Is our Land Use and Forestry (LUF) project eligible for generating verified emission reductions (VERs)?

Is our Land Use and Forestry (LUF) project eligible for generating verified emission reductions (VERs)?

Eligible LUF Projects are entitled to generate verified emission reductions (VERs—carbon credits). Eligibility criteria are:

  • Projects cannot have their planting areas on areas that were forest in the 10 years previous to the project start date. A forest is defined by the Designated National Authority (DNA) of the project’s host country: http://cdm.unfccc.int/DNA/index.html. In case no forest definition is yet given by the DNA, the project owner can take the forest definition of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/x6896e/x6896e0e.htm or the national forest definition of the project’s host country. 
  • Project area cannot be on wetlands (but projects in mangroves are eligible) or result in drainage or irrigation of areas with organic soils, and soil disturbance on organic soils shall be less than 10% of the area that is submitted to certification (not 10% of the entire project area).
  • Other specific eligibility requirements are set at the methodology level.

A project first must go through a Preliminary Review and, if successful, a project will be "Listed" in the registry. Following the Preliminary Review, a project must go through a third-party audit called "validation", which results in a validation report that then must be reviewed by SustainCERT and the Gold Standard (GS) Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) in a process called Project Design Certification. Following a successful review, the project is "Registered" in the registry. Finally, there is the verification stage (when a project gets to issue VERs, which is also audited by a third-party auditor. This step results in a verification report that is also reviewed by SustainCERT and the GS TAC in a process called Performance Certification. The result of this review, if successful, is that VERs are issued to the project.

A forest/non-forest assessment must be conducted to determine eligible areas to issue GS VERs. Guidelines to conduct a SPATIAL FOREST/NON-FOREST ASSESSMENT can be in Annex C of Land Use & Forestry Activity Requirements.