PoA Sustainable Landscapes and Forests Initiatives

This PoA aims to improve vegetation cover, arrest soil degradation, enhance soil quality and direct-indirect ecosystem services while creating income generation opportunities for communities through various livelihood activities. The program’s objective is to restore 100,000 ha area of degraded land with mixed native tree plantation in India and Benin. The plantation model will be adopted based on local site specific biophysical and socioeconomical conditions and incorporates local ecological knowledge which is more important to implement the project. The specific developmental change that our above interventions will bring is sustained deceleration of climate change by restoring degraded land at large scale to shift to Land Degradation Neutrality and Net Zero Emission target. Globally land degradation has affected more than 3.2 billion people living in rural areas with least possible adaptation options that has resulted in major biodiversity loss and ecosystem services. Without efforts to restore and protect land, nearly 70 gigatonnes more carbon would be emitted by 2050 due to land use change and soil degradation, representing approximately 17 per cent of current annual greenhouse gas emissions. In the baseline we have land lying fallow, degraded land due to continued deforestation and soil degradation because of extensive cattle grazing, land development works, poor farming and water harvesting practices, and so on. Also, small landowners/ farmers are not actively engaged in soil health restoration or afforestation/agroforestry projects which are crucial for effective climate-change mitigation. In the marginalised community sector who are heavily dependent on natural resources, awareness of plantation activity still being less at the national level and the upfront capital constraints pose as big barriers to the adoption and penetration of plantation activity. By linking these marginalised communities to carbon marketplaces, this PoA aims to overcome these critical barriers to adoption by enabling additional income opportunities to the community.

Project ID

GS23192

Registry

Gold Standard

Type

Afforestation/Reforestation · Forestry & Land Use

Removal or reduction

Impermanent Removal

Methodology

GS Methodology for Afforestation/Reforestation GHG Emissions Reduction and Sequestration

Developer

ERDA ILLUMINE LOW CARBON SOLUTIONS PRIVATE LIMITED · 13 projects

Country

Benin

First vintage

—

Crediting period

2025-06-01 to 2075-05-31

Estimated yearly credits

1,300,000

Scale

Large Scale · POA

Sustainable Development Goals

Goal 15: Life On Land · Goal 13: Climate Action · Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth · Goal 5: Gender Equality · Goal 2: Zero Hunger · Goal 17: Partnerships for the Goals

Data from

Berkeley VROD v2026-08 + Gold Standard registry

The registry gives Benin as the location, so this project is not drawn on the map. It is counted in the country totals.