Carbono Nueva Esperanza

Audit Analysis

The New Hope Carbon Project is a CDM avoided-deforestation project in Colombia with a verified combined additionality test, a 15% buffer pool, and no reported reversal events. However, the project-specific baseline, a 0% leakage deduction with contradictory justifications across documents, pending corrective actions on legal registry records, and several missing data points (FPIC, FNRB, usage monitoring) limit confidence in the credit's robustness. Delivery is broadly on-target relative to the ex-ante estimate for the elapsed monitoring period.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Leakage justification is contradictory: the PDD (2020-09-21) describes leakage as 'quantified' while the validation report (same date) records it as 'deemed negligible,' yet the actual deduction is 0% — a material inconsistency for an avoided-deforestation project where displaced deforestation is a realistic risk.
• ⚠Three material findings remain open with corrective actions pending, including outdated ICA (Colombian agricultural registry) records and a non-conformity on procedures to identify and access legal and environmental requirements.
• ⚠Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) is not stated in any available document, which is a significant gap for a land-use project in Colombia involving local communities.
• ⚠The ex-ante lifetime ERR figure appears in two different values (52,601 and 44,712) within the same PDD, and the issuance document also carries both figures, creating ambiguity about whether the headline number is gross or net of the 15% buffer.

Credit Vintages