Carbon Tanzania answers questions on Verra’s VM0048 methodology

By Marc Baker

Project developers like Carbon Tanzania use methodologies to quantify their project’s benefits. Without them, we couldn’t measure the volumes of greenhouse gas emissions our projects prevent from entering the atmosphere. 

It is under the guidance of methodologies that project developers set project boundaries, calculate baselines and consider additionality. Given their central role in the voluntary carbon market, it is understandable that new methodological developments stimulate much discussion.

Verra’s VM0048 has been no exception. Ever since the carbon credit certification body started scoping this methodology in 2019, market stakeholders have been following closely. Ahead of its expected launch in 2025, we answer some of the most frequently asked questions about VM0048 and explain how it will impact our work at Carbon Tanzania.

What is VM0048?

VM0048 is a new, consolidated methodology from Verra. It will be used by developers working on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) projects that ensure trees that would otherwise have been felled remain standing. At its most basic level, this prevents carbon that would have been released from entering the atmosphere. 

Why has Verra produced VM0048?

Science is not a process of coming up with ‘an answer’ and being done with it; it’s a process of learning and improving. Just as we’re no longer using the Landsat maps of the early 2000s to measure forests, Verra is not going to stick with its existing methodologies forever. As science and technology improve, so too will the standard of Verra’s methodologies.

VM0048 is also a response to issues with some project reference regions. A reference region is an area of forest that faces the same threats as the conserved area but which lies outside of the project’s protection. The reference region is used to assess what would have happened in the absence of a specific REDD+ project and calculate the number of credits a project can issue. 

Under Verra’s other REDD+ methodologies (specifically VM0006, VM0007, VM0009 and VM0015), a project developer can choose their reference region. While this allowed responsible project developers to apply their local understanding, it also created risk. If there is more deforestation and degradation in the reference region than would have occurred inside the project area, the project may end up ‘over crediting’ (eg. issuing more credits than it should). So as well as keeping pace with the constant evolution of science and tech, VM0048 will reduce the risk of over crediting.

How does VM0048 improve on previous Verra REDD+ methodologies? 

So how will VM0048 incorporate the latest science and reduce the risk of over crediting? The first answer lies in its change of scale.

Currently, methodologies work on the project level. This means developers apply them to REDD+ projects that may cover a small area or span across a political boundary. However, VM0048 will work on a jurisdictional scale meaning that carbon projects will operate within a national or sub-national context. It asks: What’s the state of deforestation across the whole country? And: how does a project’s conservation area fit with these trends?

In operating on a jurisdictional level, VM0048 allows project baselines to be consistent with national priorities and project developers to work closely with the government to ensure their conservation work supports a country’s big-picture environmental goals.

Secondly, under VM0048, the data on how a forest is changing (eg. the spatial data) will be supplied by Verra, not the project developer. Cutting-edge companies such as Space Intelligence will gather this data and supply it to Verra. This means that Verra can pre-validate each country’s spatial data and offers greater transparency and integrity. 

These are both major advancements. Under VM0048, a project’s baseline is set at the jurisdictional level. This removes the need for project developers to choose their reference region and supply their own data. Instead, deforestation risk pixels – as recorded in the satellite data – are allocated to the project to create a baseline using the third-party data provided by Verra. 

Are there any problems with VM0048?

Older Verra REDD+ methodologies work using a 10-year baseline validity period. Every decade project developers would have to re-baseline the project. VM0048 has reduced this to a six-year baseline validity period. 

However, when you’re working at this large, jurisdictional scale deforestation doesn’t happen at a fixed rate every year, let alone every six. On a national or subnational scale, deforestation can fluctuate, independent of an individual project’s influence. As that happens you could get over-crediting in one project and under-crediting in another. 

And it’s not just deforestation. Throughout a project’s six-year baseline validity period, many things could change. New people could move to the area. Weather patterns could change. A new road could be built or a political boundary could change.

Critics of REDD projects think that while a six-year baseline validity period is an improvement, it’s still too long to capture real-time changes in the baseline scenario. But the reality of actually implementing projects is that we cannot constantly integrate every single new technological or methodological change or improvement into our operating model. 

We can think of running a large landscape scale REDD project akin to practising medicine, or law – the practitioner uses the best available knowledge and techniques, and periodically adjusts their practice as new, materially better but practically usable ones come into the space. The very newest, most expensive and hard to apply medical breakthroughs often take many years of testing and experimentation before they are ready to be applied in real world situations at scale. 

The same goes for methodological approaches to carbon accounting for REDD projects, scientific approaches that are currently being tested and reported on in the press are as yet not practically or economically available to project developers who are actually in the business of preventing deforestation happening today, not worrying about how to measure their success in doing so more accurately in the future. So, there has to be a sensible period applied in which a validated dataset is applied, and then it can be reviewed and adjusted formally according to inevitably changing circumstances.

In terms of the activity data that will form the foundation of VM0048, you can’t just have a risk map ready at the flick of a switch. Six years gives enough time to gather local data to create accurate risk maps that complement the jurisdictional-level spatial data provided by Verra.  

When will project developers start using VM0048? 

VM0048 will be mandatory, but only once a country has the necessary levels of jurisdictional level data. Many countries, of which Tanzania is one, are already well-progressed in terms of this data development from Space Intelligence and TerraCarbon. In August 2024 VERRA announced the schedule for releasing the REDD Project Activity Data for the chosen jurisdictions, and for Tanzania it is expected in December 2024.

Once this national-level data is ready, each project developer in every jurisdiction in that country will have six months to transition their project to VM0048. It is essential to be prepared.

How is Carbon Tanzania working with VM0048?

VM0048 is not a surprise to us. We’ve been working with the Tanzanian government for years, and have built a jurisdictional approach into the foundations of our current projects.

When we wrote our project design documents in 2015/16, we specified that our project’s reference regions would be set within political boundaries to enable us to move to a jurisdictional system as it evolved in the future.

So it’s safe to say we’re excited by the arrival of VM0048. It is the first step in our moving to a jurisdictionally suitable approach to carbon accounting in which we can both transition our current projects and develop new ones. Contrary to the narrative of both academic and media critiques, this process of recognising imperfection and building continual improvements into our carbon accounting has always been part of implementing high-quality, community-led carbon projects for Carbon Tanzania.

Will VM0048 benefit Carbon Tanzania’s projects?

In short, yes. VM0048 will enable Carbon Tanzania to work at a much greater scale. It will allow us to look at the whole country and decide to expand across multiple wildlife management areas at the same time. 

Working at a jurisdictional scale simply makes more sense. We’ve found that reducing deforestation depends on working within a specific governance framework. So if you can work within the same governance framework across broader scales, it’s much more cost-effective than trying to work on scattered projects in different governance frameworks.

This increased efficiency will be extremely positive for our conservation work. We will expand our Ntakata Mountains and Makame Savannah projects as we transition to the VM0048 methodology – both of those projects will triple in size. This will enable us to prevent more deforestation, employ more people and share carbon revenue more widely.

While we’re committed to VM0048, we’re also committed to running an alternative comparative analysis to ensure our accuracy. To complement VM0048, Carbon Tanzania will use a secondary method to annually monitor the forests in our local areas. We also voluntarily verify our projects every year which is beyond the required five-year update required by Verra.

To sum up

Carbon Tanzania is proud to be part of an action-orientated, pragmatic and practical way of tackling deforestation. Solving this crisis is not just sitting on the sideline and shouting. It’s about getting into it and working on the problem.

With VM0048 the science is getting better; the process is getting better and we’re getting better. That’s what good science and best-practice project management are all about – this is the integrity process in action.