Tim Searchinger, the World Resources Institute’s technical director for land use, resigned this month from the working group advising the Greenhouse Gas Protocol on how companies should count carbon in managed forests, according to reporting first published by Bloomberg on August 13, 2026. He is the second senior scientist to quit over the same dispute since June, and the fight he is walking away from determines something with direct commercial weight for the built environment supply chain: whether harvesting timber, and the forest management practices that surround it, can be booked as a carbon removal on the corporate emissions inventories that large companies use to report under mandatory climate disclosure laws in the European Union and California. The resignation lands in the same month that registries and researchers have moved on three other forest carbon fronts, from a rebuilt Verra registry to new academic evidence that buyers pay for a credit’s story more than its integrity.
What the accounting fight is actually about
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the accounting framework nearly every major corporate net-zero commitment is built on, is drafting its first dedicated guidance for forest carbon. Two competing methods are on the table. Activity-based accounting only credits carbon changes that a company’s actual management decisions caused. The managed land proxy, favored by parts of the forest products industry, treats all carbon change on land a company manages as attributable to that management, whether or not any specific decision caused it. Danny Cullenward, a University of Pennsylvania economist and scientist, resigned from the Protocol’s Independent Standards Board on June 9, 2026, arguing the proxy approach lets a company claim a removal credit for cutting down a forest, the opposite of what physically happens when trees come down. Searchinger’s departure followed the same complaint: that a confidential joint working group formed with the International Organization for Standardization has operated without the transparency the dispute requires, and that Weyerhaeuser Company, which co-authored a modified “managed land proxy plus” proposal with added safeguards, has had disproportionate influence over language that forest products companies will eventually report against.
Why this matters beyond corporate accounting
The outcome shapes demand and credibility for improved forest management (IFM) credits, the category that underpins deals like Microsoft Corporation’s 10-year, 4.8-million-ton agreement with Anew Climate and Aurora Sustainable Lands, signed in 2025, and it bleeds directly into how REDD+ and afforestation, reforestation and revegetation (ARR) projects get evaluated by buyers who increasingly scrutinize the difference between a credit that reflects additional carbon and one that reflects business as usual dressed up as removal. If the Greenhouse Gas Protocol adopts a permissive standard for corporate inventories while voluntary market standards tighten, the two systems diverge, and mills, foresters and project developers selling into both compliance-adjacent reporting and voluntary credit markets face conflicting rules about what counts. A public comment period on the standards board’s findings runs through February 2027, and the subscription news service Carbon Pulse has been tracking the governance dispute closely since it first surfaced.
ICVCM widens its integrity label while the accounting fight plays out
The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market announced on August 4, 2026, that three more crediting programs, BioCarbon Standard, Cercarbono and Plan Vivo, operating under its PV Climate label, meet its Core Carbon Principles (CCP) and are now CCP-eligible. Cercarbono, based in Colombia, runs more than 200 projects across more than 25 countries with a significant forestry footprint. Plan Vivo has built its reputation on community-led forestry and agroforestry projects. The council said CCP-eligible programs now account for more than 95% of cumulative voluntary carbon market issuances, meaning nearly the entire market now sits under a program that has passed some form of independent integrity review, even as the corporate accounting side of the market argues over basic definitions.
Verra rebuilds the registry that houses most forest carbon supply
Verra, whose registry holds the largest share of the world’s REDD+ and ARR project credits, went live on July 30, 2026, with a rebuilt platform developed in partnership with S&P Global Commodity Insights, a partnership the two organizations announced in August 2025. The new system consolidates more than 5,900 projects, 10,500 account holders, 1.4 billion issued credits and 125,000 supporting documents onto a single platform, replacing a setup that required separate logins for project listing, verification, issuance and retirement. Verra says core fees and account requirements are unchanged, and the company has flagged transaction-ready API connectivity and expanded Article 6 functionality for international credit trading as coming next. For forest project developers, the practical change is a single lifecycle view from pipeline listing through retirement, integrated with Verra’s Project Hub.
New research shows buyers pay for narrative, not integrity
A study published July 20, 2026, by researchers at the MIT Sloan School of Management, VU Amsterdam, the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE and the Tinbergen Institute found that buyer identity, not a credit’s underlying climate impact, is the strongest driver of what companies pay. Examining more than 7,200 transactions from 2018 to 2024, covering roughly 11% of the global secondary carbon credit market and spanning 1,200 companies and 400 projects, the researchers found buyer identity explains 62% of price variation. The 20 largest purchasers paid 16 to 23 percent less than other buyers, while financial sector and consumer goods companies paid 9 to 22 percent more than industrial manufacturers for identical credit types. Most relevant to this beat, lower-rated forest protection and cookstove projects sold for two to four times more than higher-performing waste management and industrial efficiency projects, evidence that buyers are paying for co-benefits and story, not the emissions-reduction effectiveness that registries and rating agencies are built to measure. Prices across the transactions ranged from a few cents to more than $100 a ton.
What this means for forest carbon practitioners
Project developers building improved forest management or REDD+ pipelines should not assume the managed land proxy will survive the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s comment period intact. Model deal terms around activity-based accounting as the more conservative and durable outcome, and treat any near-term corporate demand spike tied to a permissive proxy as a possible reversal risk rather than a stable baseline. Buyers and sustainability officers should read the MIT Sloan findings as a warning that internal price benchmarking against “market average” numbers is unreliable when buyer identity, not credit quality, is driving that average. Verify a supplier’s CCP-eligible status directly against the Integrity Council’s published list rather than assuming a registry listing alone confers integrity. And anyone transacting through Verra should expect a period of platform adjustment following the July 30 relaunch, with Article 6 features arriving in phases rather than all at once. The next concrete checkpoint is the Independent Standards Board’s comment period closing in February 2027, which will determine whether the accounting fight resolves toward the scientists’ position or the industry’s.