African REDD+ developer to offer social measurement tool
Quantum Commodity Intelligence – Africa-based REDD+ developer Level, the owner of Carbon Tanzania, has developed a new framework to better document the social impacts of carbon projects and monetise them through the voluntary carbon market (VCM), it said on Wednesday.
The developer has tested the methodology on a REDD+ project in Yaeda Valley and said it was able to measure the net present value of the social outcomes generated over the past six years at $8.6 million, or $25 for every $1 invested.
The data collection process took place between April and July 2023, and consisted of three focus-group discussions involving 45 people each who provided "qualitative depth and contextual understanding of the social impact", said Level.
The tool can be rolled out to other projects, it said, and would help build confidence in the VCM, which has been rocked by accusations of doing too little to help local communities even as prices rose to record highs in 2021 and 2022.
"Investors are demanding greater clarity and greater transparency on what are the impacts...We feel that this is one way of answering that from the commercial side," said Carbon Tanzania co-founder Jo Anderson.
"We are so far past being able to put a big fence around the forest and say that's conservation," Anderson said.
Kate McAlpine, a social scientist at ConnectGo, a platform that measures the 'S' in ESG, helped devise the approach, which will soon become a standalone product offered by Level.
The 'mixed methods' approach, which is described by McAlpine as being "very prescriptive", involves asking community members what they were able to achieve with the money from carbon credits in order to quantify their impact.
For example, in Mongo wa Mono village, some of the carbon revenue was channelled into building a dispensary and employing two doctors, which contributed to an uptick "in childhood vaccinations, fewer fevers, and prompt preventative treatments", according to Level, which said it used a conservative estimate of the impact.
"The value derived, $94,722, has been valued based on transport savings of $277 per household annually, given the reduced need to travel to the old clinic," it said.
Ideal scenario
McAlpine said that, while the study on Yaeda Valley REDD+ was conducted after the scheme had started, a better approach in future would be to define the "social baseline" of a project from the start, like what is done on the forest carbon side.
"The ideal scenario is that you do a social value forecast at the design phase," she said.
"And that would involve working with key stakeholders right at the outset to say if you're going to get injections of cash from protecting the forests, what do you consider to be the investments that you want to make and what changes do you envisage from those assets?"
"So you have a forecast and then you actually keep annual social value accounts alongside your financials and you track then the actual versus the forecast."
Standards such as Verra have developed certifications including the Climate, Community & Biodiversity (CCB) to verify a project's social benefits, however, developers said such metrics could be improved further in future.
Last year, Forest Trends, Wildlife Works and Everland announced the Equitable Earth Coalition to better include Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) and countries in the Global South in carbon crediting frameworks.
McAlpine said that the way projects talk about their social benefits "feel like a platitude so often", but that it needn't be the case in future.
"The building sector has embedded safety procedures and environmental or social impact requirements that have to be met to make a building safe," said Jo Anderson.
"You would hope that the standards start to essentially say, well any project has to choose from maybe a selection of different tools a way of continuing to account for social value," he concluded.
Level and its sister unit Carbon Tanzania have committed to use the approach in all future nature-based projects.