Tim Searchinger, a Princeton University scholar and the World Resources Institute's technical director for land-related issues, is leaving the independent research organization over a dispute about how companies should count carbon in forests.
This fight could help determine whether corporate climate claims reflect real pollution progress or inflated accounting.
Critics say the basic problem is this: If companies get credit for carbon that trees would absorb through natural processes anyway, the public may see more sustainability branding without much additional benefit.
Here's what to know
Searchinger's departure is the second notable resignation linked to the fight over forest carbon standards. As Bloomberg reported, Wood Central said that Searchinger was stepping down after Danny Cullenward, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, resigned from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol's standards board in June.
The disagreement turns on two ways of measuring forest carbon. Activity-based accounting tries to sort out which carbon changes come from human actions and which stem from natural processes. Managed land proxy, by contrast, counts every carbon change on managed forest land as human-caused.
"My charge is to ensure the scientific integrity of WRI's work," Searchinger told Bloomberg. He resigned after Protocol developments "undermined that integrity in both the content of the rules and the process behind them," Wood Central stated.
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Opponents of the managed land approach say it could allow companies to book carbon removals they did not actually cause, raising the risk of double-counting and making corporate climate disclosures less dependable.
More background
Forest carbon guidance shapes how companies report climate progress; buy carbon credits; and market sustainability claims to customers, investors, and regulators. If those standards are loose, businesses can look green on paper without cutting pollution.
"There were basically scientists on one side, forest products industry on the other side," Charles Canham, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies senior scientist emeritus, told Bloomberg.
That split has real-world consequences for people already dealing with worsening climate impacts, including higher energy costs linked to extreme weather and more severe wildfire and flood risks. Forests play an important role in storing carbon, but overstating what companies are doing to protect them can delay emissions cuts across the economy.
Major corporations are increasing demand for forest-linked carbon credits, and the fight over how to count them is far from settled. Microsoft has agreed, for example, to buy over 4.8 million tonnes of credits tied to improved management on forest land across five U.S. states, according to Wood Central.
What's being done?
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol standards board has not made a decision, and it will accept comments on the issue through February, per Bloomberg. For now, companies may use either accounting method as long as they disclose which one they chose.
Vaughan Andrews, Weyerhaeuser's senior program manager for sustainability, helped develop a revised version he called "managed land proxy plus" that includes safeguards so it is "applied responsibly." It's a "solution that can be implemented at scale," Melissa Gallant, The Nature Conservancy's senior climate adviser, told Bloomberg.
Others are not persuaded. Jennifer Skene, global forest policy director at the Natural Resources Defence Council, argued that a tool designed for national climate inventories was never intended for corporate accounting.
"You don't want any actor who has a climate goal to be reporting removals from the atmosphere without acknowledging or somehow taking into account the fact that some of those forest-based removals really have nothing to do with their corporate action," Nathan Truitt, an American Forest Foundation executive vice president, said. "That is absolutely not what will happen if we adopt [managed land proxy plus]."
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