| Project activities | Restoration initiatives aiming to recover the ecological function of degraded tropical land by adding more trees — including agroforestry, reforestation, or natural regrowth or any combination of the three. The agroforestry activities reverse partial losses of soil fertility, biodiversity, water retention, and tree-based carbon on lands previously deforested or under unsustainable cultivation, while providing food security and livelihoods to smallfarmer and Indigenous implementers. For small-scale restoration of degraded land using agroforestry practices |
| Implementation entity | Entities implementing the projects can be any recognized legal entity, but they should have a clear mandate from local IP and/or LC communities to represent the project in their area (see FPIC). |
| Land rights | Proof of land ownership, possession, stewardship, or land-use rights must be legally valid and compliant with international law (human rights, and Indigenous rights), jurisdictional law, and customary rights or Indigenous law (see Land and Appendix C). BCPs must have documentation for all land-rights holders for project implementation. |
| Identification of stakeholders and beneficiaries | All IP and LCs must be identified, and their inclusion in remuneration from the project must be transparently disclosed. |
| Vulnerability | The project area is degraded and/or deforested or under unsustainable agricultural use if no program is implemented. |
| Prior funding or stacking | As addressed in the additionality section. The location to be conserved has not received previous funding through mechanisms that overlap in time or duplicateconflict with the funding to be allocated by biodiversity credit. Projects may only stack VBCs with carbon crediting if they can clearly demonstrate they are doing additional activities (over and above what they are doing for carbon). |
| Project Scale | The minimum project geography must encompass an area that is the size of the natural range of an individual of the indicator species that qualify for validation of biodiversity. Projects can include adjacent or non-adjacent properties with a trajectory to create contiguous areas. |
| Geographical location | No limitations. This methodology was developed with tropical rainforests in mind but it can be adapted with appropriate evidence for other geographies. |
| Legal projects | Projects must comply with all relevant local, regional, national, and international laws and regulations. |
| Project duration | Projects should be viable for the long-term future, preferably for a maximum of 30 years, but IP and LC contracts may be structured as autorenewing yearly, and cancellable after one year. |
| Governance | Governance of the project should be driven by a collaborative approach with IP and LC and transparency into all aspects of the project. |