Limay Community Carbon Project
The Limay Community Carbon Project is an innovative, multi-faceted project with multiple benefits for the environment and the community. The project integrates entire communities in the renewal of their own eco-system.
The project’s reforestation works to establish mix species forest plantations on underutilized and abandoned land belonging to low income farming families. The planning of the reforestation segment of the project was undertaken in consultation with hydrology experts, and occurs on a watershed that is critical to Limay’s hydrological cycle. As well as carbon sequestration, this will aid in the retention of water within the community during the dry season and prevent flooding during the wet season. Only native trees are utilised in the planting, the majority of which are sourced from community based nurseries using seeds gathered from surrounding forests.
The project’s agroforestry initiative involves the planting of fruit trees near participants’ homes. Aside from carbon sequestration this provides the tangible benefit of a food source and alters the way the families view and value vegetation.
Traditionally in the community fireplaces are located in the home, and require a high amount of wood fuel. The project replaces these with fuel-efficient fireplaces with chimneys, thereby reducing CO2 emissions and providing huge health benefits for the families.
Environmental Co-benefits:
- Water: The municipality of Limay has two distinct seasons, dry and wet. The extremes of these two seasons have increased due to excessive deforestation and negligent land use planning resulting in the area suffering from severe water problems. The Limay Community Carbon Project reforestation was specifically planned with the view to improving the status of water supply in the region.
- Endemic biodiversity: All trees planted in the project are native, with the majority being from the region, and hence well adapted to the specific microclimate. An emphasis is also placed on rare and endangered species.
- Soil Restoration: Due to past unsustainable agricultural practices, a lot of the soil in the areas has been degraded. To combat this, the majority of the species used in the project are Nitrogen Fixing Trees (NFT), which are trees that through a symbiotic association with certain soil bacteria, take Nitrogen out of the air and use it for growth and soil fertilisation.
Social Co-benefits
The municipality of Limay is a particularly poor farming region. The plantations are designed to provide short, medium and long term benefits through the integration of payments for ecological services, fuelwood and timber production. Through the sale of carbon offsets producers will receive a purely additional source of diversified income in addition to a fuel-efficient fireplace. A fund is established upon the successful sale of offsets and disbursed to the participating farmers over time. These payments are designed to guarantee a series of payments provided directly to the landholders at the end of each year based on the success of their project. Inherent in the project are efforts to change the way the community value the forest and the project.
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