Dataset for Ground Truth: Can forest carbon protocols ensure high-quality credits?

Forests have substantial potential to help mitigate climate change. Private finance channeled through carbon credits is one way to fund that mitigation, but market-based approaches to forest carbon projects have been fraught to date. Public skepticism of forest carbon markets signals a need to closely scrutinize the system for certifying carbon credits. We rigorously reviewed and scored new and existing protocols for the voluntary and North American compliance carbon markets. We included protocols for forest projects engaging in improved forest management, afforestation/reforestation, and avoided planned forest conversion. This dataset, provided as one xls file with seven tables, includes the detailed summaries for protocol approaches to 18 key features that we produced, the raw and final aggregated scores for each evaluated approach and protocol, the weights assigned to each feature of protocols, and the volume of credits issued by the protocols.