Shoreline Washington Forest Carbon Offsets

Audit Analysis

The Ballinger Open Space Restoration project (Shoreline, WA) is a CFC urban forestry credit with a verified combined additionality test, a 5% buffer pool, and a jurisdictional baseline. The project is outperforming its linear pro-rata sequestration expectation, but leakage is unquantified, reversal risk is only partially addressed, and several MRV parameters (FNRB, usage monitoring) are absent from the record. Documentation is reasonably complete and recent, though extraction confidence is only medium.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Leakage deduction is not quantified or justified in any available document, which is a gap for an urban tree-planting project where displacement of planting to other sites is plausible.
• ⚠Reversal events are marked as 'not addressed' in the extracted record; the 5% buffer pool provides some protection but the absence of an explicit reversal-risk analysis is a weakness.
• ⚠Baseline method is contradictory between the verification report (jurisdictional, 2021) and the PDD (project-specific, 2024), creating uncertainty about which baseline actually governs credit issuance.
• ⚠The 2021 verification report initially claimed 2,847 tCO₂e, which was later revised down to 865 tCO₂e in the 2025 report following plot adjustments and tree miscounts — a 70% reduction that, while resolved, signals initial quantification imprecision.

Credit Vintages