The Serra do Amolar REDD+ Project

Audit Analysis

The Serra do Amolar REDD+ project is a VCS-registered forest conservation project in Brazil with a VVB-verified combined additionality test, a 16% buffer pool, and a conservative 46.6% leakage deduction. However, significant contradictions between documents on lifetime emission reductions (2.84 million vs 644 thousand tCO2e) and leakage percentages (46.6% vs 19%), combined with a project-specific baseline and 40 resolved corrective actions, introduce meaningful data-reliability concerns. The project delivered roughly 69% of its pro-rata ex-ante expectation for the 4.5-year monitoring period, indicating moderate under-delivery.

Project Description

Red Flags

• ⚠Lifetime ex-ante emission reduction estimate differs by a factor of ~4.4 between the PDD (644,471 tCO2e, May 2021) and the verification report (2,837,764 tCO2e, Oct 2022), raising questions about the stability of the project's carbon accounting baseline.
• ⚠Leakage deduction is reported as 46.6% in the monitoring report but 19% in the validation report — a 27.6-percentage-point gap that materially affects the net credit volume and undermines confidence in the leakage methodology.
• ⚠The monitoring report (May 2022) references reversal events as 'reported' while the verification report (Oct 2022) states none were reported; the VVB's later assessment is privileged, but the discrepancy warrants scrutiny of the fire-risk mitigation claims.
• ⚠40 corrective action requests and 20 material findings were issued during verification, including corrections to project area, emission reduction estimates, and reference region data, indicating substantial initial documentation weaknesses.

Credit Vintages