Can this land earn reforestation carbon credits? Ten years of satellite history, checked against Verra’s VM0047 rules — across Southeast Asia and Africa.
Screening map → 19 sites with a year-by-year timeline, 2016–2026. Stocking-index and forest-cover overlays, per-site verdicts and the evidence behind them. Telegram bot → Share a location, give a plot size, get an eligibility check and an honest estimate of what moringa carbon actually pays. Draw your real field boundary on a map.VM0047 sets a 30 m resolution floor and needs a stocking index spanning
t−10 → t=0. Two tests disqualify most land, and both run from the
Hansen Global Forest Change record:
Was it forest? Peak tree cover across the ten-year window must stay below 10%,
measured against the host country’s crown-cover definition.
Was it cleared? Cumulative clearing must stay below a de-minimis share of the plot.
A hit here is not automatically fatal — VM0047 allows it to be justified — but it needs
evidence.
| Site | Verdict | Peak tree cover | Cleared |
|---|---|---|---|
| Niger — Zinder | PASS | 0.0% | 0.00% |
| Ethiopia — Tigray | PASS | 0.1% | 0.00% |
| Myanmar — Magway | PASS | 0.1% | 0.00% |
| Indonesia — Sumba | PASS | 9.7% | 0.27% |
| Kenya — Kakamega | CONDITIONAL | 29.1% | 2.66% |
| Indonesia — E. Kalimantan | FAIL | 50.5% | 30.54% |
Of 19 sites screened, 13 pass. Nearly all are dryland or savanna — Sahel parkland, miombo, semi-arid scrub, Southeast Asia’s dry corridor. That is not selection bias: humid-tropical candidates fail on residual forest cover, or on cloud. The Kalimantan site has 57–71% mean cloud in every month of the year, so no optical-only method can build a defensible time series there.
On carbon revenue, plainly. Certifying a project costs roughly $345k over 30 years and that cost does not shrink with plot size, so break-even sits near 260 ha (~640 acres). A two-acre farmer would see on the order of $17/year from carbon against ~$970/year from selling moringa leaves and seed.
Worse, the two goals fight each other: carbon pays for wood that stays standing, while the usual moringa business cuts trees back several times a year for leaf harvest. Smallholders realistically need a grouped project. The bot says all of this rather than quoting a headline number.
Hansen Global Forest Change v1.13 (30 m, 2000–2025) · Landsat Collection 2 Level-2 surface reflectance, the only free optical archive covering the full decade uniformly at VM0047’s 30 m floor · NDFI stocking index after Souza et al. (2005), the methodology’s own worked example · basemap imagery by Esri.