Creating shared value and realising the Sustainable Development Goals in the land-use sector
We believe that the way we use land has a central role to play in helping us collectively achieve global sustainable development goals. This is why we work with public entities to better design and implement effective land-use policies, and to monitor the actual impact of these measures and investments.
Our forest and land-use policy experts provide advice to the public sector on Blue Carbon, Payment for Environmental Services (PES), agents and drivers for reducing deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) and Monitoring Reporting and Verification (MRV) for land use. We also provide you sound council on effective financing tools across these different topics, helping to mobilise public and private investment to achieve sustainable development goals in the land-use sector.
Blue Carbon is the carbon stored in coastal and marine ecosystems saltmarshes, mangroves, and seagrasses). These ecosystems play a key role in the environmental service provision for coastal communities, but are also unique in their capacity to store exceptionally high amounts of carbon, particularly in their soils. These characteristics together have made the inclusion of Blue Carbon in climate change mitigation schemes increasingly relevant.
We have a specialised group of professionals working on the development of carbon asset projects for the restoration and conservation of Blue Carbon ecosystems under different methodologies endorsed by voluntary carbon standards such as the VCS and The Gold Standard. Our team has the necessary skills and the scientific knowledge to ensure the rigorous inventory and estimation of carbon stocks and the design of adaptation strategies for these complex systems.
We often take for granted the many services offered by nature - such as the preservation of biodiversity and habitat, the protection of watersheds, and the sequestration of carbon - and have failed to correctly value them in our existing marketplaces. This has led to a cycle of unsustainable use of scarce natural resources. Payment for Environmental Services (PES) has emerged as a strategy address this issue by providing financial incentives and other rewards to land users who maintain or improve the provision of valuable environmental services.
Our technical team can design and implement landscape-scale PES schemes with conservation and restoration activities that guarantee the supply of environmental services, see our recent work on the Corpochivor PES Scheme. Well-designed PES programmes can be linked to the creation of green financing funds that bring together public and private investors interested in those services.
The possible outcomes of PES schemes are as follows:
• Analysis of landscape fragmentation to support ecosystem connectivity and inform decision-making with regard to voluntary and mandatory offsetting.
• Opportunity cost analysis for land-use change.
• Economic valuation of environmental goods and services.
• Externalities analysis.
Understanding the dynamics of deforestation and degradation is critical to ensure the effective design of project activities in the framework of REDD+ projects.
We have at your disposal a strong team, highly knowledgeable in forestry and land-use as well as Geographical Information System (GIS) analysis. In the projects that we take on, we are able to combine our team's broad experience and a track record of assessing the loss of forest cover in a wide variety of contexts, see our
work for GIZ in the Protection of forest and the climate (REDD+). The quality of our work is assured through the implementation of methodologies to locate and quantify deforestation and degradation.
We advise our clients on the design and implementation of well-founded, effective emission reduction mechanisms and their respective Monitoring, Report and Verification (MRV) plans. We do this by drawing on over a decade of hands-on experience developing and managing hundreds of emission reductions projects around the world under different carbon standards and transacting them in different markets.
You can have a look at our work for the City of Medellin on urban afforestation under the ' More Forest for Metropolitan Area (AMVA)' project.
The quality of our work is built on a wealth of experience in land-use GHG accounting and a highly qualified and motivated team of climate change and land-use experts. The team has been working on the development, revision, and application of widely applicable methodologies, guidelines, and procedures for land-use GHG accounting. This is also true for the implementation of MRV for compliance with the requirements of international standards, national compliance Markets, and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) inventories in the Agriculture, Forestry, and Land Use (AFOLU) sector.
We enable public entities to design and implement effective land-use policies and monitor the impact of these measures and investments on the ground. Our forest and land use policy experts provide advice to governments, International Finance Institutions (IFIs) and cities related to Blue Carbon, Payment for Environmental Services (PES), agents and drivers of deforestation and forest degradation. We also provide advice for Monitoring Reporting and Verification (MRV) for land use and other financing tools used to mobilise public and private investment to achieve sustainable development goals in the land-use sector.