‘Carbon credit rules for forestry projects should be made simpler’

The carbon credit rules for forestry projects should be made simpler, said the director general of the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE) Dr VK Bahuguna while chairing the surveillance audit of ICFRE-Designated Operational Entity (DOE) in Dehradun on Monday.

It should be noted that the executive board of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) had accredited ICFRE as DOE for Afforestation and Reforestation CDM projects in February 2011, making it the first DOE from India for validation, verification and certification of Afforestation and Reforestation CDM Projects. The UNFCCC team is on a visit to Dehradun for surveillance audit of ICFRE-DOE which started on Monday. Bahuguna said that the modalities and procedures for forestry carbon credit projects should be simpler so that the objectives of climate change mitigation could be achieved easily and forest dependent communities are benefited by the forestry carbon projects. He also expressed concern at the slow process of development of CDM forestry projects in India and at global level. Stringent rules are one of the greatest impediments in developing CDM projects, he said.

The CDM is a programme under the UNFCCC, which allows emission-reduction projects in developing countries to earn carbon credits in the form of certified emission reduction (CER) units.

One CER is equivalent to one tonne of carbon dioxide. These CER units can be traded in carbon markets, and used by industrialised countries to meet a part of their emission reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol.