Restoration projects remove carbon from the atmosphere. Protection projects prevent carbon from being released. Both generate credits, and the market increasingly treats them as different products with different prices and different evidentiary burdens.
The Structural Differences
| ARR (restoration) | REDD+ (protection) | |
|---|---|---|
| Credit type | Removal | Avoidance |
| Baseline | Land stays degraded | Forest is lost at some rate |
| Evidence burden | Growth must be measured | Loss must be credibly projected |
| Timing | Slow — carbon accrues with growth | Immediate — credits from year one |
| Market premium | Generally higher | Generally lower, and under more scrutiny |
The timing difference drives project finance. An ARR project invests for years before meaningful issuance; a REDD+ project can issue from early monitoring periods. That makes REDD+ attractive and also explains why its baselines attract far more scrutiny, given that the credits exist because of a counterfactual claim rather than an observed gain.
Where Each One Is Contested
ARR's weak point is permanence and additionality. Planted trees can be harvested, burn, or die. And where restoration is already legally required or commercially viable, additionality is difficult.
REDD+'s weak point is the baseline. Published criticism of forest carbon has concentrated almost entirely here, and the shift toward jurisdictional risk allocation is the programmatic response.
Neither weakness is disqualifying. Both determine where a project should concentrate its evidence.
Measurement Differs Too
ARR measures accumulation, which means repeated measurement of permanent plots and careful attention to growth-model error. The signal grows over time, so early monitoring periods have the least favourable signal-to-noise ratio.
REDD+ measures avoided loss, which means the project's own stock must be measured accurately and the baseline must hold. Much of the work sits outside the project boundary, specifically in leakage belts and in the jurisdictional data underlying the baseline.
Projects running both activity types on one landscape need to keep the accounting separate, because mixing removal and avoidance credits without clear attribution is a finding waiting to happen.
Check the land before you commit
Eligibility turns on land history and forest cover at a cut-off date. TREEO Eligibility runs satellite-based forest cover detection on your area of interest, before a single seed goes into the ground.
