I have resigned from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol's Independent Standards Board. The Protocol is openly violating its own rules and has effectively delegated forest carbon accounting standards to a secret, industry-led working group. ghgpolicy.org
This matters because industry stakeholders are pushing an accounting rule that would assign carbon removals to forest harvests and wood consumption. That's the opposite of what happens in physical reality. Forest harvests cause emissions, not removals. Most people know that using recycled paper is better than consuming virgin paper. But under the industry rule, virgin paper would look better because it requires cutting down more trees. Resigning is not a decision I take lightly, but I have spent more than a year inside the process trying to get the Protocol to follow its own rules. I wrote a peer-reviewed report about those rules and filed a 200+ page complaint with Protocol leadership. They buried it.
Please take a moment to read this important story, featuring the experience of University of Melbourne lecturer Kate Dooley — one of the scientists volunteering to support the development of forest carbon accounting rules under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.
That was all bad enough, but now it appears that the Protocol has effectively delegated the forest carbon accounting rules to a secret, industry-led drafting process. There is nothing more I can do but resign. So I did.
Finally, I would observe that either: (1) The senior management of the World Resources Institute is okay with a secret, industry-led process to draft forest carbon accounting rules; or (2) The World Resources Institute no longer exerts sufficient influence over the Protocol to stop it.