Boise Forest Carbon Offsets

Audit Analysis

The Boise municipal parks tree-planting project has a confirmed additionality assessment and a 5% buffer pool with no reported reversals, but suffers from significant data gaps in leakage treatment, FNRB, and usage monitoring. Contradictions between the validation and verification reports on both verified and claimed emission reduction figures raise over-crediting concerns. The project is a small-scale urban forestry effort (504 trees across 9 parks) with moderate documentation quality.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠ERR figures are inconsistent across documents: the verification report (April 2025) reports 227 tCO₂e verified against 664 tCO₂e claimed, while the validation report (April 2025) reports 568 tCO₂e for both — a 137 tCO₂e over-claim in one document and a 341 tCO₂e verification gap in the other
• ⚠Leakage deduction is not stated and no justification is provided in any available document, despite this being a tree-planting project where displacement of existing canopy or community land-use changes is a realistic risk
• ⚠Baseline method is characterised as 'jurisdictional' in the verification report but 'project' in the PDD, creating ambiguity about whether site-specific or government-level data underpins the baseline
• ⚠FNRB value, usage monitoring method, and CORSIA/CCP eligibility are all absent from the extracted record, limiting independent verification of the credit's integrity

Credit Vintages