responsible for 58.4 million issued credits does not yet meet its standard. The Governing Board of the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market decided on 30 April 2026, in a decision document numbered M49 and published on 11 May 2026, that emissions reductions generated under the High Forest, Low Deforestation crediting level of the REDD+ Environmental Excellence Standard, version 2.0, will qualify for the Core Carbon Principles label only if the program administering it takes remedial action first. Until that happens, none of the credits already issued under that crediting level can be labelled.

High forest, low deforestation crediting is the most contested corner of jurisdictional forest carbon. It pays countries that have not yet cleared their forests, on the argument that intact forest under future pressure deserves finance now. The accounting problem is that there is little historical clearing to measure against, so a baseline has to be built from a claim about what would otherwise happen.

The Integrity Council's decision goes directly at that claim. It requires the program to state explicitly that participants must detail the activities undertaken to reduce deforestation and degradation during the five year reference period before crediting, and must supply evidence either that those activities significantly reduced emissions or that reference period emissions will significantly underestimate future emissions. Validation and verification bodies must then assess whether that evidence confirms a significant threat of increased emissions in the first crediting period, and must repeat the assessment at every crediting period renewal. Verifier reports must also cross check key baseline data inputs against other credible sources, and the decision states that carbon stocks must always be cross checked.

A fourth requirement targets permanence. The Board directed that the automatic 10 per cent deduction for low interannual variability of forest emissions be removed from the reversal risk assessment, and that a process be developed to show the buffer pool contribution actually addresses permanence risk for the jurisdiction concerned. It attached a condition that participants ensure full monitoring and compensation of material reversal risks for 20 years from the start of their first crediting period.

The same batch of decisions placed the standard's removals crediting level in the same category, with no credits issued under it so far. Other elements of the batch were approvals: the Global Carbon Council program was ruled eligible, a mangrove restoration protocol was approved outright, and grid connected renewables and coal mine methane methodologies were approved with conditions. The Integrity Council said 107 million credits had been approved for labelling in total, of which about 63 million appeared to be available in the market.

The Government of Guyana, whose jurisdictional program is the dominant source of these credits, welcomed the ruling in a statement on its Low Carbon Development Strategy site. It said approval hinges on five remedial actions that are already aligned with elements of a jurisdictional REDD+ system it has run for more than a decade, and called for rapid completion of the process because forest nations need "certainty, predictability, and confidence". The published decision sets out four numbered remedial actions plus one condition, so the count in Guyana's statement does not match the instrument on its face.

Environmental Defense Fund, a long standing supporter of jurisdictional crediting, issued a statement on 12 May 2026 disagreeing with the practical implication rather than the process. Mark Moroge, its vice president for forests, said the organisation "remains confident in the quality of ART's TREES HFLD credits today" and that airlines participating in the aviation offsetting scheme CORSIA should continue to treat them as viable. EDF noted that more than 40 million tonnes of Guyanese credits have attracted buyer interest and that the credits remain eligible under CORSIA phase two. It also cited the pressure argument: between 2002 and 2020, 60 of 310 such jurisdictions went through periods of high deforestation and 59 lost the classification altogether.

The ratings firm Sylvera, writing on 22 May 2026, put the market stake plainly, estimating that roughly 75 per cent of current CORSIA supply comes from Guyana's program, and argued that baselines must become forward looking and empirically anchored rather than historical.

What happens next is unsettled. The program released version 3.0 of its standard on 25 June 2026, extending subnational accounting to 2035 and adding a transition pathway built with the World Bank, but the release text does not mention the high forest crediting level or the remedial actions. Both flagged methodologies require a further Governing Board review once changes are made, and no date for that review has been published. It is also not known whether credits already issued would be labelled retrospectively, or whether the aviation scheme's own eligibility ruling would be revisited if the label is withheld.