Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to ensure that the Woodland Carbon Code and Peatland Carbon Code are certified under the Integrity Council on Voluntary Carbon Market's Core Carbon Principles.

The Woodland Carbon Code is currently endorsed by ICROA, a leading industry accreditation programme for voluntary carbon market programmes. The Code is supported by a transparent carbon registry and a robust monitoring, reporting and verification system underpinned by third party validation and verification. The Woodland Carbon Code is preparing an application to be assessed for adherence to the Core Carbon Principles Assessment Framework of Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market and will submit as soon as it can.

The Peatland Code is currently in the process of applying to the Integrity Council on Voluntary Carbon Market's Core Carbon Principles. The Peatland Code also applied to ICROA in March this year. The Peatland Code is awaiting conditional endorsement once the first two verifications have been completed this winter. The Peatland Code (PC) validation and verification bodies (VVBs) are undergoing ISO accreditation under the PC by United Kingdom Accreditation Services (UKAS) which is one of the requirements for ICVCM and ICROA.