Timber
Is it better for the planet to save a tree or cut it down?
Elementary school students fresh off an Earth Day lesson would probably suggest saving the tree. Reasonably well-informed adults would explain that living trees absorb carbon dioxide, growing atmospheric concentrations of which are raising global temperatures. A climate scientist might say that forests around the world emit half as much carbon as they absorb—roughly 1.5 times the emissions of the entire United States. That scientist might add that additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is helping many of the world’s forests grow faster and absorb even more carbon.
A timber company executive, meanwhile, despite being in the business of harvesting trees, might take credit for that warming-fueled growth because some portion of it is happening on land he owns. With creative enough accounting, industry representatives could make the case that, like the forests, their companies absorb more carbon than they emit. A proposed change to the go-to global standard that corporations use to measure and manage their emissions might just ratify this fairly preposterous reasoning and allow major forestry, furniture, and even beef producers to count their tree-cutting and burning operations as “carbon negative,” i.e., better for the planet than the activities of companies that don’t cut down trees. The more wood companies harvest and sell, the more carbon would—by some applications of this accounting method—be removed from the atmosphere.
That proposal has kicked off an ongoing scandal within the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a nonprofit-managed initiative that invites representatives from civil society, academia, and industry to jointly develop the accounting standards that 97 percent of Fortune 500 companies now use for reporting their greenhouse gas emissions. One of just two independent forest carbon experts on the protocol’s Independent Standards Board resigned in June, and a string of coverage has tracked the saga and the scientific debate at the heart of it. Danny Cullenward—a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy—publicly accused the protocol of “violating its own rules” and “effectively delegat[ing] forest carbon accounting standards to a secret, industry-led working group.” In July, Tim Searchinger—a senior research scholar at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs—resigned in protest from his role as director of forests at the World Resources Institute, one of the organizations that oversees the GHG Protocol.
Searchinger takes issue with the proposal itself, and with a process he sees as awarding industry interests an outsize say in answering scientific questions. “Giving companies such a large role in defining how to count emissions confuses voluntary efforts with science,” he told me. “Companies can legitimately decide how much they want to reduce emissions when voluntary, but that does not mean they get to decide how to count emissions.”
While corporations rely on these standards to voluntarily assess their greenhouse gas emissions and create emissions reduction pledges, the standards are also being integrated into formal rule-making processes in California and the European Union, which legally mandate that companies report their emissions. Depending on how the GHG Protocol opts to move forward with its proposed forest carbon accounting methods over the next few months, those new rules could soon be baked into law. In other words, timber and paper companies (among others) may have already helped write the rules that will govern them. Internal documents reviewed by The New Republic shed light on how that happened, and on the relatively subtle ways that corporate interests can come to dominate consensus-based multi-stakeholder processes.
The initiative at the heart of the scandal dates to the late 1990s. That was when the earliest iteration of the GHG Protocol set out to tackle a somewhat novel problem: how to measure individual corporations’ greenhouse gas emissions. As policymakers seemed to be closing on regulations and some sort of large-scale carbon pricing scheme, companies, governments, and international institutions needed to do exactly that. A by-then well-established environmental nonprofit—the World Resources Institute, or WRI—took on that task.
It took off, and GHG Protocol methodologies now form much of the basis for corporate net-zero pledges. University of Toronto political scientist Jessica Green—who has researched the GHG Protocol initiative extensively—describes a supply-and-demand dynamic at work in the protocol’s success. On the supply side, she explains, WRI was eager to play a role in an exciting new policymaking landscape where its expertise could be of real use. On the demand side, companies, international institutions, and governments all lacked the capacity to develop these sorts of standards in-house. Companies especially had good reason to want to get out ahead of any prospective climate rules or trading systems; whenever rules did come down, they wanted to be prepared. Having the standard-setting process be administered by a respected nongovernmental organization—with plenty of input from corporations—would lend it credibility and give companies a say. Participating firms could improve their image with a climate-concerned public by taking part in the process, and show would-be regulators that they could be trusted.
The GHG Protocol receives considerable corporate funding; its forest carbon accounting work specifically is funded by the Ikea Group, Cargill, and the forestry giant Weyerheuser, among others. Its governance structure has been overhauled in recent years so as to better balance the interests of stakeholders across business, academia, and civil society. Its day-to-day operations are handled by a secretariat staffed by WRI and the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, a nonprofit network of more than 250 corporations, including Ikea’s parent company, the Ingka Group, Amazon, EY (formerly known as Ernst and Yong), Shell, and Weyerhaeuser. Its top governing body is an 11-person steering committee that provides high-level advice and oversees the GHG Protocol’s main decision-making body, the 11-person Independent Standards Board, or ISB. As of now, the steering committee contains no independent scientists, and the ISB contains no civil-society representatives.
The forest carbon accounting scandal started brewing last spring. At a May 2025 meeting of the Independent Standards Board, EY consultants contracted by the secretariat presented findings from a larger Technical Working Group tasked with proposing forest carbon accounting methods. Technical Working Group membership is made up of scientific experts, forestry products industry representatives, and NGOs; this group’s members had been approved by the Independent Standards Board, according to the organization’s bylaws. Since the Technical Working Group was unable to agree on a single recommendation, EY presented the ISB with two separate accounting systems developed by two different cohorts within the TWG.
One approach was less generous to industry, and one far more generous. “Activity-based accounting” would distinguish between changes in forest emissions caused by firms’ treatment of the land; if a company cuts down or plants trees, for instance, its carbon ledger would reflect those activities. The other approach, called managed land proxy “plus,” or MLP+, would instead track forest carbon absorption, storage, and emissions across the land a company manages. Companies would be allowed to count carbon absorption that happens on land they own or lease toward their total emissions, regardless of whether their activities on that land have caused that absorption. Separately, firms would also report on the specific impact of their forest management. In Northern climates, forests are currently growing faster as a result of climate change—additional atmospheric carbon dioxide speeds plant growth, and warmer temperatures can mean longer growing seasons. By some estimates, such effects amount to more than 10 gigatons of additional carbon removals worldwide per year—roughly a third of all carbon dioxide emissions. Under the proposed accounting method, companies could take credit for at least some portion of those climate-induced removals while also cutting down and burning massive numbers of trees, thereby contributing to climate change. So long as the company owns enough wooded land—and the forests on those lands are growing—those carbon removals can effectively cancel out the carbon emitted by tree harvesting and burning.
The proposal presentation, reviewed by TNR, does note that companies would have to disclaim that carbon removal reported using these methods could not be represented as their having achieved “net-zero.” The MLP+ is intended to correct for shortcomings in a similar draft proposal that was shelved in 2022, after more than 200 scientists wrote to WRI and WBCSD leadership claiming that it “would have the effect of inaccurately claiming that harvesting trees for bioenergy or any other purpose is carbon neutral or maybe even carbon negative.”
Under MLP+, companies wouldn’t account for actual wood harvesting in their physical emissions inventories, either. The emissions of the wood that companies purchase would instead be counted as a proportion of forest growth across somewhat vaguely described regions. On a recent webinar, Searchinger highlighted a study showing how this accounting works in practice. Poland’s forests, for example, absorb roughly 60 megatons of carbon dioxide annually, during which time the country typically harvests roughly 20 million square meters of roundwood. Under the managed land proxy method, each square meter of Polish roundwood would be credit as removing three tons of carbon dioxide: The more trees are cut down and sold, the better off the planet. As Searchinger noted, “This is physically backwards and incoherent.”
That approach holds some obvious benefits for firms that, on paper, could remove carbon by owning land, cutting down trees, and/or buying wood. A 2022 pilot study circulated within the GHG Protocol shows that—using an earlier version of the managed land proxy accounting method—all but one of the participating forestry products and pulp and paper companies recorded negative emissions.
Among the other core problems with this approach, experts argue, is that these already-occurring forest carbon removals are already accounted for in our understanding of climate change. Over a 100-year time frame, that is, a single ton of carbon dioxide is understood to cause warming equivalent to half a ton of carbon. That’s because oceans and forests—both better able to absorb carbon as a result of climate change itself—absorb a quarter ton each. Notably, wooden chairs and tables do not absorb carbon from the atmosphere; the on-paper emissions removals amassed through buying the wood used to make those things are already being factored into our planetary accounts. If that carbon is not actually absorbed—if those otherwise carbon-absorbing trees are cut down—then companies could be branding themselves green for depleting one of the world’s most important carbon sinks.
A month before the EY presentation—on April 9, 2025—American Forestry Foundation vice president Nathan Truitt,* who belonged to the Technical Working Group, complained privately to the secretariat and EY staff about the group’s composition. Together with the Nature Conservancy, the American Forestry Foundation runs a revenue-generating program that pays private landowners to responsibly manage forests. This generates “carbon credits” that correspond to the amount of carbon purportedly removed by way of that responsible management. Corporations can then buy those credits through the voluntary carbon market to offset their own emissions.
Truitt complained, in an email reviewed by TNR, that the Technical Working Group lacked the expertise needed to present all the relevant scientific literature on the subject. He alleged that the TWG’s academic researchers were “engaged in advocacy for one particular solution.” While that is “not necessarily a problem,” Truitt wrote, he claimed that this advocacy meant the working group was ill equipped to present “independent research,” and suggested that more impartial experts could have been invited to take part in the deliberations. Truitt also alleged that the developing optics within the TWG—where most scientists supported activity-based accounting and most industry representatives supported the managed land proxy approach—had created “a biased and unfair dynamic where the ‘scientists’ all support the ABA approach, while ‘industry’ support the MLP approach.” According to Truitt, the dynamic “suggests to casual observers that this is an example of ‘industry’ resisting what ‘the science’ demands.” He suggested inviting into the Technical Working Group four additional academics, whom he cited as supporting the managed land proxy approach.
When EY presented the Technical Working Group’s proposals in May, it didn’t include the same kind of explanatory memoranda for the activity-based proposal that was included with the MLP+ proposal. Having heard that this explanatory memoranda was submitted in late April, Cullenward—on the ISB—questioned the secretariat’s staff, Bassen, and an EY presenter about whether the ISB had been given all available documents. The board maintained that it had, that the accounting-based activity authors were still working on their memorandum, and that the ISB would be able to read the memo in June.
And while Truitt’s complaint wasn’t shared with the ISB, that body’s chairman—German economist Alexander Bassen—obliquely referenced a “critique that the selection of the academics in the board is going in one direction, too strong in one direction.” He also announced that the four researchers Truitt had suggested inviting in his complaint—a complaint still unknown to other ISB members—were invited to give their opinions on the Technical Working Group’s proposals.
Cullwenward asked about the source of the accusations that the TWG’s independent scientists were biased. “I’ve heard a number of people use the passive voice in expressing the observation that somebody, without identifying who that somebody is, has expressed concern with respect to the balance of the group that has brought us one of these two proposals,” Cullenward said at the recorded meeting. “I’m concerned that we’ve begun this with what I think is a fairly unbalanced set of documents, and right now an unvoiced allegation about one of the groups not being representative, that I think is pretty profoundly concerning as a way to open what will be a technically complex discussion.”
He did not receive an answer. The ISB continued debating the two proposals for the rest of the year. Unable to reach an agreement, they opted last July to form a subgroup made up of Bassen and four others, including Cullenward. The subgroup was tasked with determining broad points of agreement about the two forest carbon accounting proposals, which it would then propose to the broader ISB in the hopes of coming closer to a decision. After some spirited back and forth, the subgroup agreed that the first point of agreement presented to the ISB would be that managed land proxy accounting methods are “are not suitable for a physical inventory for corporate reporting.”
Bassen said he would to run a subsequent draft by GHG Protocol governance lead David Burns, a WRI staffer, to see if it raised any governance concerns—a fairly standard step in these sorts of bureaucratic processes. In the next draft Bassen sent back to the remaining subgroup members in early January, language about managed land proxy methods being “not suitable” was deleted. A new bullet point noted that the subgroup hadn’t reached consensus on “whether MLP methods or the ABA method are suitable for the purposes of estimating an organization’s greenhouse gas inventory.” A spokesperson for the GHG Protocol did not respond to a request to explain how or why this change was made.
Cullenward and forest ecologist Heather Keith protested the change. Bassen countered that he “did not censor anything” (his emphasis) and eventually agreed to revert the language back to a previous version, then transmitted that to the rest of the group in early January.
In February, Cullenward and Keith filed a formal complaint listing several concerns, including the handling of Truitt’s email, the subgroup process, and alleged witholding of documents. In the months that followed, ISB members’ complaints made their way through the GHG Protocol’s internal processes; the protocol hired an external mediator to resolve disputes. Cullenward and Keith received a response to their complaint that they were barred from sharing; a spokesperson for the protocol declined to provide more information about it. In response to a request for comment on several of the specific allegations raised by Cullenward and Keith, and in subsequent reporting, a spokesperson for the protocol wrote that forest carbon accounting “remains an open topic under consideration,” emphasizing that the GHG Protocol was still considering the merits of both proposals. At the end of June, RFI announced a seven-month public comment period on the proposed accounting methods. “Given the importance and complexity of the topic, the ISB concluded that further methodological development, testing, and stakeholder input were needed before a decision could be made,” the spokesperson wrote. “The ISB therefore did not reach a final consensus, and no approach has been selected.”
Shortly after Cullenward and Searchinger resigned this summer, the GHG Protocol announced that it would be aligning its carbon emissions accounting with the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, a venerable and corporate-dominated body responsible for industrial standards that range from screws to chargers. The two organizations formed a strategic partnership last September. And while the ISO has long utilized GHG Protocol standards, the two have not formally collaborated on accounting methods. The ISO has its own proprietary forest carbon accounting standard that SourceMaterial and Bloomberg report closely mirrors the managed land proxy approach. In combining their methods, the jointly formed committees that help make those decisions could be anonymous, per ISO policy and against GHGP Protocol, which stipulates that membership lists be made publicly available. Cullenward has reasoned that this could offer cover for corporate representatives to dominate talks more openly than they have been, given the GHG Protocol’s governance rules. Searchinger told me he eventually left because of the protocol’s agreement to create standards “by anonymous committees using anonymous votes,” and felt he could be “more effective in influencing what the world ultimately does on the outside.” The protocol spokesperson declined to comment as to whether these bodies’ membership and votes would be disclosed to the public.
Lurking in the background of all this arcane drama is an overriding sense of scarcity in the world of climate policy, and—relatedly—the cottage industry built up around helping companies meet climate goals. Corporate uptake of the GHG Protocol standards has been propelled, in large part, by the belief that those companies would eventually be regulated. Whatever modest progress had been made in getting climate policy on the books these last few years is, for now, stalled. Engaging in multi-stakeholder processes can still have material and reputational benefits for major polluters. But accounting for emissions does not necessarily mean reducing them. Generally only states can force that kind of change, and the credible threat of regulation is essential for voluntary initiatives like the GHG Protocol. At a time when it’s easier than ever for companies to abandon their climate commitments—and to stop funding green nonprofits—GHG Protocol secretariat staff may be understandably anxious to keep industry on side. Faced with the prospect of these hotly contested accounting methods being drafted into law, well-meaning environmentalists may have to decide between keeping corporate stakeholders engaged and happy, and maintaining scientific integrity.
* A previous version of this article misstated Nathan Truitt’s affiliation.