Afforestation, Reforestation, and Revegetation (ARR) projects focus on establishing new forests or restoring degraded land by planting trees and implementing soil conservation practices.
What are the three main components?
By increasing forest cover, ARR projects enhance carbon sequestration, improve soil health, and promote ecosystem resilience. These projects often involve community engagement, land-use planning, and monitoring to ensure the successful establishment and long-term sustainability of the forested areas.
For more information on the two kinds of climate contribution projects and how they can be divided into seven categories, please read our blog: How to Select Climate Contribution Projects.
ARR sequesters carbon in the tree’s biomass. ARR provides several notable benefits:
Not only can afforestation and reforestation projects promote carbon sequestration goals, but they can also help forests by enhancing landscape connectivity, and reducing fragmentation. Additionally, afforestation and reforestation can:
Protect natural resources, and regulate water flow through the forest’s hydrological-related ecosystem services, storm flow regulation and erosion control.
The large-scale implementation of ARR requires the recruitment of landowners to implement forestry practices on their land. This can be time-consuming, expensive, and difficult in terms of physical labor.
The forest design must consider biodiversity and water yield aspects to ensure spatial alignment and effective planning of its components.
Some of the current methodologies used in the VCM can be found below:
CDM
Gold Standard
ACR
CAR
Verra
As of May 2023, a large number of projects, 290, are registered under Verra, Gold Standard with 47 has the second largest number of projects, CAR and ACR stand with 14 and 11 projects, respectively. The total number of credits issued is almost 60 million, most of them concentrated in South America, with Uruguay as the main reference, and East Asia, with China as the main promoter of this type of projects. In the South American country, reforestation and afforestation with eminently productive objectives predominate, while in China there is a greater diversity of objectives in these actions, with projects with both productive and protection objectives.
This project works with small groups of farmers to plant millions of trees and develop local sustainable activities. This project is proven to have improved firewood management as well as agriculture and livestock management. It also offers training in HIV/AIDS and malaria prevention, addresses indoor pollution, promotes gender equality, and provides steady revenue to local farmers for their sustainable practices.
The project has over 11.7 million live counted trees and has sequestrated 3.9 million tCO2e. The exceptional community benefits amount to an average of $1,400 from carbon payments to each member per year.
Other KPIs:
At ClimateSeed, we offer both removal and avoidance projects in our portfolio. We have dedicated experts that ensure projects are of the highest quality, and have passed our robust three-level verification process. Our unique approach maximizes your positive environmental and social impacts, and offers risk mitigation backed by top-tier financial expertise.
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