EVALUACIÓN DE ÁREAS POTENCIALES DE FUGAS PARA EL PROYECTO BIOREDD+

The program was launched in 2012 with a budget of $27.9 million and is designed to strengthen Colombia's capacity to address climate change, conserve biodiversity, and promote sustainable livelihoods. The development of REDD+ projects is a key component of the BioREDD+ program, which seeks to promote sustainable livelihoods and forest conservation. The program is developing a portfolio of 8 REDD+ projects in the Pacific region of Colombia, which will be validated under the Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA) and the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS). These projects are located in four geographic nodes that cover over 700,000 hectares. The BioREDD+ program has selected eight areas along the Pacific coast of Colombia to develop the REDD+ projects. These areas are distributed across different municipalities along the Pacific coast, covering a wide range of ecosystems, from coastal mangroves and wetlands to high-altitude paramos and forests. This region is part of the Chocó biogeographic corridor, one of the 10 megadiverse hotspots in the world, which accounts for over 40% of Colombia's total vertebrate population. The REDD+ projects will be established in the territories of Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities in the coastal region, where forests have been degraded and are under threat of further degradation and deforestation due to various factors. The main drivers of changes in forest cover have been identified as wood extraction for fuel and development, illegal logging, gold mining, and conversion of forests to agriculture and livestock. The BioREDD+ program is working in collaboration with local communities to develop the REDD+ projects, which will aim to promote sustainable livelihoods and forest conservation. The program will use a range of protocols based on the VM0006 methodology and various economic and GIS data on roads, market access, and other land use and land cover (LULC) attributes to design areas of leakage within larger reference areas that will be monitored in the future to detect carbon leakage and develop credits. The program will use satellite LULC data, LiDAR-estimated carbon stocks, and in-situ data to evaluate the LULC and carbon pools of the leakage areas for each of the 8 projects in the BioREDD region. The document provides information on LULC and carbon for all projects collectively, but will extend to individual project areas as necessary. The development of areas or leakage corridors is an important component of any REDD+ project. The underlying cause of carbon leakage comes from various conservation activities resulting from implementing REDD+ projects in the region. In general, carbon leakage is a similar effect outside the site. Net greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions in an area are affected by emissions attributable to the project outside the mitigation areas focused on. Leakage can occur whenever the spatial scale of the intervention is less than the complete scale of the problem focused on. For example, a payment at the farm level for a program of environmental services could reward the smallholder farmer for not deforesting within the project area or the REDD forest lot for five years. However, if the owner moves all their planned deforestation from the REDD forest lot within the project area to another uncontrolled lot, the mitigation would be completely compensated by leakage or 'emission displacement', as it is known within the Bali Action Plan (Thirteenth Session of the Conference of the Parties – COP 13). Changes in land demand or land resource such as wood, either through competitive land markets or other spatial substitution mechanisms, are the dominant force of leakage for REDD+ projects (both conservation and SFM): as deforestation is mainly caused by land conversion to agriculture, the closure of the agricultural frontier will create land scarcity, unless technology allows intensification. Land scarcity induced is more pronounced for REDD than for afforestation and reforestation (A/R) that often takes place on degraded lands with low economic value.