Climate solutions
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Precision Development: Climate change mitigation through nature based solutions
In a nutshell
| Location | India, East Africa |
|---|---|
| Sustainable Development Goal | Climate Action |
Project timeline
"Project is 100% completed "
The challenge
The effects of climate changes - erratic rainfall, rising temperatures, and extreme weather events like prolonged droughts - are rendering the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in the Global South more precarious than ever. There is a substantial need to increase financing of effective interventions for these communities to support sustainable development goals.
The voluntary carbon market (VCM), which facilitates the offsetting of unavoidable emissions by carbon emitters through purchases of carbon removals or reductions, has high potential to funnel financing to communities in the Global South who need it most. The VCM is estimated to reach more than USD 50 billion by 2030 (McKinsey, 2021) and presents a unique opportunity to directly improve livelihoods by paying smallholder farmers for their environmental services as well as catalyze a sustainable agriculture transformation by motivating regenerative agricultural practice adoption.
However, as currently structured, voluntary carbon credit markets are not conducive for high integrity projects involving local and indigenous communities like smallholder farmers. There is a substantial lack of guidance in project design for credible and equitable smallholder farmer participation, ranging from evidence-backed behavior change programming to equitable payment structures to measuring, reporting, and verifying climate impacts.
The approach
Precision Development will develop a carbon credit standard for agriculture-based carbon projects in the Global South which provides requirements for transparent project design, especially with respect to how the project works with local and indigenous communities for project activities. Current standards for carbon credit projects leveraging agricultural land clearly outline requirements projects need to fulfill from a carbon removal perspective, but there is not much discussion of how projects should work with the ultimate implementers, often local and indigenous communities like smallholder farmers, to design and conduct activities. Developing ways to engage local and indigenous communities as equal stakeholders in carbon credit projects, in addition to scaling accurate carbon measurement, will not only support those who are most vulnerable to climate change but also bolster the integrity of agriculture-based carbon credit projects and ensure the large amounts of financing flowing through voluntary carbon credit markets are a real investment in climate change mitigation.
Goals and expected impact
Precision Development’s overall project goal is to advance the distributional justice of voluntary carbon credit markets in the Global South by facilitating credible, equitable, and transparent involvement of local and indigenous communities, like smallholder farmers, in carbon credit projects. As proof of demonstration, there will be three key outputs:
1) Create a smallholder farmer engagement standard for voluntary carbon credit projects leveraging agricultural land in the Global South and work with standard bodies/registries to incorporate this standard into credit issuance requirements.
2) Publish a knowledge product, as a public good, on the learnings for how to engage with smallholder farmers in voluntary carbon credit projects.
3) Support a group of 20 000 farmers to get access to carbon credits roughly estimated at the equivalent of USD 3.7m for 550'000 tCO2 emissions.
References
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