By Reuters Point Carbon

Chile’s government will set a platform to generate and trade voluntary carbon credits from the forestry sector, the head of the country’s forest service said on Tuesday while announcing an agreement with carbon standards company VCS.

Chile’s National Forestry Corporation (Conaf) will partner Verified Carbon Standards (VCS) in a program to harmonize rules and boost production of forestry projects that sequestrate carbon. The platform would then trade the future credits.

“One of our obligations at the government level is to develop projects in the forestry sector that allow our forests to increase their ability to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions,” said Conaf’s executive director Eduardo Vial Ruiz-Tagle in a joint statement with VCS.

“To achieve this, we are working on a ‘Platform for the Generation and Trading of Carbon Credits from the Forestry Sector in Chile’ (PBCCh). The agreement with VCS is an important advancement for this, as it allows us to harmonize the criteria of these projects with an international standard,” he said.

VCS says this is the first time a national government links up with a carbon standard entity to combat forestry emissions on a countrywide level.

“This landmark agreement will allow activities at both national and project scales to ensure robust jurisdictional accounting while incentivizing private sector action,” said VCS chief executive officer David Antonioli in the statement.

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