From single farms to nations: is there an optimal scale for robust and viable schemes?

A centralised European carbon farming certification framework can provide greater clarity for funders, reduce transaction costs and ensure the same level of requirements for everyone. Conversely, a decentralised approach can be better tailored to local circumstances and easier to use for local operators. This Focus Group of the Credible project focuses on sharing experiences from stakeholders involved in international, national, and local certification frameworks, to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the different scales of governance and predict potential interaction of overlapping schemes at different levels, bottlenecks and barriers. Through consultations of experts involved in the certification of carbon credits in agriculture, forestry and peatlands (project developers, existing standards, auditors, etc.), this Focus Group supports the development of recommendations to better shape the governance of the future CRCF.