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Lion Landscapes, a grassroots organization working in Africa, has become the first conservation organization to become ‘100% climate positive’, using the ground-breaking Lion Carbon.
Lion Carbon is an innovative premium carbon offset that simultaneously addresses climate change, landscape-level biodiversity conservation, and local empowerment. Lion Carbon is developed by BCP, one of Africa’s leading forest carbon offset developers, in partnership with Lion Landscapes, a conservation organization working in Zambia, Kenya, and Tanzania.
How does Lion Carbon work?
Under BCP’s REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) Model, the mechanism generates sustainable income for local communities, which is linked to the conservation of their forests and wildlife:
“Lion Carbon is a tool to close the funding gap in protecting Africa’s greatest wildlife legacy landscapes. The Lower Zambezi to Luangwa Valley is described by National Geographic as one of the last 10 lion strongholds on the planet. Lion Carbon aims to help restore the Luangwa Valley’s wildlife and forests through improved community livelihoods. We need to be creative in ways to help protect ‘gigaforests’; forests that have the potential to store up to a billion tons of carbon”
Dr Hassan Sachedina, BCP CEO.
Biodiversity loss is closely tied to poverty in many parts of Zambia, where local communities depend on the use of natural resources to meet their basic needs. Limited financial models exist to incentivize local people to protect biodiversity, with tourism being a key player. Even in normal years, tourism often fails to generate sufficient revenue for conservation, while the recent crash in global tourism due to Covid-19 has decimated income for many wildlife areas.
“As conservationists, we spend our lives trying to facilitate coexistence between people and wildlife where wildlife generally represents more of a cost than a benefit to local people. We don’t believe that just minimising those costs is enough. We are thrilled that our partnership with BCP has allowed us to help develop a solution that significantly improves the wellbeing of people as a direct result of habitat and wildlife conservation.”
Dr Alayne Cotterill, joint CEO of Lion Landscapes.
A REDD+ Model you can Trust
BCP works in partnership with Government and local communities to conserve forests under 30-year forest management agreements, using the highest Verified Carbon Standards (VCS). In addition to this, BCP’s projects were the first in Africa to achieve gold-level validation against all three categories of the Climate, Community, and Biodiversity (CCB) Standards, while the Lower Zambezi REDD+ Project has also attained CCB Triple Gold Verification. Income from BCP’s carbon offsets protects over 530,000,000 trees across almost 1 million hectares of community forest. That is an average reduction of deforestation-related emissions of 1.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, the equivalent to removing 290,000 cars from the roads annually. It is not just climate and forests that are benefitting. In 2020-2021, the Luangwa Community Forests Project generated over US$4 million in direct payments to 12 chiefdoms for the protection of wildlife habitat and community development. Across both projects the REDD+ model benefits 225,000 people, making BCP’s REDD+ projects the biggest in the world in terms of community beneficiaries.
Email info@biocarbonpartners.com today to find out how you can be part of the change and offset Lion Carbon today.
