The Natural Forest Standard has formally adopted NFS AM001.0 – A Risk Based Methodology for Quantifying Natural Capital Credits Issued to Projects Operating under the Natural Forest Standard, with application in Amazonia. This methodology offers a unique approach to quantifying emissions associated with deforestation.
The methodology, which has been approved by the NFS technical panel, applies a risk-based approach to baseline quantification and could be described as an application of a risk adjusted performance benchmark. This approach has several benefits for a programmatic approach to reducing emissions where projects within a given region can use a consistent set of baseline data and accounting methods. Performance benchmarks may aid programmatic evaluation, reducing costs for individual projects.
The methodology has been designed to be applied at scale and over relatively long time periods to produce valid results (minimum area of 20,000 ha per project and a minimum timescale of 20 years). The methodology does not involve prediction of land use changes at specific locations and specific dates, instead, the output of the methodology is an estimate of emissions avoided by protecting large areas against deforestation over periods in the order of a few decades.
NFS AM001.0 is now available to download from the methodology section of this website.