The registry and its forest work group is now reviewing public comments on the draft revised protocols, and expects to prepare the next draft for consideration by the CCAR board of directors at their meeting in April 2009. Separately, the workgroup is continuing to consider accounting issues related to the treatment of harvested wood products.

The Registry is a private non-profit organisation originally formed by the State of California. It serves as a voluntary greenhouse gas (GHG) registry to protect and promote early actions to reduce GHG emissions by organisations. It provides leadership on climate change by developing and promoting credible, accurate, and consistent GHG reporting standards and tools to measure, monitor, third-party verify and reduce GHG emissions consistently across industry sectors and geographical borders.

The update is the result of more than a year of discussion by a dedicated workgroup. The multi-stakeholder workgroup began meeting with the explicit task of updating the forest protocols to:

• Allow greater participation by land owners particularly of publicly-owned lands and industrial working forests.
• Make improvements that improve the protocols' clarity, accuracy, conservatism, environmental integrity, and cost-effectiveness (where doing so does not infringe on other principles).

Additionally, the update is designed to allow the protocol to be used outside California's boundaries with the aim of generating high-quality GHG offsets for use in the voluntary market.

CCAR's Climate Action Reserve uses a very rigorous, open, and comprehensive process for developing all of its protocols and is primarily focused on accuracy and conservative GHG accounting to ensure that the resulting emission reductions meet the tests of being clearly real, permanent, additional, verifiable, and enforceable. As a result, the registry believes that emission reductions registered by the Climate Action Reserve are of the highest quality.

Notwithstanding the rigor of CCAR’s requirements, CRTs (the Climate Reserve Tonnes issued by the registry) are not currently recognised by any government-run trading programme or regulatory system.

The Forest Protocol Working Group strived for, and successfully achieved, consensus in most of the issues associated with updating the forest protocols. Minority reports have been issued by two ENGOs that did not agree with aspects of the group's consensus.
Information regarding the current forest protocols:

• CCAR continues to fully support projects registered under the current version of the forest protocol and strongly believes that the emission reductions associated with such projects (known as Climate Reserve Tonnes or CRTs) will continue to meet the highest standards today and into the future.
• The California Registry's forest protocols represent a sound rigorous approach to quantifying the benefits of voluntary forestry projects.
• The protocols are available now for project developers to the public to develop forest conservation, forest management, and reforestation projects in California.
• Voluntary projects that are registered under the current protocols will continue to be verified under the protocol in place at the time the project was registered for the life of the project for the purposes of generating voluntary credits for the voluntary market.
• Projects will be accepted for registration under the current protocols for a period of up to three months after an updated protocol is adopted by the California Registry's Board of Directors.

The Forest Project Reporting Protocol and Forest Verification Protocol provide guidance to account for, report, and verify GHG emissions reductions associated with forest conservation, conservation-based management, and reforestation projects in California. The Forest Project Protocols are available for public use but are applicable for California forests only. Project developers that undertake forest projects will use this protocol to register GHG reductions with the California Registry. These protocols were originally adopted by the California Registry Board of Directors in June 2005, and an updated version of the protocols was adopted by the Board in September 2007.

Registry members voluntarily measure, verify, and publicly report their GHG emissions, are leaders in their respective industry sectors, and are actively participating in solving the challenge of climate change. In turn, the State of California offers its best efforts to ensure that California Registry members receive appropriate consideration for early actions in light of future state, federal or international GHG regulatory programmes. Registry members are well prepared to participate in market based solutions and upcoming regulatory requirements.

The California Registry is regarded as a leading international thought centre on climate change issues and an intersection where business, government and environmental organizations meet to work together to implement practical and effective solutions.

The California Climate Action Registry was formed in 2001 when a group of CEOs, who were investing in energy efficiency projects that reduced their organisations’ greenhouse gas emissions, asked the state to create a place to accurately report their greenhouse gas emissions history.

These farsighted CEOs saw eventual regulation of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and wanted to protect their early actions to reduce emissions by having a credible and accurate record of their profiles and baselines. Subsequently, the bill SB1771 was introduced to the legislature by Senator Byron Sher and the California Climate Action Registry was formed. Technical changes were made to the statute in SB527 and eventually it was signed by Governor Gray Davis on October 13, 2001, finalising the structure for the registry.

The California Registry started with 23 charter members and currently has more than 300 of the world’s largest and leading corporations, universities, cities & counties, government agencies and environment organisations voluntarily measuring, monitoring, and publicly reporting their GHG emissions using the registry’s protocols and working together to solve climate change.

Source: Adapted from CCAR website