Set up a Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS) bamboo carbon forestry pilot project in Ethiopia and share lessons learned with Kenyan and Ugandan

The China Green Carbon Foundation (CGCF) will work with INBAR to adapt existing Chinese standards for quantifying and monitoring bamboo forest carbon into VCS standards, allowing for bamboo offset projects to be traded internationally, benefiting investors in the EU, Africa and China. These standards will then be applied to establish an offset project in Ethiopia. CGCF and project partners will produce a publication on the this process and share findings from the initial pilot establishment with Kenya and Uganda partners via a regional training, thus enabling them to also apply the standards to their own climate change mitigation, reforestation and reduced deforestation national programmes. The project will publish 2 VCS standards and approximately 2,000 hectares of bamboo forests will be traded for offsets on either the VCS or CGCF platform by the end of the project. The concept notes for the methodology for VCS was submitted in November 2016. The first two steps such as (a) preparation and submission of methodology concept note and (b) VCS evaluation is completed and other steps involved are in progress.