Araku Valley Livelihood Project

Audit Analysis

The Araku Valley Livelihood Project is a VCS soil-carbon ALM project with VVB-confirmed additionality and a 10% buffer pool, but it carries moderate risk due to a project-specific baseline with no documented formal reassessment past the 10-year mark, a 0% leakage deduction justified only as 'deemed negligible,' and a large number of corrective actions (20) raised during the 2025 verification. The project delivered roughly 78% of its pro-rata ex-ante expectation for the elapsed monitoring period, indicating no over-crediting, but several key MRV parameters (FNRB method, usage monitoring) remain unstated in the available record.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠20 corrective actions were required during the 2025 verification, spanning sampling design deviations, area discrepancies, data inconsistencies, and missing calibration records — indicating a verification process that surfaced substantial implementation gaps.
• ⚠Leakage deduction of 0% is justified only as 'deemed negligible' with no quantified analysis, which is thin for a soil-carbon ALM project where adjacent land-use changes are plausible.
• ⚠Baseline last reassessed date is not stated in any available document; the 10-year reassessment milestone (circa 2020) appears to have passed without a clearly documented formal reassessment, though material findings reference updated SOC default values.
• ⚠The 2024 monitoring report does not address reversal events, creating a gap in the non-permanence narrative for a soil-carbon project.

Credit Vintages