Enabling community-based forest conservation in Africa

Conservation Need

 

Expanding population in Tanzania has led growing numbers of immigrant farmers to convert forests to agricultural land to grow crops and raise livestock. 

Deforestation is a threat to the world’s climate, to the long-term health of these forest ecosystems that provide food and water to communities, and to the extensive and diverse wildlife community, including chimpanzees, that live in these areas.

 

Carbon Opportunity

 

Carbon Tanzania is a social enterprise that works with communities to develop land use plans that protect forests while increasing livelihoods.

Its model is to access carbon markets to fund the protection of at-risk forests, including the 100,000+ hectares of forest in the Makame Savannah and 200,000+ hectares of forests in the Ntakata Mountains.

TerraCarbon Solution

 

TerraCarbon designed and prepared the analysis and documentation to register the Makame and Ntakata projects with the Verified Carbon Standard, including design and training for Village Game Scouts (VGS) to perform forest inventory and remote sensing analysis to estimate deforestation in the baseline and with project scenarios.

TerraCarbon also prepared the documents and supporting analysis to register the projects with the Climate Community and Biodiversity Standard to further demonstrate the positive community and biodiversity benefits of the projects. For the Ntakata project, TerraCarbon collaborated with other partners to design an innovative approach to combine deforestation models with species distribution maps to improve measures of the benefits of protection for chimpanzee habitat. Read the published paper.

Conservation Results

 

TerraCarbon is providing ongoing support for the Makame and Ntakata projects, preparing annual monitoring reports that calculate the climate benefits of protection and support additional issuances of carbon offsets to fund conservation activities.

The Ntakata project has generated more than 1.2 million tons of emission reductions through 2020 and disbursed more nearly $750,000 in payments to eight village communities.

The Makame project has generated more than 150,000 tons of emission reductions through 2020 and disbursed more than $300,000 in payments to five village communities.

Read a related article about the IUCN and UNDP Pathfinder Award for the Ntakata Mountains project.

 

Services | Design & Monitoring