The CBP project is being implemented by UNEP’s Division of Global Environment Facility Coordination (DGEF) and executed by UNEP’s Division of Early Warning and Assessment (DEWA) in association with two scientific consortiums, one led by Colorado State University (CSU) and the other by WWF.
The CBP consortium will provide scientifically rigorous, cost-effective tools to establish the net carbon benefits of sustainable land management interventions in terms of protected or enhanced carbon stocks and reduced greenhouse-gas emissions. The component led by CSU will develop three options for assessing the C benefits and greenhouse gas emissions of a project: a) Simple assessment—suitable for a quick assessment at any stage, including proposals; b) Detailed assessment—suitable for detailed reporting in projects with a reasonable focus on climate change mitigation; c) Dynamic modeling option—for users with a scientific background who wish to model carbon stock changes in projects with a carbon focus. The CBP-system will be applicable at various levels of scale, from national level to the project level, made available freely as a web-accessible system (see CBP website at CSU).
Within the Component led by CSU, ISRIC will provide global soil information for carbon stock assessment across the range of world climate zones, soil types and land use - derived from legacy data. These are required for at minimum IPCC Tier I, or national scale, level inventory assessments using the simple assessment option of the CBP system in data poor regions. More detailed data, derived from field monitoring and long-term chronosequence studies, are needed at project-level to verify projections of the process-based models; these data sets will be compiled and used for model validation by the respective test case partners.
Ultimately, the CBP-system will help project managers quantify carbon as a global environmental benefit in natural resource management projects and should enable developing countries to engage in the emerging carbon-offset markets with sustainable land management and land use activities. The system will be applicable across the full portfolio of land use projects implemented by the 10 GEF Agencies and will thus provide a way to compare and document their performance in contributing to climate change mitigation.
