Gordon Smith, Senior Fellow

Gordon Smith, Ph.D. supports the Institute’s international capacity building work on forestry and especially REDD issues. He has worked on GHG mitigation since 1994, addressing forest carbon sequestration, avoided forest emissions (REDD+), soil carbon, manure management, fertilizer nitrous oxide, and soil methane.

Dr. Smith works on the entire spectrum of mitigation, including modeling likely emission benefits of project and programmatic activities, policy analysis for governments, standard and methodology development for offset registries, project development, project and methodology validation and verification, and verifier accreditation. He is an expert in biomass carbon sampling efficiency and designing sampling systems to meet precision goals. Other topics of expertise include leakage quantification and baseline determination.

As a leading GHG professional, he is an editorial board member of the journal Greenhouse Gas Measurement & Management, is a member of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute advisory committee and professional standards committee, is a VCS expert in afforestation/deforestation, improved forest management, avoided deforestation (REDD), and agricultural land management, and is a member of the ACR AFOLU Technical Committee.

Dr. Smith has numerous technical and scholarly publications to his credit, including being the first technical author of a book of guidelines for quantifying terrestrial greenhouse gas emission offsets published by the Nicholas Institute of Duke University. He is currently the Chairman of Seattle Mountain Rescue.