The Philippines has adopted a 2026-2030 roadmap for its voluntary forest carbon market, aiming to turn forest protection and reforestation into a reliable source of climate finance. The move follows an updated NDC that keeps a 75% emissions reduction and avoidance target for 2025-2035 and now includes forestry and other land use. Government modelling says FOLU policies could cut cumulative emissions by about 2.3 billion tonnes of CO2e versus business as usual. The roadmap sets up policy, monitoring, and registry systems, including a DENR Forest Carbon Credit Database tied to the national Article 6 registry. Roughly 7.23 million hectares of forest remain, about 24% of the country. Early supply is thin: no nationally issued credits yet, two Verra-registered projects, and four more in the pipeline. The bigger hurdles are carbon rights, tenure, and benefit sharing. If the Philippines can deliver transparent benefit sharing and credible monitoring, its forest carbon credits could compete in ASEAN markets. The new NDC depends on international support, and carbon finance is one channel for that support. The real test is whether the infrastructure and safeguards scale fast enough to match the target.
