Drafting a new Standard for Carbon Credits and Climate Impact Measurement

We are a group of volunteers proposing a new IEEE Standard for Carbon Credits. We are looking for a professional researcher and writer who can draft the standard including the guidelines, measurement methodologies, and climate impact case studies.

The first task would be to draft the IEEE Standard Project Authorization Request (PAR) which is the document that outlines the goals of the standard. Then the next step would be to draft the standard itself.

Any prior experience with existing carbon credit standards such as Verra, Gold Standard etc will be very valuable.

Here are more details on this new Standard:

The Problem: Most of the Climate Action projects do NOT have access to the global Carbon Markets that trade certified-credits and hence their impacts typically go un-accounted, un-incentivized, and ultimately un-credited. While the current globally recognized standards such as Verra and GoldStandard have done pioneering work by creating an ecosystem for carbon credits to be issued to climate projects around the world, there are many projects that cannot afford the cost of credit issuance which can be as high as $30K to $50K to register a project and get the credits issued, ruling out most of the small and medium scale projects which constitute the vast majority of climate action in the world.

The Opportunity: Voluntary Carbon Markets are projected to reach $50B+ and Institutional Compliance are projected to reach $250B+. If we bring down the cost of climate impact measurement, reporting, and verification, which ultimately results in reducing the cost of carbon credit issuance, then we could unlock the financing flood gates to truly democratize climate action. IEEE has the opportunity to leverage its rich standardization expertise, history, and credibility to empower a large number of climate action projects such as agroforestry, renewable energy, carbon removal technologies, community-led initiatives, and more to monetize their climate impacts by accessing the global carbon market.

What can be improved or built upon the current standards?:

A) Decoupling the Standard and the Assessment function so that multiple regional carbon credit registries can emerge to facilitate local carbon markets.

B) Decentralizing and Enabling Local Assessments so that a large network of local assessors can support the credit issuance process (IEEE has the concept of a Compliance-Standard Addendum that defines how the validations should be done for a given standard)

C) Leveraging Technology (such as Satellite Imagery, Remote Sensing, IOT etc) for better credibility and faster verification. Triangulation of multiple sources of data for validation – independent assessments, remote sensing estimates, and self reporting.

D) Incentivizing Honesty (Disincentivizing the lack of). For example: un-correlating the independent assessment results with the fee that the assessors earn.