Makaro Ap+ro

Audit Analysis

Makaro Ap+ro is a Colombian REDD+ project with VVB-verified additionality, a jurisdictional baseline reassessed in 2023, and no reported reversal events, but it is undermined by numerous material findings including a stakeholder association withdrawal (ASATIQ), baseline calculation errors, a 0% leakage deduction that is questionable for an Amazon REDD+ project, and a buffer pool that was reduced from 15% to 10.3% between successive verification reports. The project delivered approximately 105% of its pro-rata ex-ante expectation for the 2021–2023 monitoring period, but the volume of corrective actions and inter-document contradictions erode confidence in the underlying data.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠ASATIQ association withdrew from the project after 21 mandate contracts had been signed, raising concerns about the robustness of stakeholder engagement and benefit-sharing claims
• ⚠Historical deforestation rate was initially calculated using the total Amazon biome area instead of the reference region area, a substantive baseline error that was later corrected
• ⚠Leakage deduction of 0% with a 'deemed negligible' justification is questionable for a REDD+ project in the Colombian Amazon, and the monitoring report contradicts this by stating leakage was 'quantified'
• ⚠Buffer pool percentage decreased from 15% (verification report, Dec 2024) to 10.3% (verification report, Feb 2025), reducing the permanence safety margin
• ⚠Low extraction confidence across the document set, combined with six inter-document contradictions, limits the reliability of the extracted data

Credit Vintages