Land use in Article 6 'hinges on emissions avoidance'

Nature-based solutions in principle could be used in deals under Article 6 of the Paris climate agreement, but the main open question is the extent to which "emissions avoidance" will be accepted as a mitigation activity, researchers have said.

The issue of whether to include, and if so how to assess, emissions avoidance activities under Article 6, will be on the agenda in June at the next session of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA), which oversees technical negotiations on behalf of the UN Cop climate conferences.

Depending on how "avoidance" is ultimately interpreted, this could imply that certain land use activities might be excluded from the Article 6 rulebook, researchers Anne Siemons and Judith Reise from German research group Oeko-Institut said. This could be the case regarding "avoided deforestation" from countries in which the land use, land use change and forestry sector are not yet a source of emissions.

A decision could "technically" be made at the next UN climate conference Cop 27, which will take place in Egypt in November, they said.

Article 6 is designed to enable voluntary international co-operation on climate action, including through the trading of emissions reductions between countries and the creation of a new voluntary market for private entities.

Although the Article 6 rulebook agreed at Cop 26 last year contains no explicit reference to the land use sector, the decisions made at the conference include many aspects crucial to land use activities, such as the setting of baselines, the permanence of emissions reduction and the issue of societal and ecological safeguards, Siemons and Reise said.

From this it can be deduced that land use activities can, in principle, be included in Article 6, provided the risks are "adequately addressed". To an extent, "robust" rules already exist for trading certificates from the land use sector and could be used as a basis.

Siemons and Reise pointed out the various initiatives that evaluate the quality of certificates and assess the handling of risks in connection with land use projects. These include the Carbon Credit Quality Initiative, in which the Oeko-Institut co-operates.

The fact that no rules exist yet for nature-based solutions in Article 6 deals does not prevent their inclusion by signatories of contracts under the mechanism — signatories can use plausible standards, as is already done in the voluntary carbon market.

In theory, there could even be different nature-based solutions underlying an Article 6 deal between parties, in which case it will be crucial to adequately address the respective risks. This will come with various degrees of difficulty depending on the activity, Siemons says.

The main risks of nature-based solutions lie in the uncertainty in setting baselines, monitoring carbon stock changes and the non-permanence of the achieved mitigation, according to a recent paper by researchers from Oeko-Institut, including Siemons and Reise, and research institute Ecologic.

The paper, which was commissioned German environmental agency Uba, flags up the need to properly assess the value of nature-based solutions.

So far, under most existing carbon crediting approaches, the benefits of such solutions have not been monetised beyond mitigating emissions, the researchers said. At the same time, they have potential negative costs, such as the rise of emissions in other areas to which emissions-intensive activities are shifted instead.

The paper also warns against unduly optimistic assumptions about land availability, which often translate into overestimating the potential of nature-based solutions.

But uncertainties relating to the quantification of their mitigation effects should not be used as an argument against their implementation, the researchers said.

Nature-based solutions have key advantages over technical carbon dioxide removal options, as the latter tend to be more expensive, more energy-intensive and are not yet deployable at scale, the paper said. Additionally, their potentially negative impacts are not yet fully known.

An increasing number of companies in recent years have been looking into using carbon offsets through nature-based solutions to meet their decarbonisation strategies, and this has raised questions on the extent of their usage.

In 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report focusing on the urgency of incorporating these solutions into climate mitigation strategies.

By Chloe Jardine