Toby Janson-Smith
Chief Program Development and Innovation Officer
As Chief Program Development and Innovation Officer, Toby leads the team responsible for the evolution of Verra’s existing programs to maintain their integrity and impact, and for developing new standards, methodologies, and tools to scale up climate action and sustainable development.
Toby has established ground-breaking standards initiatives, including the Sustainable Development Verified Impact Standard (SD VISta) for assessing and rewarding projects that generate verifiable SD benefits, LandScale for incentivizing the sustainable production of agricultural commodities, and the Plastic Waste Reduction Standard for crediting plastic waste recovery and recycling efforts globally.
More than fifteen years ago, Toby conceived of and led the creation of the original VCS framework covering Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU), the world’s preeminent natural climate solutions (NCS) crediting program, which has driven billions of dollars into reducing emissions from deforestation (REDD), afforestation/reforestation, sustainable agricultural land management, and blue carbon.
Previously, Toby headed up Conservation International’s (CI) Climate and Land Use, Markets and Policy program after directing the Climate, Community & Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA), a partnership comprising The Nature Conservancy, CI, Rainforest Alliance, Wildlife Conservation Society, CARE International, BP, Weyerhauser, and SC Johnson.
On the forest carbon policy front, Toby has developed legislative proposals adopted within various US climate bills and helped establish bilateral agreements between US, Brazilian, Indonesian and Mexican states. He was appointed to the REDD Offsets Working Group, providing policy recommendations to California Air Resources Board, and served as an adviser to the Carbon Fund of the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility.
Toby holds a BS degree from the University of London and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Michigan. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and two sons.