**Context: **
In light of the recent article by the British newspaper The Guardian, published on January 18, 2023, raising concerns with elements of the methodologies used to calculate carbon dioxide reductions from REDD+ projects listed on Verra, a legacy carbon credits registry in the voluntary carbon market, we would like to start an open, public discussion with the Regen Network community about the values, registry program design, and business model decisions that inform Regen Registry.
Regen Registry, which has been under development for 5+ years, is a distinct alternative to current voluntary carbon market registry standards. Regen Registry is the ecological credits registry system that allows scientific communities to design high integrity methodologies and credit standards to monitor ecological regeneration for credits issued on Regen Marketplace. Regenerative projects listed on Regen Registry go far beyond only carbon and agricultural ecosystems, and utilize innovative, expert peer reviewed, and community-governed carbon and ecological credit standards under development.
At the heart of this system is the ability for communities to self-govern methodologies and credit standards, thus putting scientists and on-the-ground project developers, land stewards, and local communities at the center of the decision making process.
Prompts:
We would like to hear from you, our community, on the following topics:
Credit Design and Scientific Methodologies
How should the Regen Registry approach forestry protection and biodiversity protection projects?
Hi all ! I’m Gisel Booman, the Head of Science at Regen Network Dev, and I’m super eager to discuss about all these questions and more.
The Registry and Marketplace should serve our community, while helping improve the Voluntary Carbon Markets by bringing innovation and transparency. We have some ideas but its time to get yours! Please pick a question and share thougths or ideas that can help us improve in that direction
Very excited to see this and looking forward to hearing from the community. I’d be happy to support in answering questions related to existing tools available and how those tools can better serve the goals of Regen Registry. Mostly here to listen and follow along though.
Q: How should the Regen Registry approach forestry protection and biodiversity protection projects?
I think biodiversity protection and preserving existing forests is critical to ensuring we protect existing ecology across the globe. I think the inclusion of these types of solutions is critical to planetary regeneration and should be included in the types of regeneration projects allowed to be issued on regen network.
Q: How should the Regen Registry approach carbon removal vs. emissions reductions at a program level?
For the reasons above I think regen network should include both types of solutions, however, developing new carbon removal projects will help to speed up climate impact.
Q: Should Regen Registry adopt 3rd party credit curations frameworks?
Yes, I think regen should include 3rd party curations frameworks, like Bzero. This could be integrated into project pages on the marketplace app where the methods on regen have already been rated. I think newly published methodologies on regen network should be shared with ratings systems, so that they can be included in their existing ratings processes. These ratings should be published on the marketplace app credit class pages and the methodologies library, in order to better inform project developers and credit buyers.
I would recommend a first phase of utilizing existing ratings partners, rather than the complexity of developing a regen specific rating system, given that this could be seen as a conflict of interest to have the organization(s) that govern the methods creation process (regen registry guide) designing the methods rating systems - to me this seems like it wouldn’t qualify as independent, third-party, non-incentivized quality assessment.
A lot of these questions are quite heavy and probably could use some context re past literature that we could read to educate ourselves with and existing solutions.
I am not a climate expert but am interested in putting my 2 cents in but would like to put forth educated opinions.
Perhaps it would be nice to have workshops with interested community members (and experts as a part of it who could perhaps guide and answer questions) that could address some or all of these together
It’s certainly clear there is a crisis in integrity in the climate finance field, with the majority of web3 #ReFi projects porting the shortcomings of existing carbon registries on chain, without rising to the challenge of overhauling a skewed system.
The space for the origination of novel ecoCredits is often intimidating and multifaceted. Asking different communities to create frameworks, and then originate credits within their systems is perhaps too open and unconstrained of a space. Design by committee is difficult particularly through a blank slate. Community ownership and governance is well suited to clearly scoped discussions and governance proposals with clear terms and results. This is particularly the case for credit originating communities which have lower climate finance and technical fluency.
In short, I think an opinionated registry with clear governance feedback loop is an effective way to nurture community participation. I’d advocate the Regen Registry can best empower project developers to own and govern their own credit creation by developing a rudimentary taxonomy and parameters for what define high integrity “beyond carbon” credits. This is something the Regen Foundation and csDAO’s could develop and support. Assuming an evolving political process through community governance, the taxonomy and parameters can be refined, removed, updated etc through ongoing proposals.
Two questions which emerge are:
1 - How do we define the primary taxonomy and parameters for high integrity ecoCredits?
2 - To what extent should our emerging credit classes draw from industry standards like Verra vs being develop in a wholey original manner.
1 - We could define ecoCredit parameters as the measures (outcome -based) or practices (practice-based) for ecological regeneration. They could be considered composable, and to some degree modular integrating ecological and social indices. The integration of differe
The idea of a working group on this topic was proposed below. As a first step, I wonder if we should host this discussion on an upcoming regenerati newshour or community call?
This is a very timely discussion for us in Kansas City with the Climate Action Marketplace (also known as the Delta EcoCredit). See brief here.
The more types of credits on the Regen Registry, the better (emission reduction, risk mitigation, and carbon sequestration). I believe that aggregating as many credits as possible onto one registry/ marketplace is a major value proposition in the industry and opportunity for the network. Some group will emerge as the winner in this category in this industry and I hope it is us.
I don’t have a good understanding of “the current Regen Registry development process of Internal Review, Expert Peer Review, and Public Comment to ensure high integrity credits.” Do you mind sharing that process?
To deal with differences in quality and MRV depth for such a catch all, a grading system that the science team provides for any approved methodology credit with a one page analysis of how those grades are calculated based on 5 categories could jumpstart premiums or discounts for various methodologies. Most importantly, it will allow the network to gatekeep for a baseline of integrity (for example the minimum score to become a B Corporation). It will help credit developers improve their models over time and buyers to understand the strengths/weaknesses trade offs of each credit. Some ratings must be done for credits not on the Registry as well. More 3rd Party rating companies and products could also emerge but the risk of being wrong or not doing any basic version of this is too important to the Regen Network platform to outsource.
People use and empower the incumbents Verra and Gold Standard only because they trust them. The trust is waning. But how does Regen communicate its superior trustworthiness? Clear boundaries. Less Confusion. I agree that getting out ahead of this discussions in the public narrative will help the network grow
Im loving this discussion.
Following @Austin Wade Smith and @Brian Weinberg ´s thoughts, here are some additional questions and ideas I 've been chewing: What´s the level of transparency we need to acheive for our registry and for the credits? My thoughts here are that simply showing all the data attached to the MRV process and to the projects originating the credits as pdfs is not enough. The data needs to be presented in a digested way for buyers, and to curators too, to streamline their processes and get more credits rated in return.
For the sake of transparency of the Registry processes, I think it would be nice to show in a very user friendly way in our website the current status (real time) of a methodology in the pipeline, or of a project or credit coming to the marketplace. For example (simplified version):
The “x” Methodology Pipeline:
submission–> internal review → external peer review–> public comment–> voting ? -->approval
The “Y” project pipeline:
submission of project plan–>acceptance–>1st MRV round–>credit issuance → credit sales
This info could be shown in a more designd fashion of course.
Once on the marketplace, I agree that there needs to be some level of curation. But what Im not sure about is whether Regen Registry should curate.
One alternative that could be as effective , from my perspective, but less centralized, is to offer a set of tools for the buyers to make informed decisions, that would also inform project developers and land stewards about market acceptance of their products (and help them make the right MRV choices).
The set of tools Im thinking about are a mix of:
external curators ranking or scores (lets say bezero + carbonplan+ sylvera). These will not always be available. We could try to partner these orgs to get a lower price for the service for instance… Ratings co
Thanks for these great questions. I’ll answer from the African context, as that is where my expertise lies. I do believe this will be relevant for most if not all Global South countries as well.
RE: Austin’s opinion on “developing ecoCredit parameters as the measures (outcome -based) or practices (practice-based) for ecological regeneration.”
This cuts into the issue of land tenure and ownership which in our context is unfair to women and many indigenous communities that don’t own the ‘rights’ because they have no titles. By applying an approach that is REGEN native, we could essentially be including a HUGE proportion of untitled communities and women (who own less than 30% of the titles in Kenya), yet have been caring for the land for generations. These groups are completely left out of the carbon markets and climate financing due to a lack of titles and ‘proof of regeneration’.
I believe it is essential for us to look into interventions that can create a bridge for these communities to access the much needed climate financing.
On transparency for buyers-technology exists that can be leveraged by land stewards to quantify and verify their regenerative efforts, be they as rudimentary as photos and videos or satellite imagery and geofenced sensors. I think we need to leverage on existing technologies and create a platform that is simple to use and impossible to gameify. (The foundation is currently undertaking this research through our project Chama DAO).
I feel that the foundation can also steward the process of creating our own frameworks to use alongside 3rd party ones that could include a wealth of information such as gender inclusion, livelihoods, sustainable development and food security. Most of the frameworks I have seen seem to forget that in many countries people are fighting to feed themselves, and carbon programs that limit use of land for communities can actually be incredibly detrimental to them.
Thanks for Kicking off the thread! Here are some thoughts:
Credit Design and Scientific Methodologies /
How should the Regen Registry approach forestry protection and biodiversity protection projects?
An interesting opportunity that arises from these articles and tensions, is the need for governance and consensus around baselines. Regen, could present a governance model for forestry baselines (informed by remote sensing, ML, and ground truthing) that are adopted by other registries, and these baseline consensus can be be agnostic to the specific credit methodologies. Regen is best positioned to have on chain governance on regional baselines (and ideally global baselines) that are leveraged for credit issuance across other registries.
For Biodiversity credit, this is a bit more complicated. Longer response and less conclusive given the nascent nature of the methodologies and complexity in baseline development.
**How should Regen Registry govern the curation of different methodologies on the platform? **
As with the baselines above, and with the tensions from these articles, it would be ideal to spearhead the ‘Uncertainty’ factor in Project Claims, AND in baselines, in a way we can propose dynamic credits. Regen could present these important new ideas for credits to the other registries and drive them in concert.
**How can the Regen Registry further empower scientists and practitioners to govern methodologies? **
An idea would be to allow them to question baselines or other aspects in a transparent way. Another would be to partner with tool providers (eg. baseline calculation tools, metrics tools) to offer them as a way to create standard tooling practices, which in turn must remain transparent and auditable.
What is your opinion of the current Regen Registry development process of Internal Review, Expert Peer Review, and Public Comment to ensure high integrity credits?
Its great!. It would be great to have a Dashboard where
Great discussion going on here. I think that Regen Network is becoming important for the establishment of methodologies, as many projects have been arriving to present their views, providing debates and generating innovation in the community. I think the role for Regen as a community that rates, discusses and legitimizes methodologies for projects everywhere is very important. In the case of Ekonavi qualitative methodology, we think that is very productive to interact with others to establish a common ground.
I think it is normal that some uncertainty plays a role, when we are working with human life and environment, where not all variables can be mathematically measured. So, it is important to keep track of developments to achieve consensus, but taking in consideration that there will always be something to be criticized. If there is track of development, than this shows that rational choices were taken along the way.
To summarize the perspective that I think was reflected by my read of community engagement around the topic:
People are sympathetic to and agree NCT represents standards that can be improved upon.
The design of Regen Ledger has been to be registry agnostic, meaning its meant to be an open registry system where different communities can program in their values, methodologies and standards for creating new ecological units of account.
Therefore instead of a banning approach people would prefer to focus on shipping tools that allow specific credit class curation, addition of meta data from research such as branch out has undertaken with an open badge or certificate system
This is my attempt to distill what appears to be emerging consensus from voting and dialog. However it is almost certainly inaccurate and of course filtered through my own perspectives.