The American Forest Foundation and the Sorenson Impact Institute released a report on September 14, 2026 concluding that forests enrolled in the Family Forest Carbon Program (FFCP) generate millions of dollars in direct financial benefits and cost savings for the small landowners who enroll them and the businesses and communities around them. The finding puts a number on a question that has mostly been argued in the abstract: what a verified, project-level forest carbon credit is actually worth to the landowner who produces it. That question matters more than usual right now, because a separate and much larger fight over how forest carbon gets counted, one that has already cost the Greenhouse Gas Protocol two of its standard-setters this year, remains unresolved.
Tim Searchinger, the World Resources Institute’s technical director for land issues and a Princeton University research scholar, resigned from his role advising the Protocol in August 2026, months after Danny Cullenward, a University of Pennsylvania economist and lawyer, stepped down from the Protocol’s Independent Standards Board on June 9, 2026. Both cited the same underlying conflict: an industry-backed accounting method that timber, paper, and landowner groups want the Protocol to formally endorse for corporate greenhouse gas inventories. Neither resignation has been resolved by a final Protocol decision, and the comment period on the dispute now runs into next year, which is why a report quantifying what a project-level credit is worth lands with more weight than it might have a year ago.
For a beat that lives at the intersection of forest management and carbon accounting, the unresolved methodology fight matters more than any single credit auction. The outcome will decide whether Scope 3 emissions reporting under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol treats a forest products company’s own timberland the same way voluntary carbon registries treat an improved forest management project like FFCP, or whether it opens a much wider door.
Two ways to count the same tree
The dispute centers on two competing accounting approaches for forest carbon. Activity-based accounting, the method favored by the scientists on the Protocol’s technical working group, attributes carbon changes to the specific human action that caused them. Cut a tree, release the carbon associated with that harvest. Leave a stand standing, credit the growth that follows. The managed land proxy, pushed by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and forest industry representatives including the American Forest Foundation, instead treats all carbon change across a company’s entire managed forest footprint as attributable to that company’s management, regardless of whether the company caused the underlying sequestration or the wood was harvested at all.
The practical effect is large. According to reporting on an anonymized pilot study cited in coverage of the dispute, one United States paper company calculated it would be credited with removing 45 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually under the proxy method, a figure comparable to the annual output of 12 coal-fired power plants. Scientists involved in the review called the result physically backward: under the proxy, harvesting and using wood for any purpose becomes carbon negative on paper, and the more wood a company uses, the better its reported number looks.
Who is on which side
IKEA and Weyerhaeuser Company, the multibillion-dollar United States timber and wood products producer, are among the direct participants pushing the Protocol toward the managed land proxy, according to internal documents reviewed by reporters. The American Forest Foundation has also lobbied Protocol leadership, with an April 2025 letter from an AFF executive alleging bias among the scientific advisers who favor activity-based accounting. On the other side, Searchinger, Cullenward, and researchers including a scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies argue the proxy method would let companies claim credit for carbon sequestration that has nothing to do with their corporate decisions, a concern an American Forest Foundation executive has separately acknowledged in public comments, noting that companies should not report removals “without acknowledging that some of those forest-based removals really have nothing to do with their corporate action.”
Cullenward’s resignation followed a formal complaint he and fellow board member Heather Keith filed in February 2026 alleging process violations in how the Protocol was developing its forest carbon rules. A Protocol-commissioned independent review reported in late May 2026 that it had found “some process shortcomings.” Cullenward went public with his resignation days later, contending that substantive decisions had already been effectively delegated to a joint Greenhouse Gas Protocol and International Organization for Standardization working group whose membership has not been made public.
Why this is a forest management story, not just an accounting story
The Family Forest Carbon Program, the joint American Forest Foundation and Nature Conservancy initiative behind the September 14 report, lets landowners with as little as 30 acres enroll in improved forest management crediting, and it illustrates the stakes on the other end of the market from the Protocol dispute. The program issued its first credits in December 2025 under Verra’s VM0045 methodology, which uses dynamic matched baselines drawn from the United States Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis database rather than static growth projections, and which carries the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market’s Core Carbon Principles label. That is a project-level crediting methodology, built for the voluntary carbon registries and vetted through the ICVCM’s assessment process. The program has grown quickly, crossing 200,000 enrolled acres on May 6, 2026, and the new landowner-benefit figures are the clearest evidence yet that a rigorously verified, project-level credit produces real, documented income rather than a paper claim.
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol dispute is a different and, for corporate reporting purposes, more consequential fight. VM0045 and similar registry methodologies determine how many tradable credits a specific, verified project can sell. The managed land proxy under debate at the Protocol would determine how any company with forestland or wood supply chains reports its baseline emissions and removals in its own corporate inventory, independent of whether it ever buys or sells a credit. A timber company’s Scope 1 and Scope 3 numbers, not just its voluntary offsetting activity, hang on which method wins.
What to watch
The Independent Standards Board has said it will open a seven-month public comment period on forest carbon accounting recommendations, with the current comment window running through February 2027. Companies may use either accounting method today provided they disclose which one they have chosen, meaning inconsistent Scope 3 forest carbon figures are already circulating in corporate disclosures this reporting cycle. Sustainability officers at any company with forestland ownership, fiber sourcing, or wood product manufacturing in its supply chain should confirm which method their own inventory currently uses and flag the choice clearly in disclosures rather than let auditors or investors discover it later. Specifiers and buyers evaluating a supplier’s carbon claims tied to wood sourcing should ask directly whether those numbers rely on activity-based accounting or the managed land proxy, since the two can produce dramatically different answers from identical physical facts on the ground. The composition and transparency of the joint Greenhouse Gas Protocol and International Organization for Standardization working group drafting the eventual rule is worth tracking closely, given Cullenward’s contention that its membership and deliberations remain undisclosed.