Land eligibility screening for Verra VM0047 reforestation projects
Send a location and this tells you whether that land can be registered for reforestation carbon credits under Verra VM0047, and what it would really pay. It reads ten years of satellite history and applies the methodology's own tests. Free, in about a minute.
Airlines and technology companies already pay for those trees. The people farming the land have never been told whether theirs qualifies.
Free, on any phone that runs Telegram. No account, nothing to upload.
Buyers, brokers and plantation operators all work from the same public satellite record. It has simply never been pointed at a smallholding and explained in words a farmer can act on.
The trees are the money. Planting moringa on grazed land is roughly a fortyfold move. Carbon adds a few percent on top — worth taking, and it compounds, but nobody should plant for carbon alone.
What carbon really buys is the paperwork. About eighty hectares of farmers together covers the cost of certifying a project; five hundred hectares earns roughly $35,000 a year. That is why this only works when farmers go in together — and why the first useful thing anyone can do is find out whether the land counts.
It reads the same satellite record an auditor would, across the ten years the rules care about, and applies the checks that decide whether land counts.
Drop a pin in Telegram while you are standing on it, or type the coordinates. Nothing to install.
Whether it qualifies, why, and what a hectare would really earn if the trees are left to stand.
Trace the boundary with a finger. The check runs again on your actual shape, not a square around a pin.
Across Southeast Asia and Africa, 2016 to 2026. Thirteen qualified. Six did not, and their farmers would have found out the slow way.
| Site | Verdict | Peak tree cover | Cleared |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zinder, Niger | Eligible | 0.0% | 0.00% |
| Tigray, Ethiopia | Eligible | 0.1% | 0.00% |
| Magway, Myanmar | Eligible | 0.1% | 0.00% |
| Sumba, Indonesia | Eligible | 9.7% | 0.27% |
| Kakamega, Kenya | Conditional | 29.1% | 2.66% |
| East Kalimantan, Indonesia | Not suitable | 50.5% | 30.54% |
Almost everything that qualified is dry country — Sahel parkland, miombo, semi-arid scrub, Southeast Asia's dry corridor. That is not how we chose them; it is where the rules happen to land. Wet tropical sites fail on the forest they already have, or on cloud: the Kalimantan site sits under 57–71% cloud in every month of the year, so no honest reading is possible there at all.
Carbon pays for wood that stays standing. The usual moringa business cuts the trees back several times a year for the leaves, which drops the payment by roughly five times. The two pull against each other, and you deserve to hear it before you plant, not after.
Money also arrives years later, once someone has come and measured the trees. There is no upfront cheque.
For most smallholders the honest answer is to join with other farmers rather than go alone. That is not a small ambition — it is the only version of this that has ever paid. We would rather hand you a real number and a real route than a headline you cannot bank.
Buyers, developers and validators are short of one thing: high-integrity removals with credible origination. Smallholder aggregation is where the volume is, and screening cost is what keeps it out of reach. This is that screen, run against the methodology's own tests rather than a generic tree-cover proxy.
A feasibility study is the wrong place to discover that land was forest eight years ago. Screening a portfolio first means capital goes to parcels that can actually be validated, and the ones that cannot are dropped before anyone has paid for a field visit.
It also produces the artefact a grouped project needs: a per-parcel boundary, drawn by the person who farms it, with a dated satellite record attached.
Stocking index is NDFI after Souza et al. (2005) — the worked example VM0047 itself names — over Landsat Collection 2 surface reflectance, the only free optical archive covering the full look-back uniformly at 30 m. Forest state comes from Hansen Global Forest Change v1.13 (2000–2025). VM0047 is the first VCS methodology to use dynamic performance benchmarks, and both v1.0 and v1.1 are ICVCM CCP-approved; the annual index series here is the input those control-plot matching steps consume. Screening only — it does not replace a VVB, a host-country forest definition, tenure evidence, wetland and peat screening, or field measurement.
Your parents farmed this land and their parents before them. What grows on it next could be worth more than the harvest — but only if somebody finally tells you what you are standing on.