How We Rate Projects

Legality and Environment assesses the legal and environmental dimensions of carbon projects. It verifies legal authorization and evaluates the stability of legal frameworks to identify future risks. It checks existing conservation laws and their enforcement to confirm the project's additional environmental benefits. The section also analyzes local policies and practices to determine their impact on project claims. Finally, it reviews the sociopolitical climate, considering local opinions and governmental stability to predict potential challenges or support for the project. This ensures projects are legally compliant and effectively contribute to environmental conservation.

"Governance and Budget" assesses carbon projects' financial and operational structures. It evaluates if budgets are realistic, equitable, and adequately distributed between project work, benefits sharing, and profits. It also reviews the project timeline for feasibility compared to similar initiatives. Additionally, it examines governance structures to ensure accountability and effective management across complex stakeholder groups. Lastly, it scrutinizes the implementation plan for coherence and suitability to the project's scope and size, ensuring operational feasibility. This comprehensive evaluation ensures projects are financially and administratively sound for successful execution.

“Additionality” evaluates whether or not a project is justified. It determines if a project needed to exist in order for that carbon to be captured or stored. Usually, this is answered through a series of financial and risk justifications in the project documentation. Checking for additionality demonstrates whether the project is justified, if it avoided deforestation or somehow preserved carbon storage.

It is broken down into a set of subcomponents, some of which are graded on a “good/medium/fail” scale, and some of which are simply “pass/fail”. Additionality is addressed in different ways for each project type. For Avoided Deforestation, would these trees have been cut down in the absence of the project? For Reforestation, would these trees have been planted in the absence of the project? For Improved Forest Management, were these trees really at risk of removal or bad forestry practices in the absence of the project?

"Baseline" evaluates if a carbon project's baseline accurately reflects regional practices and predicts environmental impacts. It checks if the project area and its reference region are comparable in 3aspects like accessibility, deforestation history, and ecological characteristics. The section scrutinizes the methods used to forecast future deforestation, ensuring predictions are conservative and justified. Additionally, it assesses the accuracy of spatial mapping and baseline assumptions. Renoster's own baseline comparison further verifies these assessments by comparing project conditions with similar external areas, ensuring the project's environmental impact projections are realistic and unbiased. This analysis confirms the project's benefits are based on credible environmental forecasts.

"Leakage" assesses if carbon projects adequately address unintended impacts outside their areas, like market and geographic leakage. It checks if projects measure both leakage types, noting that some only quantify one due to method constraints. The review includes the leakage belt's appropriateness, ensuring it models potential deforestation risks accurately and doesn't underestimate leakage by including unaffected areas. It also considers the potential for reverse leakage, where project activities might inadvertently promote conservation outside project boundaries, a significant but hard-to-quantify co-benefit. This analysis ensures projects do not cause unintended environmental harm while claiming offsets.

"Verification" assesses the robustness of a carbon project's inventory and accounting methods to ensure accurate carbon stock measurements. It checks if the project employs statistically valid approaches to measure carbon, including field inventory and the use of regionally appropriate allometric equations. The section also evaluates the scientific soundness and peer-review status of the equations used, ensuring they accurately reflect local species and conditions. Additionally, it scrutinizes the project for any unethical practices that could lead to overestimation of carbon credits, such as manipulating boundaries or ignoring variances in forest types. This rigorous verification process ensures that carbon credits are based on credible, ethical, and scientifically validated data.

"Growth Modeling and Forest Management" reviews how carbon projects manage and predict forest growth. It checks if projects have detailed management plans that specify harvesting, regeneration, and expected impacts on forest stocking. It also scrutinizes the handling of credits for long-term wood product storage, ensuring they don't incentivize unnecessary logging. Additionally, it assesses the scientific validity and spatial accuracy of growth models used by projects, especially in regions with varied productivity. This ensures that forest management and growth predictions are scientifically sound and ethically managed.

"Monitoring" evaluates how carbon projects monitor deforestation and degradation to ensure their effectiveness. It assesses whether projects use reliable and unbiased methods, such as satellite imagery or ground surveys, and whether these tools are capable of detecting subtle deforestation events. The section also checks if projects have a high-frequency monitoring system to quickly identify and address deforestation incidents . Additionally, it considers the projectʼs long-term data management plans, ensuring data is stored securely and is accessible for the projectʼs duration. Effective monitoring is crucial for the accurate reporting and verification of a projectʼs impact on forest conservation.

"Permanence" evaluates the durability of carbon projects by analyzing contract lengths and assessing risks to determine the longterm stability of carbon sequestration. It considers the contract's duration against ideal benchmarks, the specific fire risk to the project, and the frequency and nature of fires in the area. It also examines threats from other natural risks such as pests, flooding, and droughts, to gauge their impact on the projectʼs viability. This thorough evaluation ensures that projects are likely to deliver on their environmental promises over the long term.

"Credit Assessment" scrutinizes the number of carbon credits a project should receive, ensuring they accurately reflect the project's true carbon sequestration potential. It includes an evaluation of the appropriate number of credits without considering potential leakage, emissions, or registry-specific deductions. Additionally, it compares the project's claimed credits to Renoster's calculated estimates, analyzing discrepancies and adjusting for factors like inaccurate carbon measurements or faulty allometry. This critical assessment ensures that the credits awarded are justified and reflect the project's actual environmental contribution.

"Ecological and Community Benefits" evaluates the additional environmental and social gains from carbon projects. It reviews the project's claims about ecological benefits, such as biodiversity enhancement and ecosystem services like water filtration, and assesses their monitoring systems for tracking these benefits. For community benefits, it scrutinizes the equity and tangibility of benefits provided to local populations, including direct payments and infrastructure development, ensuring they are proportionate to the project's scale and revenue. This analysis ensures that the projects contribute meaningfully to both ecological preservation and community well-being, beyond mere carbon sequestration.