Eastern Cape Restoration Project, South Africa - Somerset East

Audit Analysis

The Eastern Cape Restoration Project is a 40-year VCS ALM soil-carbon project validated by TÜV NORD CERT with a confirmed investment-test additionality and a 13% buffer pool, but the validation process surfaced ten material findings and thirteen corrective actions—including a ground-truthing discrepancy in forest-cover mapping and unresolved soil-organic-carbon measurement justification. FPIC was not conducted, leakage was deemed negligible with a 0% deduction and no detailed justification, and the available documentation includes corrupted or unreadable files with low extraction confidence, limiting the depth of independent assessment.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Ground-truthing discrepancy between satellite image analyses and field observations of forest cover (CAR 02) directly undermines baseline reliability
• ⚠Soil organic carbon measurement method justification and soil-type assessment flagged as a material finding (CL 08) in a project whose primary credit source is soil carbon
• ⚠FPIC was not conducted despite the project being in a community-adjacent restoration context in South Africa
• ⚠Leakage deduction of 0% with only a 'deemed negligible' label and no quantified or documented justification for a soil-carbon ALM project
• ⚠Thirteen corrective actions were required at validation, including ownership-structure evidence, project-scale clarification, and non-permanence risk report sourcing

Credit Vintages

No issuances recorded on the registry.