PRESS RELEASE
15 July 2024
Contact: media at wildlifeworks.com
New Paper Introduces Innovative Method for Setting High-Quality Baselines for Nested Nature-Based Solution (NBS) Projects
Mill Valley, California, 15 July 2024. Nature Scientific Reports has published a collaborative research paper introducing an innovative NBS nested project baseline setting method called the ‘Baseline Allocation for Assessed Risk’ model, or BAAR.
Authored by researchers at Wildlife Works and Everland, the BAAR model builds on over a decade of work by Wildlife Works in preparing its NBS projects for nesting into National REDD+ programs in multiple countries including Cambodia, Colombia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The method enables the standardization of nested project baselines and ensures they are consistent with the jurisdictional programs’ climate goals, while still reflecting the risk of future deforestation accurately for each project. Risk-adjusted baselines enable governments to attract higher investment to highly threatened forests, without the risk of inflated project-specific baselines jeopardizing the integrity of jurisdictional programs.
“The BAAR model marks a practical advance in predicting and allocating deforestation risk, based on the proximity of remaining forests to recent deforestation hotspots," said Jeremy Freund, Chief Technology Officer at Wildlife Works and co-author of the paper. “Wildlife Works has used the BAAR approach for more than 10 years, and we are now making this work publicly available to enrich the current discussions on how best to design jurisdictional programs with nested projects as the carbon market for NBS rapidly advances.”
The paper uses the Democratic Republic of the Congo, home to the world's second-largest tropical forest, as a case study to demonstrate the BAAR model's capacity for managing scale and complexity, and illustrates how this model enables the consistent and centralized creation of baselines within a jurisdictional program.
Once created, resulting nested baselines can be shared with developers, investors and communities in advance of project commitments. Early knowledge of project baselines elevates market integrity as it supports crucial decision making processes for investors, project developers and Indigenous Peoples and local communities, who increasingly depend on fair and accurate baselines to create the financial opportunity needed to protect forests.
“BAAR is a transparent and intuitive method for producing large-scale deforestation risk maps that can be used to baseline any nested REDD+ project. And while this is a first iteration of this method, the DRC maps we’ve produced allow buyers, governments and developers to see clearly which forests are at the greatest risk – ultimately demonstrating where REDD+ projects could deliver greatest impact,” says, Dr Maren Pauly, co-author and Everland's Director of Evaluation and Research
REDD+ is an important mechanism for driving climate financing to local communities. A risk-based mapping approach has shown to be an effective tool for setting fit-for-purpose baselines that ensure that finance flows to communities who need it to halt tropical deforestation. The next iteration of the BAAR approach has already begun to incorporate advancements in remote sensing science and updated carbon market policies and regulations.
View the paper on nature.com
About Wildlife Works
Founded in 1997, Wildlife Works is the world’s leading REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) project development and management company with a community-centered approach to applying innovative, market-based solutions to the conservation of biodiversity.
About Everland Everland is a specialized conservation marketing organization in the climate change mitigation business that exclusively represents the Voluntary Carbon Market's largest portfolio of high-impact, community-centered, forest conservation (REDD+) projects. Everland brings together communities and corporations in common cause to protect some of the world’s most important and vulnerable forests. www.everland.earth
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