A new global standard recently launched will put in place a robust assessment scheme for ensuring agriculture and forestry protection projects are environmentally sustainable and credible providers of carbon offsets. Projects to tackle deforestation and reduce the carbon impact of agricultural practices can now be verified against the new Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS) and issue credits that can be sold on the global carbon market.

David Antonioli, chief executive of the VCS Association (VCSA) said the new standard will help boost investment in forestry projects, which in the past have been criticised for struggling to adequately demonstrate whether the carbon offsets they sell relate to real emission reductions.

'The new VCS rules will drive much needed investment into protecting the world’s threatened forests as a means to stabilise our global climate,' he said.

Experts hope the move means that developing nations will eventually be able to make more money from protecting forests and land than they can from clearing forests for agriculture and timber.

Agriculture and forestry practices together account for about a third of all global greenhouse gas emissions, and improving their sustainability is seen as vital to slowing climate change.

Until now most projects to improve their sustianability have been excluded from international carbon markets because of concerns over the extent to which emission reductions can be accurately measured.

For example, critics have claimed that offset credits issued on the assumption that trees planted as part of an afforestation scheme will last 100 years have no way of absolutely guaranteeing those trees will survive. They have also argued that it is difficult to prove that tracts of forest would not have survived regardless of the funding generated by selling offset credits.