The Republics of Honduras and Suriname have signed a Letter of Intent (LoI) with Deutsche Bank, Bayer, Siemens, Symrise, and the Coalition for Rainforest Nations (CfRN) to pilot the issuance of high-integrity, rainforest-based carbon credits under Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement. 

This partnership aims to pioneer a sovereign asset class of Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs) based on national-level conservation of standing rainforests. This approach is novel in the international carbon market, which often focuses on credits derived from reforestation or afforestation projects. Deutsche Bank is mandated to arrange the potential sale, with Bayer, Siemens, and Symrise acting as prospective buyers.

Honduras and Suriname are leveraging their extensive rainforests to meet their Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) targets. Honduras is home to UNESCO’s World Heritage Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, which spans across 350,000 hectares and supports more than 2,000 indigenous people. Suriname has the highest forest cover in the world, with approximately 93% of its land covered by tropical forests, sequestering more than 900 million metric tons of carbon.

High-integrity carbon markets hold immense potential as a building block for advancing national economic resilience, social equity, climate action, and biodiversity prosperity, while unlocking new streams of capital for countries facing the deepest climate funding gaps and the greatest climate vulnerability. Specifically, this could provide governments with additional revenue lines in exchange for emissions reductions from nature-based solutions, mitigation, and resilience projects and programs. 

Developing high-integrity carbon credits, such as the intended rainforest-based carbon credits, however, requires participatory and equitable institutional and implementation arrangements. This includes strong social and cultural safeguards for indigenous communities and forest-dependent tribes, ensuring fair benefit sharing for these people. The parties to this new agreement acknowledged this and committed to implement transparent tracking and auditing of implementation processes guided by the existing market standards and best practices.