Toby Janson-Smith

As Chief Program Development and Innovation Officer, Toby leads the team responsible for the evolution of Verra’s existing programs to maintain their integrity and impact, and for developing new standards, methodologies, and tools to scale up climate action and sustainable development.

Over the past two decades, Toby has been responsible for establishing several ground-breaking standards initiatives. He led the creation of the original VCS framework covering Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU), which has become the foremost global carbon accounting standard for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), being used by hundreds of projects worldwide.

Previously, Toby ran Conservation International’s (CI) Climate and Land Use, Markets and Policy program, after directing the Climate, Community & Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA), a partnership comprising The Nature Conservancy, CI, Rainforest Alliance, Wildlife Conservation Society and CARE International. CCBA created the leading social and environmental standards for forest carbon projects and government programs.

On the forest carbon policy front, Toby has developed legislative proposals adopted within various U.S. climate bills and has helped establish bilateral agreements between leading U.S., Brazilian, Indonesian and Mexican states. He also served on the REDD Offsets Working Group, providing recommendations to the California Air Resources Board on how tropical forests could be brought into the state’s cap-and-trade scheme, and has been an adviser to the Carbon Fund of the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility.