ICVCM Ongoing work programs

The ICVCM’s Continuous Improvement Work Programs (CIWPs) are the live processes that will shape the next version of the CCPs and the Assessment Framework. Several are directly relevant to forest carbon.

Permanence: stress tests, definitions, and the Permanence Trust

The CIWP on Permanence published its first report in May 2025 and launched a follow-up phase in February 2026, with a working group convened in Q2 2026. The work addresses three strands. First, stress-testing of pooled buffer reserves: designing and piloting a standardised stress test protocol for buffer reserves held by CCP-Eligible programmes, evaluated across scenarios including correlated reversal events such as large-scale wildfires and financial stress. The initial report recommended mandatory stress testing at minimum every five years, conducted by independent parties. Second, standardised definitions for reversal risk: the report noted that definitional inconsistencies across programmes, for example, differences between Verra’s and Climate Action Reserve’s definitions of unavoidable reversals, allow varying interpretations of minimum standards. Standardising the avoidable/unavoidable distinction and the treatment of monitoring cessation (currently treated as an avoidable reversal but with limited guidance on quantifying compensation liability) are both on the agenda. Third, novel compensation mechanisms, explicitly including the feasibility of a permanence trust, the role of industry-wide pooled buffer reserves, and parametric insurance products as flexible, extended coverage tools. The Permanence Trust concept developed by American Forest Foundation (AFF), Kita, and Climate Resilient Solutions is directly referenced in the ICVCM’s framing of this workstream. The CIWP also flagged exploration of whether the 40-year monitoring and compensation period should be extended for certain activity types.

The ICVCM’s scientific advisory partner on permanence and durability is SHIFT-CM, the Science for High-Integrity Frameworks to Transform Carbon Markets initiative, co-led by The Nature Conservancy and Yale University and hosted by Nature4Climate, which published its “Beyond Buffer Pools” white paper in June 2026. That paper reframes permanence as durability; a spectrum comprising both how long carbon stays out of the atmosphere and how likely it is to remain stored, and provides a taxonomy of seven active or proposed market mechanisms for managing non-permanence risk across NCS pathways. SHIFT-CM’s forest working group is also producing global maps of natural reversal risk likelihood, fraction of carbon lost upon disturbance, and likelihood of recovery, providing the empirical foundation for more rigorous risk-based buffer pool calibration.

Leakage: from blanket deductions to empirical estimates

The ICVCM’s approach to leakage is embedded in its methodology assessments rather than a separate workstream. The central empirical reference is Daigneault et al. (2025), a globally relevant data-driven assessment of carbon leakage from forestry published in Environmental Research Letters, which ACR and the ICVCM have both drawn on in evaluating IFM leakage factors. The assessment decisions show a consistent approach: methodologies must apply explicit market leakage deduction factors reflecting the degree to which a project reduces total wood product output relative to baseline, with the scale of the deduction tiered against that reduction and property size. VM0045 was approved with a requirement for tiered default leakage deductions for projects below a 5% de minimis threshold. ACR IFM v2.1 was approved with an equivalent condition. CAR’s Mexico Forest Protocol v3 received only conditional CCP approval; CAR must revise its leakage values to align with the latest research before full labelling applies to its 8.1 million already-issued credits. The ICVCM has been explicit in its observations that default deduction factors are a workable but conservative approach to leakage accounting, and that more rigorous empirical quantification methods are expected to feature in future methodology updates. The direction of travel is toward requiring methodologies to account for market leakage with increasing specificity, moving away from blanket conservative deductions and toward project-type and geography-specific estimates grounded in the latest leakage research.

Jurisdictional integrity

A CIWP on jurisdictional programmes is addressing how to ensure the integrity of REDD programmes at national and sub-national scale, including the interaction between jurisdictional baselines and nested project-level crediting, how jurisdictional programmes account for international leakage, and what policy consistency requirements (such as commitments from host countries not to undermine the programme’s conservation claims through other policy decisions) should be mandatory versus recommended.

Digital MRV and data standards

A CIWP on data standards is developing universal protocols for digital and remote sensing technologies, including satellite imagery, LiDAR, and machine learning, that can verify, monitor, and report on project performance. This is the technical infrastructure layer that sits underneath the methodology requirements. Getting standards right here determines whether the monitoring claims in CCP-approved methodologies can actually be verified at scale and at reasonable cost. MRV standards cover the data that monitors projects. The same rigour should cover the methods that construct counterfactual baselines: that is where the real uncertainty sits, and where belian works.