Carbono Ganados y Bosques

Audit Analysis

Carbono Ganados y Bosques is a Colombian avoided-deforestation project (AR-ACM0003) with a verified investment-test additionality and a 15% buffer pool, but it is undermined by a project-specific baseline, contradictory leakage and safeguards documentation, and a significant discrepancy in the ex-ante lifetime ERR between the PDD and the monitoring report. The project delivered roughly 116% of the pro-rata expectation for the elapsed monitoring period, which is reasonable, yet the absence of FPIC, a grievance mechanism, and a clear leakage justification weaken its integrity profile.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Ex-ante lifetime ERR differs by a factor of ~2.8 between the PDD (309,721 tCO2e) and the monitoring report (111,444 tCO2e), creating material uncertainty about the true baseline credit volume.
• ⚠Leakage deduction is 0% with contradictory justifications: the verification report states leakage was 'not addressed' while the monitoring report claims it was 'deemed negligible'—no quantitative analysis supports either position.
• ⚠FPIC was not conducted and no grievance mechanism is in place, despite the project operating on community-adjacent land in Colombia.
• ⚠Nine contradictions were identified across documents, including conflicting additionality test types, safeguards status, and verified ERR figures, indicating data-reliability concerns.
• ⚠The PDD is dated 2020-09-25, more than a decade after the stated project start date of 2010-05-02, raising questions about the validity of the original ex-ante estimate.

Credit Vintages