© carbon tanzania 2024
Image credits: Carbon Tanzania/Roshni Lodhia/Paul Joyson-Hicks.
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The project protects a one million hectares’ corridor in Ruvuma to connect wildlife between protected areas in Mozambique and Tanzania by strengthening the capabilities of five community Wildlife Management Areas. The Ruvuma project is currently under development with validation expected in 2025.
Being developed using VERRA’s consolidated methodology (VM0048) as well as Tanzania’s jurisdictional baseline.
As anthropogenic climate change persists, Tanzania is experiencing changes to its rainfall patterns. Droughts and floods are occurring with increased frequency and hit with greater severity, impacting millions of Tanzanians – reducing crop yields, exacerbating food insecurity and increasing poverty.
These environmental challenges are driving Tanzanians to move internally with many people arriving in the Ruvuma region, placing additional pressure upon the region’s resources.
Ruvuma’s forests are seen by many as unused; ripe for development and ready for agricultural conversion. Without considered action, these ancient forests and the irreplaceable wildlife they contain are likely to struggle in an increasingly changeable environment.
Tackling the underlying drivers of deforestation addresses the specific threats facing the Ruvuma region. Forest-protection carbon credits (using the REDD methodology) do this by offering financial incentives to conserve forests. When trees that would otherwise have been felled are left standing, additional carbon is prevented from entering the atmosphere.
Based on these emissions reductions, a corresponding volume of carbon credits can be sold to businesses and corporations to support their existing decarbonisation strategies. Revenue from these sales is returned to local people, thus supporting their daily costs of living and reducing the economic necessity to fell trees to meet their immediate needs. In this way, forests are no longer seen as ‘unused’ when standing and it can be a better financial decision to leave them intact. By returning the profits from the carbon credit sales to the local communities, it also funds sustainable development that aligns with community needs
Tanzania currently loses between one and two percent of its trees every year. This is catastrophic. It accounts for approximately 70 percent of Tanzania’s total annual emissions and reduces the resilience of ecosystems to adapt to changing weather patterns. In response, Ruvuma Wilderness works to counter these trends and increase Tanzania’s national capacity for climate mitigation.
The Ruvuma Wilderness project is the result of the collaboration of five community Wildlife Management Areas (WMA), spanning some 15,000 km2 of land. Within this area, the local communities have legal user rights over their land.
The majority of people living in the ecosystem are Yao subsistence farmers with a strong cultural identity and desire to protect both their forest and their spiritual sites found across the landscape. In 2022, project managers were recruited from each of the five community Wildlife Management Areas (WMA) and training on biodiversity monitoring began.
Carbon Tanzania is a business making the protection of forests and biodiversity valuable to Tanzania and its people.
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© carbon tanzania 2024
Image credits: Carbon Tanzania/Roshni Lodhia/Paul Joyson-Hicks.
Director of Operations
David is a dedicated conservationist with both an excellent academic record and extensive field experience in designing and implementing practical conservation and agricultural project work. At Carbon Tanzania, he oversees the highly technical aspects of project operations, while also using his interpersonal and language skills to communicate the many and complex details of our projects to our partner communities and field collaborators.
Director of Finance
Alpha is a Certified Public Accountant with a degree in accountancy and finance. Alpha is responsible for overseeing all the finance and accounting systems both within the company and across our projects. Alpha’s work with the communities also ensures that they are able to plan the financial management and implement best practices in the allocation of the revenues from their successful natural resource protection activities.
Co-founder
Marc oversees project operations, often in the field as well as from the Arusha base, and leads the search to find and develop new areas where our approach can deliver lasting results. As a co-founder of Carbon Tanzania, maintaining a connection with the landscapes in which Carbon Tanzania works is critical to Marc.
Co-founder
After an established career as one of East Africa’s leading professional outdoor, trekking and wildlife guides, Jo co-founded Carbon Tanzania. Jo’s focus is to ensure business sustainability through financial management and sales, and to ensure that the company has the financial capacity to scale when opportunities arise.