It’s Time to (Finally) Agree and Move Forward on Forest Carbon Accounting

By Ara Erickson
Vice President of Corporate Sustainability

Five years after the Greenhouse Gas Protocol launched an effort to extend guidance to carbon removals and land use, inviting the promise of a new global standard for forest carbon accounting, we still don't have agreement or a clear path forward. Disagreements and differing approaches have scuttled progress toward building an effective consensus, and meanwhile the consequences of our inaction compound.

More than ever, we need a global forest carbon accounting standard that is rooted in science and common sense. Such a standard would bring consistency to the forest and forest products sector and allow companies to provide a real, authentic and complete accounting of their carbon inventory.

At Weyerhaeuser, we have spent years building our own GHG inventory, borrowing best practices from similar companies and incorporating input from nonprofits and scientific advisors. Since 2021, we've published our detailed carbon inventory - and the methodology we use to calculate it - in our annual Carbon Record.

Today, we're releasing the GHG inventory principles we follow at Weyerhaeuser - and that we believe provide a clear, science-based approach to accounting for the carbon impact of forests and forest products.

Principle 1: Provide discrete and complete reporting. We report emissions, removals and product storage across land and non-land sources and sinks, and between fossil and biogenic categories of greenhouse gases. We use a stock-change methodology (i.e., the difference between what was actually emitted or removed between two points in time) across a consistent spatial boundary for each annual forest inventory, and we remove any carbon credits we issue from our own GHG inventory to avoid double counting.

Principle 2: Include the full value chain. We include the indirect emissions, removals and product storage that are a consequence of our activities but occur at sources or sinks we do not own.

Principle 3: Differentiate from intervention accounting. We believe intervention accounting (i.e., measuring actual emissions or removals against a hypothetical or counterfactual scenario) can be a useful method to calculate the avoided emissions or increased removals of specific projects. But this method should never be the basis for creating a GHG inventory.

These principles form the foundation of our approach here at Weyerhaeuser. We believe they can be equally useful for peer companies, customers, investors and other standard developers throughout the forest and forest products value chain. Time is of the essence. We desperately need to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere if we are to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of this decade. Forests can do that better than any tool we've yet found or invented. But the lack of a clear, globally accepted standard for forest carbon accounting is holding us back and preventing the full-scale investment in forests, forest products and carbon markets that will keep our forests as forests and unlock the full potential of our most sustainable natural resource.

These are complex problems we are all trying to solve. But the answer to complexity isn't always complicated. Sometimes, simple and straightforward solutions work best. That is the spirit in which we developed these principles and how we propose to move forward, ideally in alignment with developing global standards such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol or International Organization for Standardization. Apply them. Test and challenge them. Tell us what you think and help make them better. But let's not wait any longer to take action.