Bukaleba Forest Project

Audit Analysis

The Bukaleba Forest Project is a VCS ALM soil-carbon project in Uganda with a confirmed investment-test additionality assessment and a quantified 4.79% leakage deduction, but it carries moderate concerns from a project-specific baseline, a buffer pool that was reduced from 29% at validation to 10% at the 2022 verification, five open corrective actions (including a missing non-permanence risk report), and multiple contradictions across documents on safeguards, FPIC, and benefit-sharing. The project delivered roughly 274% of the pro-rata ex-ante expectation for the 2016–2020 monitoring period, suggesting a conservative baseline, but the overall documentation and process record is uneven.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Buffer pool percentage dropped from 29% at the 2012 validation to 10% at the 2022 verification without a documented justification in the extracted record
• ⚠Corrective Action 2 flags a missing non-permanence risk report and calculation, a significant gap for a 42-year forest crediting period
• ⚠FPIC status is contradictory: the April 2022 verification report records it as not conducted, while the June 2022 monitoring report records it as conducted
• ⚠Five corrective actions remain open, including monitoring-period mismatch, outdated template, and missing FSC certification evidence
• ⚠Baseline last reassessment date is not stated in any available document; for a project-specific baseline this is a transparency gap

Credit Vintages