The World Bank BioCarbon Fund promotes large-scale comprehensive landscape management through performance-based carbon finance. In Zambia, a partnership with the Government and the Community Markets for Conservation (COMACO) was selected as a promising institutional platform for pioneering environmental performance payments from REDD+ and sustainable agricultural land management (SALM) activities. COMACO and its partners intend to pioneer a unique approach to landscape-wide carbon asset management that combines several Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) methodologies under an umbrella of grouped projects to monitor, verify, and monetize carbon increments across the managed landscape. UNIQUE provided technical support to develop the baseline for the SALM component of the project, using VCS methodology to be ready for VCS validation.

• Training and capacity building in activity based monitoring and soil modeling.
• Analyze existing COMACO farm-based monitoring & evaluation (M&E) systems to define the carbon baseline.
• Parameterize soil carbon models to model baseline carbon stock changes.
• Analyze existing inventory datasets to define woody biomass baseline in agricultural landscapes.
• Participatory development of farm based area identification and verification procedure using GPS.