The Permanence Trust
An innovative approach to tackling risk in carbon crediting
The Permanence Problem
Natural climate solutions (NCS) are an essential tool in mitigating climate change and protecting the health of our planet, but they are often questioned for the credibility of their impact claims. A critical aspect of high integrity NCS projects in the voluntary carbon market is the ability to ensure that the credits they produce are permanent, meaning that emissions that these credits are meant to offset can capture and store those emissions permanently.
To date, there is no universal approach to addressing non-permanence risk in carbon projects. Existing efforts like emissions liability management, buffer pools, and tonne-year accounting have made significant progress in increasing the credibility of projects, but none of them provide a complete set of solutions that address the complexity of the problem.
The Permanence Trust: A Solution for Nature
The American Forest Foundation has created an innovative new approach that aims to fill all the core functionalities necessary for permanence: The Permanence Trust. This approach frames non-permanence as a risk to be managed, strengthens market-wide definitions and risk management strategies, and provides a framework that allows NCS credits and other carbon credit types (like geologic storage) to be managed together, increasing overall market confidence and credibility.
Read AFF's full concept paper on the Permanence Trust here
What Makes the Permanence Trust Different?
The Trust pools both collective risk and resources, increasing access for participation across all project types and sizes.
The Trust provides resources to invest in innovation within the carbon market, and manages actions to reverse the storage of existing climate benefit
The Trust’s operations incorporate financial support of long-term monitoring systems
Instead of trying to predict the future of reversals, the Trust instead ensures that any reversal is replaced by another temporary credit, addresses interim gaps through insurance, and ultimately retires liability by purchasing a removal credit backed by geologic storage.
The Trust provides a framework for comparing carbon credit types across the market, operationally unifies definitions and measurement methods for permanence, and ensures NCS credits deliver the same durability as other permanent credit types such as geologic storage.
Fees generated through carbon credit sales are pooled together and grown both through and after the Credit Liability Period, generating long-term funds that can be reinvested in monitoring, risk reduction, and replacement of carbon storage when needed.
The Trust shift permanence assurance from a passive approach of holding reserves that may or may not cover future reversals to an active strategy that funds prevention, monitoring, and replacement of future reversals to ensure long-term durability of carbon.
Putting the Trust to Work: Feasibility Study
While the Permanence Trust is promising as a concept, it remains only theory until practically applied. That's why AFF has partnered with carbon insurance specialist Kita to conduct a feasibility study. The study will include framework development, stakeholder engagement, and risk modeling for the Trust. This will involve entity structure and design, financial planning, reversal risk assessments, carbon portfolio management, and mapping loss recourse options.
The study will be supervised by an Advisory Group of experts across the climate, carbon, and conservation spaces to gather valuable and diverse input into the assessment framework. Advisory group members will contribute expertise through focused working groups on topics such as governance, capitalization, reversal definitions, and long-term monitoring.
Interested in getting involved? Contact us
Resources
September 17, 2025
Carbon Market Stakeholders Launch Feasibility Study, Advisory Group on New Permanence Framework
The American Forest Foundation announced today the launch of their partnership with carbon insurance specialist Kita to conduct a design and feasibility study for a new system-wide approach to addressing permanence for carbon markets.
September 5, 2025
What is the Permanence Trust? A Look at a New Solution for Nature
The American Forest Foundation has created an innovative new approach that aims to fill all the core functionalities necessary for permanence: The Permanence Trust. This approach frames non-permanence as a risk to be managed, strengthens market-wide definitions and risk management strategies, and provides a framework that allows NCS credits and other carbon credit types (like geologic storage) to be managed together, increasing overall market confidence and credibility.
May 28, 2025
New Report Details Innovative Approach to Permanence for Natural Climate Solutions
The American Forest Foundation released today “A Trust for Permanence: Enabling a New Generation of Permanent Nature-Based Credits in the Voluntary Carbon Market,” a new concept paper that details an innovative approach to ensuring the quality and integrity of credits produced through natural climate solutions (NCS).
November 12, 2024
New White Paper Sets Bar for Quality in Forest Carbon Projects
This week, the American Forest Foundation, a nonprofit organization that empowers family forest owners to create meaningful conservation impact, released its latest white paper, “Catalyzing Forest Carbon Project Quality: Addressing Issues of Integrity in Improved Forest Management Carbon Projects." The paper discusses the common challenges that IFM projects face in the voluntary carbon market and details four key elements the Family Forest Carbon Program (FFCP) focuses on to ensure high quality: additionality, permanence, leakage, and social integrity.