Carbono Rancho Victoria

Audit Analysis

Carbono Rancho Victoria is a 3,063-hectare afforestation project in Colombia verified by ICONTEC under the Cercarbono standard. The project delivered roughly 101% of its pro-rata gross expectation over the first 5.3-year monitoring period, with a 9% buffer pool applied for permanence risk. However, significant data contradictions across documents—particularly regarding FPIC, safeguards, and reversal events—along with the absence of a grievance mechanism and a thin leakage justification, limit confidence in the project's integrity and transparency.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠FPIC contradiction: the validation report (VVB, June 2024) states FPIC was NOT conducted, while the issuance document (one day later) states it was; the VVB's independent assessment is privileged, indicating a potential free, prior, and informed consent gap
• ⚠No grievance mechanism is documented, and the validation report does not confirm safeguards, creating a weak social safeguards framework for a project affecting local communities in Meta, Colombia
• ⚠Eleven contradictions across project documents (additionality test type, buffer pool percentage, leakage justification, reversal events, ex-ante lifetime ERR, and others) raise concerns about internal data consistency and document quality
• ⚠Leakage deduction is 0% with only a 'deemed negligible' justification, which is thin for an AFOLU project where displaced land-use activities are a plausible leakage pathway

Credit Vintages