Isometric Launches New Avoided Deforestation Protocol to Restore Buyer Confidence

Isometric has announced its expansion into avoided deforestation certification, introducing a new protocol built around three specific methodological changes, dynamic baselines, 100% assumed leakage, and root cause accounting, intended to restore buyer confidence in a category where certificate retirements fell from nearly 61 million in 2021 to just 35 million in 2025 amid overcrediting concerns. Project developers Imperative and Revalue are among the first to commit projects to certification under the upcoming protocol, which will enter public consultation by November 2026.

 

Why Dynamic Baselines Address the Specific Mechanism That Enabled Historical Overcrediting

 

A baseline in avoided deforestation accounting represents an estimate of how much deforestation would have occurred in the absence of a given conservation project, with the certified carbon benefit calculated as the difference between that estimated baseline and the actual, lower deforestation rate a project achieves. The release specifically states existing methodologies have "historically fixed" these baselines "against past rates in a region, locking them in for years," a static approach that becomes increasingly inaccurate over time if actual regional deforestation pressure changes, whether increasing or decreasing, after a baseline is initially set.

Isometric's protocol instead sets baselines "against real-world control areas, recalculated at every certificate issuance," meaning each new round of certificate issuance compares a project's actual performance against genuinely current, comparable non-project areas rather than an increasingly outdated historical estimate. That distinction directly addresses a documented mechanism behind overcrediting concerns in the broader avoided deforestation credit market, since a static baseline set during a period of historically high regional deforestation risk would continue generating credits based on that original, possibly no longer accurate, risk estimate even if broader deforestation pressure in that region genuinely declined for reasons unrelated to the specific certified project itself.

 

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Why Assuming 100% Leakage by Default Represents a Fundamentally Different Accountability Approach

 

Leakage refers to the risk that protecting one specific forest area from deforestation simply displaces that same deforestation pressure to a different, unprotected area nearby, rather than genuinely reducing total deforestation across the broader landscape. The release states that "leakage... has historically been deducted at rates of 0 to 21%, while research puts real leakage at 20 to 70%," identifying a substantial gap between commonly applied leakage deduction assumptions and what independent research suggests actual leakage rates may be.

Isometric's protocol reverses the underlying assumption entirely, defaulting to "100% leakage" and reducing that deduction "only where developers can demonstrate and monitor that deforestation hasn't moved elsewhere." That structural reversal shifts the burden of proof from assuming a project has achieved genuine, undisplaced conservation benefit unless leakage is specifically proven, toward assuming full leakage has occurred unless a project developer can actively demonstrate otherwise, a considerably more conservative default position directly responsive to the research gap the release identifies between historical practice and measured real-world leakage rates.

 

Why Building Root Causes Into the Calculation Changes What a Certificate Represents

 

The release states that economic and social pressures driving communities to clear forest land "have never been accounted for in avoided deforestation certificates; at best, they're a requirement to meet," whereas Isometric's protocol will "build them into the calculation itself, requiring developers to demonstrate that those pressures have been addressed... before certificates are issued." That distinction matters considerably: treating root cause mitigation as a separate compliance checkbox alongside the core carbon calculation is meaningfully different from making that mitigation a direct, quantified input into how many credits a project can actually generate.

Since the release notes deforestation is frequently driven by "social and economic pressures that lead to forest clearance," a conservation project that successfully prevents deforestation only through enforcement or restriction, without genuinely addressing the underlying economic pressures driving local communities toward forest clearance in the first place, risks representing a temporary or fragile conservation outcome rather than a durable one, since those unaddressed economic pressures could plausibly re-emerge or shift toward a different unprotected area once a specific project's enforcement or funding period ends.

 

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Why Independent Scientific Endorsement From Outside Isometric's Own Team Matters for Credibility

 

The release includes endorsement from Dr. Tom Swinfield, described as Chair of the Scientific Council at Haven, a separate initiative focused on nature-based credit rigour, who specifically stated Isometric's dynamic baseline and leakage approach aligns with "principles central to the Haven Criteria." Separately, Professor Ed Mitchard of Space Intelligence, a satellite data company specialising in forest carbon mapping independent of Isometric, described the approach as "genuinely different from any existing REDD+ methodology."

That independent scientific validation from individuals and organisations outside Isometric's own commercial structure provides a different form of credibility than the company's own internal scientific claims alone would offer, since these external experts have their own independent professional and scientific reputations at stake in publicly endorsing this specific methodological approach, a meaningful distinction given the broader credibility challenges facing avoided deforestation credits that this protocol is specifically designed to address.