Funding Organisation: Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)
Timeline: Dec 2025 - Dec 2026
Budget: 18,457 CHF 

Summary:

Voluntary carbon markets have become an increasingly important source of climate finance, particularly for land-based projects that aim to reduce emissions through avoided deforestation, reforestation, afforestation, and changes in land management. These projects can mobilize private resources for climate mitigation, but they also create long-term rights over land, forests, and carbon revenues in places where rural livelihoods often depend on agriculture, grazing, timber, charcoal production, and access to common resources. While certification systems reward restrictions on land use, they often provide weaker incentives for delivering local public goods such as jobs, infrastructure, education, revenue-sharing, or community investment. This project examines how land-based carbon concessions affect local economic activity, land governance, and the communities living in and around project areas.

The project constructs a global Atlas of Carbon Concessions, building what is intended to be the first comprehensive dataset of land-based carbon concessions worldwide. Initially focused on Sub-Saharan Africa, the dataset has expanded to cover 874 carbon concessions across 91 countries. It combines information from carbon registries, certification records, project design documents, monitoring and verification reports, maps, and other regulatory or inspection materials. The dataset records project-level and spatial information, including location, timing, project type, certifier, land-use category, crediting period, public-goods provision, and other implementation features where available.

The research links these concession boundaries to satellite-based measures of nighttime lights, forest cover, land suitability, population, infrastructure, political geography, and conflict. A major part of the ongoing work involves extracting information from lengthy project documents and digitizing missing or incomplete project boundaries. The team is using AI-assisted extraction alongside manual validation to improve consistency and accuracy, while documenting boundary precision, source quality, and coding decisions. This is especially important because many projects provide information only through PDFs or embedded maps rather than structured data or official geospatial files.

The project is expected to generate new evidence on the trade-offs between climate mitigation, local development, and land governance in voluntary carbon markets. Its findings will be relevant for governments, donors, certification bodies, firms purchasing carbon credits, and communities affected by carbon projects. This study will inform debates on land-tenure safeguards, community consultation, benefit-sharing rules, social-impact monitoring, and the design of carbon finance systems that protect both forests and local livelihoods