The carbon credit system is getting an upgrade: mega-scale forest protection programs.

REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) projects are singular forest conservation projects in which communities or project developers protect a forest from deforestation and sell carbon credits to corporate buyers for compensation. This patchwork system is mediocre, saving some trees in some areas but moving deforestation to others, and the scale is too small to meaningfully combat systemic deforestation.

Despite preliminary data for 2025 showing that global rates of deforestation are slowing, forests are still disappearing due to intentional clearing and increasing wildfires. Forest loss is rapidly erasing habitats, threatening communities and emitting carbon dioxide — a key driver of climate change.

“We need all the solutions and we need them to work fast,” said José Otavio Passos, Brazilian Amazon senior director at The Nature Conservancy. “We need to make everything right, but we don’t have a lot of time, so we need to keep doing it and improving the system as we go.”

Now, jurisdictional approaches to REDD projects, where entire countries or states are covered by a forest conservation program instead of small sections, are emerging as an evolution of the patchwork system, potentially improving the results.

The Growing Threat of Deforestation and the Role of Mega-Scale Forest Carbon Credit Programs

From 1990 to 2020, the world lost about 420 million hectares of forests by converting forested land to agribusiness, housing, infrastructure, mining and other human activities, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. That’s about 43 percent of the size of the United States.

Increasingly frequent and intense wildfires are also making an impact. In 2023, an estimated 384 million hectares of land surface were burned, according to research from the University of California, Merced. Forests lost to wildfires eventually regenerate over the span of a few decades, but forests lost to human-induced deforestation do not.

Deforestation accounts for up to 9 percent of human-caused carbon emissions globally, according to the latest assessment by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Along with carbon emissions, deforestation drives massive habitat and biodiversity loss, disrupts natural water cycles, and erodes soil.

Read the full article about mega-scale forest carbon credit programs by Andrew Kaminsky at TriplePundit.