RCC management, avoiding over crediting
Discount factor
The Riverse Certification team may eliminate a fraction of a project’s estimated RCCs using the uncertainty discount factor to mitigate carbon credit overestimation. These verified avoided/removed emissions are never issued as RCCs.
Application of a discount factor may occur when material uncertainty is identified, for example, in the project’s measured data, assumptions, or the selection of the baseline scenario.
When faced with high uncertainty, steps should be taken to reduce uncertainty, and conservative choices should be made. If uncertainty remains, a discount factor shall be applied. Requirements are described in the Uncertainty Assessment section of the Riverse Standard Rules.
RCCs that are eliminated with the discount factor are not issued and will not appear on the registry. This discount factor may vary from 0% to more than 10% of estimated RCCs. The amount is evaluated individually for each project.
Buffer pool
All projects that issue removal RCCs must allocate a portion of their verified removal RCCs to the buffer pool. This pool acts as an insurance mechanism, shared across all removal projects, against the risk of reversal of sequestered carbon before the agreed upon commitment period (at least 100 years, for removal RCCs). This may occur due to, for example, natural disaster (fires, drought, pests) or project mismanagement. These RCCs cannot be retired by buyers.
The buffer pool is supplied with RCCs via two paths:
Default: Each removal project allocates by default at least 3% of its verified removal RCCs to the buffer pool.
Conditional: If the project has high or very high risks of reversal (according to the project evaluation’s Risk Assessment Template), the Project Developer may choose to develop a risk mitigation plan, or contribute an extra 3% of their verified RCCs to the buffer pool. More details are available in the Riverse Standard Rules section on Risk Assessment.
RCCs are withdrawn from the buffer pool if there is a reversal event (see details in the Cancelation section).
Under- / Overachievement
As a result of the verification phase, provisional credits either are issued as verified RCCs or are canceled.
Upon verification, three situations are possible: exact estimation, overestimation and under-estimation. Below is an example for 100 estimated provisional removal credits. Note that the actual portion of RCCs going to the buffer pool may vary by project.
Issuance
The issuance of RCCs is operated by the Certification team once the Annual monitoring & verification is fully conducted and all audit certificates are available.
The name of the Riverse Registry operator, from the Certification team, who operates the issuance is registered in the process.
When removal RCCs are issued, a contribution will automatically be transferred from Project accounts to the Riverse Buffer Pool account. The amount of removal credits to be added to the buffer pool is defined for each project, and displayed on the project page on the registry. The contribution shall equal the percentage confirmed during project validation, and shall be rounded up to the nearest whole RCC (3% by default).
Cancelation
Canceling provisional credits
Provisional credits may be canceled on the registry for several reasons:
lack of measurement source for a KII
change in KII or overall process, so that the project no longer avoids/removes carbon as expected
change in external factors causing the project to lose its additional status (i.e. change in regulation that makes the project activities required)
If pre-purchase agreements were made between buyers and PDs, the buffer pool will not be used to replace canceled provisional credits.
Canceling removal credits due to reversals
Riverse Certification team shall cancel RCCs from the buffer pool of a similar type as the removal RCCs that were reversed.
Canceling credits due to erroneous issuance
Verified RCCs may be deemed erroneously issued due to, for example, calculation errors, use of wrong input data, or inaccurate proof. While the comprehensive audit process renders this highly unlikely, a procedure is prepared out of an abundance of caution.
Erroneous issuance may be signaled by the PD, the VBB, the Riverse Certification team, or any stakeholder. The Riverse Certification team shall investigate the incident, determine the number of excess credits issued, and take the following remediating action:
Credits not yet transferred: an amount of credits corresponding to the number of excess credits issued for the given project's crediting pool shall be frozen during the investigation, and canceled.
Credits already transferred or retired: the above procedure shall be applied, and an equivalent amount of excess credits will be transferred to the credit user at no cost from the project's next verification and issuance. If no additional credits are available, Riverse will work with the credit user on a case-by-case basis to agree upon compensation, with Riverse taking financial responsibility to ensure the credit user incurs no loss.
An Cancelation Report will be generated and attached to the cancelation event in the Registry that states the amount of excess credits erroneously issued and the remediating action.
Retirement
To retire RCCs, the user must log in with their username and password to the Riverse Registry and click on the option “retirement”. There they must enter the following information:
Project name and registry ID from which RCCs are to be removed
Vintage year
Number of RCCs to be retired
Reason for retirement: voluntary offset, carbon tax, or another specific offset scheme
End-user information: country of location, name, document type, and document number
Taxpayer information, if applicable: country of location, name, document type, and document number
A retirement certificate can be downloaded from the Riverse Registry. Additionally, all retirement transactions are publicly available on the registry (see example here).
Once retired, RCCs can not be transacted, retired or canceled.
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