How do the scheme’s calculations compare to others’?
There are no existing examples of widely agreed international standards for evaluation or assessment of forest carbon projects. However, a Guide to Monitoring Carbon Storage in Forestry and Agroforestry Projects (pdf) produced by the Winrock Organisation in the United States is widely respected and referred to as an approach to monitoring woodland carbon. The Forestry Commission protocol has been developed independently but has broadly similar structure and methods. Many of the methods also build directly on tree and woodland measurement methods which have been agreed as best practice within the UK for over 40 years (Matthews and Mackie, 2006; Mackie and Matthews, 2008). The IPCC has produced a good practice guide on estimation of land and vegetation carbon at large (e.g. national) scales, and related assessment methods have been reviewed by the EU (see the results of the MASCAREF project which looked at Harmonising Methods for Assessing Carbon Sequestration in European Forests (pdf)).
