Carbon Projects

Our Global Carbon Project Portfolio

Eleven community-led carbon projects. Choose the one your organisation should stand behind.

Every project below is run by the people who live on the land. Each one is certified under Plan Vivo, monitored over years rather than months, and returns a guaranteed minimum share of the money to the community doing the work. We have supported many of them since they started.

Projects differ in four ways that matter to a buyer: whether they remove carbon or protect carbon already stored, what they physically do to the land, where they are, and whether certificates are available now. This page explains all four so you can shortlist before you talk to us. If you want the wider thinking behind the portfolio, read how we choose and build regenerative projects. New to this? Our guide to carbon offsetting for business explains what a credit really pays for and how to judge one before you buy.

Removal or protection

The first filter: which kind of carbon benefit do you need?

Carbon projects have always worked in two ways, and they are not interchangeable. Being clear about which you are funding is the difference between a claim you can defend and one you cannot.

Removal projects take carbon out of the air

Removals draw carbon dioxide down out of the atmosphere and hold it in living systems — in trees, in soil, in mangrove mud. Growing forests, restoring degraded woodland, rebuilding soil fertility through agroforestry and replanting mangroves and seagrass all remove carbon. Most of the projects in our portfolio do this. We call them Restore projects.

Protection projects keep stored carbon where it is

Protection projects stop carbon that is already locked in a forest or a soil from being released. The Hadza project in Tanzania protects East African forest and reduces the emissions that deforestation and degradation would have caused. This is avoidance, not removal. It is real and it is urgent, because carbon that is never released does not have to be recaptured. We call these Protect projects.

Which you should fund depends on what you are saying about it. If you plan to describe your action as balancing emissions you have already made, removals are the stronger and more defensible choice, and buyers are increasingly held to that distinction. If your aim is to protect standing ecosystems and the communities in them, protection projects do work that removals cannot. Many organisations fund both. Neither replaces cutting your own emissions first, and we will say so before we sell you anything.

Mechanism and place

The second filter: what the project actually does, and where

“Nature-based” covers work that has very little in common on the ground. These are the five kinds of intervention in the portfolio.

Agroforestry — trees grown into farmland

Smallholder farmers plant and tend trees among their crops. Soil recovers, yields become more reliable, and carbon accumulates over decades. This is the backbone of the portfolio. CommuniTree in Nicaragua, Trees for Global Benefits in Uganda and Kukumuty in Mozambique all work this way.

Forest restoration and community forestry

Degraded woodland is brought back and then held under long-term community management. Ethiotrees restores dryland woodland and frankincense trees in Ethiopia. Scolel’te in Mexico and Khasi Hills in India are managed by Indigenous and local communities under their own governance.

Forest protection

Standing forest is defended from clearance, with the community that depends on it in charge. Hadza and Datooga in Tanzania and Paskaia Mosquita in Honduras work this way.

Blue carbon — mangroves and seagrass

Coastal ecosystems store carbon in waterlogged sediment at rates well above those of dry land, and they also protect the coastline and the fishery. Mikoko Pamoja in Kenya was the world’s first community mangrove carbon project. Tahiry Honko in Madagascar followed it.

Grassland and soil

Grazing is managed so that grassland recovers and soil carbon rebuilds. Mongolian Nomads works with herding families across the Mongolian steppe.

Geography is a real decision, not a preference. Organisations choose a region because their supply chain runs through it, because their staff or customers are there, or because their sector depends on that landscape. Our carbon projects run across East, West and Southern Africa, Central and South America, South and Central Asia. If your operations point at a particular place, say so early — it usually narrows the list to two or three.

The standard

Every carbon project here is certified under Plan Vivo

We work with one standard, not several, and we have done for 25 years. Plan Vivo is the oldest carbon standard in the world and it was built for community-led land projects rather than adapted to them.

The reason we stay with it is the money. Plan Vivo is the only standard that requires every project developer to pass a defined minimum share of the funding straight to the communities in the project, and it sets that floor at 60%. That is a rule of the standard, not a promise from us.

Certification also requires:

• Independent third-party validation, then monitoring that continues for the life of the project
• Proof of additionality — the work would not have happened without the funding
• Long-term land stewardship agreements, so permanence is contractual and not assumed
• Social and biodiversity safeguards assessed alongside carbon

What Plan Vivo certification actually requires of a project, and where it is the wrong standard to choose, is set out on our Plan Vivo page.

You can read what we check before we put a project in front of you on our trust and transparency page.

The checks a buyer can apply to any project, whoever is selling it, are in our guide to how to choose high-integrity carbon credits. How a company funds and evidences a purchase is on our page about carbon credits for business.

Availability and fit

The third filter: what you can fund today

Not every project has certificates available at every moment. Supply follows verification cycles, and verification follows the growing season and the monitoring calendar, not the buyer’s financial year.

Available now, directly

Certificates can be bought straight from the project pages for Khasi Hills, Mongolian Nomads and CommuniTree. This suits smaller volumes, individuals, and organisations that want to start before a larger commitment.

Everything else, through us

For the rest of the portfolio, and for any volume worth reporting on, availability is confirmed project by project when we talk. That is not a sales device. It is what happens when you buy from real projects instead of from a spot market.

Who this is a good fit for

• Organisations that have measured their footprint, are already cutting it, and want the remainder handled credibly
• Organisations that want a relationship with one or two projects over years, with photography, film and monitoring data they can actually publish
• Organisations whose supply chain touches the landscape or the communities in a specific project
• Organisations that have to answer hard questions from investors, customers or a procurement team about where the money goes

Who it is not

If you need the cheapest available tonne, or credits delivered this week with no interest in which project they came from, we are the wrong supplier and we will tell you so in the first conversation. If you are putting a budget together rather than shopping on price alone, I have set out what carbon credits cost and why two quotes for the same tonnage differ so widely.

Not measured your footprint yet? That is where we normally start. Measuring your carbon footprint is the first step in working with us, and it is what sizes everything that follows.

FAQ