Western Bahia to host carbon pilot project for conserved areas
Land Innovation Fund partners Treevia and GSS Carbono e Bioinovação receive strategic support from AIBA to launch the Arbaro Carbon Project's activities on the ground
A partnership between the Treevia/GSS Carbono e Bioinovação consortium, responsible for the Arbaro Carbon, nature-based solutions platform, and the Bahia Farmers and Irrigators Association (AIBA), with support from the Land Innovation Fund, will carry out a carbon-related pilot project on conserved areas of farms in one of Brazil's most productive agricultural regions. Covering almost 6,000 hectares in western Bahia, seven farms will be monitored start-to-finish by the Arbaro Carbon Project, from an initial diagnosis to provide a baseline for market negotiations, all the way to generating carbon credits in legal reserves and permanent protection areas in the Brazilian Cerrado.
In Brazil, there are some 130 million hectares of conserved land on farms throughout the country. Recent research by MapBiomas, however, shows that the country has lost 15% of its original forest cover in the last 38 years, 75 million hectares of which are on private holdings. Arbaro Carbon hopes to lay the groundwork for standing forests to become valuable environmental assets, generating credits for carbon projects and other environmental service payment mechanisms, while also fostering sustainable agricultural development.
"Carbon projects are financial incentives to minimize costs for farmers who conserve their land. Our proposal is to provide an asset they can turn into a financial benefit to invest in their farms' upkeep and conservation, with actions like fire prevention and brigades, curbing illegal hunting, maintaining and recovering fences, producing seedlings or investing in bioeconomy, to name just a few examples," explains Israel Schneiberg, an expert in nature-based solutions at GSS Carbono e Bioinovação.
“Carbon projects are financial incentives to minimize costs for farmers who conserve their land. Our proposal is to provide an asset they can turn into a financial benefit to invest in their farms' upkeep and conservation, with actions like fire prevention and brigades, curbing illegal hunting, maintaining and recovering fences, producing seedlings or investing in bioeconomy, to name just a few examples," explains Israel Schneiberg, an expert in nature-based solutions at GSS Carbono e Bioinovação.
Photo: Helio Hopp, Finance Director at AIBA; Raquel Paiva, AIBA’s environmental analyst; Israel Schneiberg, nature-based solution analyst at GSS; Glaucia Araujo, AIBA’s environmental analyst; Odacil Ranzi, AIBA’s president.
Using Social Carbon's methodology – the only one applicable to farms' conserved areas – to measure and validate carbon credits, Arbaro Carbon will begin its field activities in November, with a forest inventory and the installation of around a thousand Treevia IoT sensors that will monitor plant biomass to establish the project's baseline. GSS Carbono e Bioinovação will be responsible for marketing the assets through the Arbaro Carbon platform, which will enable payments to the farmers.
For AIBA’s president Odacil Ranzi, the partnership with Arbaro Carbon reinforces local farmers' commitment to sustainable development in Western Bahia. "Participating farmers will be able to benefit financially from preserving their APPs and Legal Reserves, areas that had never been able to generate income," he explains.
The collective involvement of several farms will cut the project's implementation costs and also ensure environmental benefits on a larger scale for the region. "Small-scale carbon projects are still very expensive. But an umbrella project carried out on several farms shares the returns in proportion to the area of each participating farmer," explains Israel. The farmers win through a financial incentive for conservation; and the environment wins too, with the creation of biodiversity corridors to recover local fauna and maintain the genetic variety of species.
Arbaro Carbon & AIBA
As the Land Innovation Fund's partner in four other projects in Western Bahia, AIBA's strategic support for the Treevia/GSS Carbono e Bioinovação consortium underscores the importance of designing novel, integrated solutions for sustainable, low-carbon agriculture. "In our portfolio, we foster points of contact and synergy among projects that can help scale up and enhance the impacts of innovation in the field," says the Fund's director, Ashley Valle. "Strategic partnerships like AIBA's with Treevia and GSS speak directly to our values and objectives, and help us build an innovation landscape for sustainable, deforestation-free agriculture," she adds.