Verra and WOCAN Announce Streamlined Process to Assess Carbon Benefits and Women’s Empowerment Aspects of Projects
Women play an essential role in addressing climate change and ensuring community resiliency, but their contributions are often invisible and undervalued. This is about to change as a result of a collaboration between the W+ StandardTM and the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS). These two standard-setting organizations are now enabling the developers of carbon offset projects to measure the impacts of their work on climate and women’s empowerment simultaneously. Projects that meet both standards’ requirements have been able to generate ‘W+ Labeled VCUs’, which has just become easier with the release of a combined application process. By advancing women’s empowerment, offset purchases from these projects will contribute to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 13 (Climate Action) and 5 (Gender Equality).
The first project that has demonstrated the desire to be jointly labeledunder both standards is a project of the Biomass Group in Sri Lanka.
The Biomass Group is a renewable energy company that develops biomass energy resources for chips, pellets and power. It engages more than 50,000 smallholder farmer suppliers, 90% of whom are women. The Project uses multiple W+ ‘domains’ (akin to VCS methodologies) to measure how women are benefitting across different dimensions of wellbeing. The Income & Assets domain measures income and savings; Time measures time savings from not collecting fuelwood; Knowledge & Education measures benefits from training on sustainable agricultural practices among other topics; Food Security and Health domains are used to measure benefits gained through the promotion of organic farming without pesticides, and access to clean water.
If you are interested in learning more about this streamlined process, please contact coordinator@wplus.org or cchapman@verra.org.
Photo ©: Biomass-Group