Phase I Mangrove Restoration Project in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Audit Analysis

A 45-year mangrove restoration project in Saudi Arabia with VVB-confirmed additionality and a 12% buffer pool, but undermined by a project-specific baseline, contradictory leakage justifications across documents, unaddressed reversal risk per the validation report, and a very low first-period delivery (~4% of pro-rata expectation). The project is conservative in its actual crediting relative to its lifetime estimate, reducing over-crediting risk, but documentation quality and safeguards (notably the absence of FPIC) remain weak.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Reversal events marked as 'not addressed' in the validation report, contradicting the PDD's claim of 'none reported' — permanence risk for mangroves (storms, disease, sea-level rise) is not robustly quantified
• ⚠Leakage justification is contradictory: the monitoring report states it was 'quantified' while the validation report says it was 'deemed negligible,' yet the deduction is 0% in both cases
• ⚠Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) was not conducted for a project operating in three coastal communities (Safaniya, Jazan, Yanbu)
• ⚠26 Clarification Requests and 4 Corrective Action Requests were raised during verification, indicating substantial initial documentation deficiencies
• ⚠Low extraction confidence across the document set limits the reliability of the structured data used for this assessment

Credit Vintages