From village roots to global standards: Inside the carbon project making history

By Annie Schultz, Global Advocacy Lead, & Jasmin Dorney, Advocacy Officer, Tree Aid

Restoring degraded land is more urgent than ever. It’s a powerful way to tackle the climate, desertification and poverty crises — challenges that are deeply connected. But one big question often comes up: how do we pay for it?  With global aid budgets cuts and current levels of climate and land restoration finance falling short of the needs, we need new ways to scale up support for land restoration at the pace and scale required. The good news? At Tree Aid, we’re taking action. We’ve just registered the world’s first land restoration carbon project under Verra’s new high-integrity methodology. It’s a big step—and we believe it could be a game changer. Sound complex? Don’t worry, we’ll break it down and show you how you can help turn this model into a movement.

Image by Tree Aid/Martha Tadesse

Tond Tenga: A blueprint for regreening Africa

Tond Tenga, meaning, “our land” in Mooré, is a pioneering restoration project in rural Burkina Faso contributing to the Great Green Wall by regreening degraded lands, capturing CO2, and building community resilience through improved livelihoods and food security over the next 40 years. Three features make the Tond Tenga model transformative for the land restoration sector:

• It unlocks private sector investment from the voluntary carbon market (VCM) for Africa, showing the way to a much larger pool of investment available to land restoration actors, particularly across the continent’s drylands. Our recent report with the World Economic Forum highlights just how much promise there is in the VCM. Our analysis suggests an untapped potential of 1.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent across the region, equivalent to a potential carbon asset value of $28 billion at 2023’s market price of $15.74, predicted to increase significantly. This demonstrates that significant carbon finance should not be limited to tropical forest landscapes and expand to dryland forests.

• It ensures that local people receive a fair and direct share of the income from carbon credits, generating over $30 million in financial benefits for these communities. In a landscape where international development and climate finance often fail to reach the ground, this represents a transformative shift. Saidou Zoungrana, a farmer and president of the Vohoko East Forest cooperative in the Tond Tenga project recognises this profound impact: “Our standard of living has improved significantly thanks to Tond Tenga, especially the money we earn from tree planting and seedling protection activities. This money is reinvested in income-generating activities such as producing seedlings, growing legumes in nutrition gardens, and processing forest products. More trees, more carbon, more income.”

• It implements locally led restoration: Tond Tenga was recently announced as the first project in the world registered with the new afforestation, reforestation, and revegetation (ARR) methodology, developed by Verra, the leading carbon standard. Approved by the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) as meeting the Core Carbon Principles, this methodology sets a high bar for high quality practices. Tree Aid goes even further by ensuring that local communities are truly placed at the heart of the restoration of their own landscapes, by supporting their local access and control rights over forests.

Image by Tree Aid/Jhoe Sey

Recipe for success: Secure tenure and stewardship for local communities over their natural resources

Tond Tenga didn’t happen overnight. For years, Tree Aid worked with these communities through our forest governance programme (2007-2024) to restore degraded land through, first and foremost, securing local community rights and governance over their natural resources. By the end of the programme, 30 communities had developed a strong sense of ownership over their local forests, 22 forest management plans, 34 local land charters, and 76 local forest governance structures – which improved local management of over 33,000 hectares of land. Over 17 years, this work delivered powerful outcomes for people, nature, and climate.

Impact overview of Tree Aid’s 17 year-long local forest governance programme in rural Burkina Faso. More here.

This work, funded by public development grant funding, demonstrated two vital building blocks to unlock private carbon investment:

• Public investment is needed to create the right enabling conditions, such as building local community tenure and governance. This is crucial for attracting high integrity carbon investment into land restoration, as it is perceived by investors as an important derisking strategy. 

• Secure community tenure and governance rights are a condition for delivering impactful and long-lasting restoration benefits for people, climate and nature.

Scaling land restoration through public-private partnerships and carbon markets – an essential next step for people, climate, and nature

To restore land for people, climate, and nature, we need collective action—and we need it now. That includes scaling high quality carbon investment, especially in regions that are typically left behind like the African drylands, where the investment potential is high. 

Our public-private partnership model has helped us do that successfully. Over the next 40 years, Tond Tenga is expected to remove over 3.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent from the atmosphere, while improving people’s livelihoods, food security and restore land. If carbon investment builds on public funding that has supported a locally empowering forest governance system, and if its benefit sharing mechanism is designed to genuinely and directly benefit the communities who steward these landscapes, the sequestered carbon can generate income streams capable of driving transformational change for communities. 

This is what land restoration should look like: fair, effective, and community-led. We’re excited to be leading the way, and we've started collaborating with fellow land restorers to share our lessons learnt and support them in unlocking the potential of carbon investment in their own landscapes. We can’t wait for you to join us on this journey!