Miombo woodland carbon assessment
Feasibility and carbon-potential assessment for landholders, conservancies and community trusts across Zimbabwean miombo.
The brief
Landholders, conservancies and community trusts across Zimbabwe hold extensive miombo woodland with no clear view of whether it could support a registered carbon project — or what that project would be worth.
Terra Verde was engaged to assess carbon potential honestly, before any commitment to development costs.
What we did
- Reviewed tenure and the legal basis for the carbon right on each parcel.
- Built land-cover change analysis to establish historic deforestation pressure.
- Designed a stratified field sampling approach across canopy, biomass and soil carbon pools.
- Modelled baseline and project scenarios, and tested the result against realistic issuance prices.
- Mapped the drivers of loss — charcoal, fuelwood and agricultural expansion — to the interventions a project would need to fund.
The finding
Carbon potential varies enormously between parcels, and the binding constraint is rarely the forest. It is the strength of the tenure instrument and the credibility of the benefit-sharing arrangement.
That conclusion reshaped the development pipeline: parcels with clear rights and organised community structures moved forward; the rest were re-scoped rather than pushed.
Why it matters
A project that cannot evidence who holds the carbon right will not survive validation, however good the forest is. Establishing that early protects landholders from spending on development work that cannot be registered.