JPMorganChase has bought more than 85,000 tonnes of improved forest management credits from Anew Climate and Aurora Sustainable Lands, issued under the American Carbon Registry’s new dynamic baseline methodology. The purchase is one of the first large corporate commitments to credits generated under ACR’s updated rules, which try to fix a long-standing credibility problem in forest carbon accounting.
Why this matters
Improved forest management, or IFM, has been the most-criticized category in the voluntary carbon market. Older methodologies let project developers set static baselines that often assumed aggressive future logging, inflating the “avoided” emissions from leaving trees standing. A dynamic baseline refreshes the counterfactual over time using regional data on what similar unprotected forests are actually doing. If nearby forests are not being cut at the rate the project claimed, the crediting drops. For a buyer like JPMorganChase, the appeal is simple. Dynamic baselines reduce the risk that the tonnes you paid for never represented real additional carbon. For the forest carbon category as a whole, a major bank signing a deal at this scale is a signal that institutional buyers are willing to pay for methodology upgrades rather than walk away from forests entirely.
The details
The 85,000+ tonnes were issued by Anew Climate, a project developer and carbon market services firm, together with Aurora Sustainable Lands, which manages roughly 1.7 million acres of US timberland acquired to be operated for long-term carbon and ecological value rather than maximum harvest. Aurora’s portfolio is one of the larger consolidated forest carbon plays in the country, which is part of why its credits are showing up in corporate deals of this size. ACR’s dynamic baseline methodology, finalized earlier in 2024, is part of a broader reset across registries. Verra, Gold Standard, and ACR have all been moving IFM and avoided deforestation rules toward jurisdictional or regional reference levels that update on a schedule. The idea is to stop rewarding projects for beating a baseline that was never realistic in the first place. JPMorganChase has been one of the more active corporate buyers in the CDR market, including deals across direct air capture, biochar, and nature-based removals. Forest credits remain the cheapest tonnes available at volume, which is why large buyers keep returning to the category even after years of criticism.
Implications
If dynamic baseline credits start trading at a meaningful premium to legacy IFM credits, developers will have a financial reason to re-issue projects under the new rules or retire old vintages. That is the market mechanism that actually cleans up a methodology. Registry updates alone do not do it. Buyer preference does. The deal also reinforces a split that is getting harder to ignore in corporate carbon portfolios. Engineered removals like DAC and mineralization still cost hundreds of dollars per tonne. Forest credits, even premium ones, cost a small fraction of that. Buyers with net-zero commitments in the hundreds of thousands of tonnes per year cannot get there on engineered removals alone at current prices. They need forest tonnes that they can defend publicly. Dynamic baselines are one of the few credible answers. For Anew and Aurora, the transaction validates a business model built around owning or controlling the land and running the carbon program on rules that will hold up to scrutiny. It is a different model than the early-2010s wave of IFM projects that layered credits on top of existing timber operations.
Caveats
A few things this announcement does not prove. First, dynamic baselines are better than static ones, but they are not perfect. The quality depends on how the reference region is drawn, how often the baseline refreshes, and whether leakage (logging shifting to other forests) is properly tracked. Independent analysis of ACR’s specific implementation is still thin. Second, IFM credits are avoidance-leaning removals. They reflect a mix of carbon that stays in trees because harvest is reduced and carbon that gets sequestered as trees grow. For buyers trying to match hard-to-abate residual emissions with durable removals, forest tonnes carry reversal risk from fire, pests, and future management changes that DAC tonnes do not. The durability gap is real regardless of how good the baseline is. Third, the 85,000-tonne figure is the issuance, not necessarily the retirement. How JPMorganChase applies these credits against its own emissions, and over what timeframe, shapes what the purchase actually means for its climate claims. Finally, forest carbon is not a substitute for cutting fossil emissions. It is a tool for addressing residual emissions from sectors that genuinely cannot decarbonize on the needed timeline. A bank financing oil and gas expansion while buying forest credits is doing two separate things, and the credits do not cancel the financing. That distinction matters for how this deal gets read. The short version: a real buyer, a real methodology upgrade, a real volume. Worth watching whether the rest of the market follows.
Source: Carbon Herald