Kent Forest Carbon Offsets

Audit Analysis

The Kent Forest Carbon Offsets project is a 2,449-tree urban preservation project in Ohio with VVB-confirmed additionality and a 10% reversal pool, but it carries notable gaps in safeguards documentation (no FPIC, no grievance mechanism), an unquantified leakage deduction, and a project-specific baseline. The apparent ERR discrepancy between documents is explained by the 10% reversal pool deduction (4,603 gross → 4,143 net), but the overall evidence base remains moderate.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Leakage justification is labelled 'quantified' in the verification report, yet no actual deduction percentage is stated in any available document, leaving the magnitude of the leakage treatment unknown.
• ⚠No Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) process or grievance mechanism is documented, despite the project affecting a public university campus and surrounding community.
• ⚠Two material findings were raised by the verifier (8 trees below the 5-inch minimum diameter threshold; Site 3 avoided-emissions recalculation using 30% rather than 20% impervious surface), indicating the initial project documentation contained calculation errors.
• ⚠The verification report records reversal events as 'not addressed' while the validation report states 'none reported'; although the 10% reversal pool (460 credits) is described in the detail field, the inconsistent treatment across documents weakens confidence in permanence safeguards.

Credit Vintages