The Quirimbas Community Carbon Project

The Quirimbas Community Carbon Project is located in the Quirimbas National Park located in the six central districts of Cabo Delgado Province, Mozambique, and encompasses an area of approximately 7506 square kilometres, 5984 on the continent and 1522 ocean, intertidal, and island habitats. The Quirimbas National Park was established in 2001 as an initiative of the 40 villages in the Park and the Mozambique government, supported by WWF. The park is the largest marine protected area in Africa, the first to be declared in post-independence Mozambique, and significantly, the first park in Africa to be created at the request of local inhabitants. The marine part of the Park includes the 11 southernmost islands of the Quirimba Archipelago, of which four (Ibo, Matemo, Quisiwe, and Quirimba) have a long history of permanent human occupation. A managed elephant corridor will in time connect this part of the park to the Niassa Reserve to the north.

Targeting communities

Envirotrade’s Quirimbas Community Carbon Project is located inside the boundaries of the national park and will target agricultural communities in the Macomia, Quissanga and Meluca districts of the National Park. Some 95 000 people currently reside in the park and 30 000 in the buffer zone. The large population in the park poses significant challenges to the management of resources and poverty and environmental degradation threaten this unique habitat. Forest management and conservation of soils and river catchment areas is essential to ensure the survival of fragile marine environments including the coral reefs in the national park.

The project is working with the park authorities and selected communities in vulnerable and threatened areas of the park to develop forestry and land use practices that promote sustainable rural livelihoods in a way that raises living standards through the generation and sale of verified carbon emission reductions. The project has three main components: the promotion of sustainable land use through agroforestry, forest and fire management and effective use of non-timber forest products to generate co-benefits for the participating communities. Animal/human conflict is a significant problem in the park and impacts on livelihoods. The project will address this problem and bring much needed resources from carbon revenues to assist in this effort. The project will also work closely with the management of the Quirimbas National Park and WWF to conserve biodiversity and implement the park management plans.

Developing sustainable land use

The project will generate Verified Emission Reductions (VERs) under approved methodologies of the Verified Carbon Standard Association (VCSA) and will also be validated under the Climate Community and Biodiversity Association (CCBA) standard, which will certify the project as providing ‘exceptional benefits’ in climate change mitigation, community engagement, and biodiversity conservation. Envirotrade will market the carbon offsets to buyers who wish to invest in poverty alleviation, biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation in Mozambique. Project activities are aimed at developing sustainable land use practices with the targeted communities to provide socio-economic benefits (transform livelihoods) and protect and restore forest resources in the national park. This will involve the restoration of degraded areas in the park that were previously cultivated and are now abandoned or areas that have been illegally logged, an extensive agroforestry programme to stabilise shifting agriculture and assist farmers, the production and marketing of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) and sustainable community timber utilisation in designated areas.

The project will also build institutional capacity in communities including the establishment of trust funds to channel funds from the sale of carbon offsets to individual farmers participating in the project and communities who contribute to forest rehabilitation, management and fire control. These community structures will be supported by institutional and administrative capacity to enable the Envirotrade project model to be implemented and ensure that carbon assets are maintained in a credible registry that promotes transparency, accountability and confidence in both producers and purchasers of offsets.

You can find various reports on the Carbon Livelihoods projects in our Resources