Summary

Nature-based solutions have rapidly gained traction as quality carbon removals with co-benefits to biodiversity and society. However, these projects face significant permanence risks from forest fires.

As much as 20% of carbon credits are set aside in a buffer by the registries at the time of carbon credit issuance to mitigate the permanence risk.

Climate Connect Digital has identified forest fires as a major risk theme for nature-based carbon credits and has

• Conducted analysis which indicates whether changing climatic trends will increase the likelihood of forest fires in India
• Started developing tools which enable near real-time monitoring of forest fires in areas of interest and generate actionable alerts

This white paper presents the following key results: –

• Temperature rise in Central India is 1℃ higher as compared to the global average temperature increase (in the last 40 years)
• Forest fires have increased in Central and South India over the past two decades

The white paper also presents future projections for temperature and rainfall over India till 2100.

Given the past trends and future climatic projections, forest fires are expected to increase in frequency of occurrence, duration and intensity. These findings have important implications for deciding the permanence risk buffers for nature-based projects in the Indian subcontinent. Hence, project developers and registries may need to factor this in for future nature-based solutions projects in India and probably South Asia. It highlights the need for conducting similar analysis for other parts of the world.

Software and satellite-based monitoring of forests have an important role to play in early response to reduce the loss of carbon from nature-based solutions.

Download