Papariko: Mangrove reforestation in Kenya. Road to Verra validation
Vlinder is often seen as an expert understanding the “supply side” — carbon projects that are traded on the voluntary carbon market. Well, we know what high-quality carbon is because we are on the ground: we have mangrove reforestation projects that we finance, help to develop and also lead as developers. This gives us a lot of first-hand experience, a multi-angled view, and as a result, a profound understanding of project implementation and risks. Since we get a lot of questions about the Verra certification processes, we would like to show how it works using one of our development sites in Kenya as an example and walk you through the recent project validation.
Papariko project
“Vlinder” means “butterfly” in Dutch. So is “papariko” in Swahili. Papariko is a project that restores degraded mangrove forests in Kwale, Kilifi and Tana River Counties in Kenya. We call it an early-stage project, but it is already quite advanced. We have done the socioeconomic and environmental baseline studies, prepared the project documentation and submitted it to Verra, a leading voluntary carbon standard with a well-developed methodology for mangrove reforestation projects. We even started planting last year. And now it’s time for validation by independent auditors.
Meet the Vlinder team
Our teammates went to Kwale early this year to meet the auditors from KBS Certification Services, an independent certification body accredited by Verra, and show them how we are working on the Papariko project. All the pictures in this article were taken by our colleagues on this trip.
This is Camilla Werl, our mangrove project manager from Vienna. Camilla is responsible for project documentation and project registration at Verra, mangrove and community research and reporting. And she also coordinated this validation effort.
And here are Robin and Isabella. Isabella Masinde is an expert in community engagement and social development from Nairobi. At Vlinder, her responsibilities are project administration in Kenya, project monitoring and safeguarding, and community management.
Robin Bartmann is Vlinder’s COO from Vienna. In the Papariko project, Robin does impact measurement. He is the one who often helps Camilla with documents and research and knows the Kenyan project in and out.
Field visit
First of all, for the validation, the auditors need to visit the project site to check how the actual situation corresponds to the project documentation submitted to Verra and whether the project fits the Verra mangrove reforestation framework.
Mangroves grow along the coastline and the sites with mangroves are often covered with water. Though the auditors could only visit those areas which are not in the water, it was quite a hard walk, often by muddy roads and wet soils.
These are Martin Luther King and Shilpa Swarnim, our auditors from KBS. Martin is from Kenya and speaks English and Swahili. Shilpa is from India. They visited the five so-called sample plots of newly planted mangroves — you can see them being marked with sticks colored blue and red. These very plots will be visited during the next audits to check the progress.
To have a higher survival rate for the new mangroves, we plant seedlings, not just propagules. To grow them, you need to organize nurseries. You can see one of them that was visited by Shilpa and Martin, in the picture below.
The mangrove nurseries are set up and managed by local women Community-based Organizations (CBOs). Papariko purchases seedlings of local and native mangroves from them. In the picture, you can see the CBO women explaining to the auditors how the process is organized.
The auditors also met with Vlinder’s local partners and experts and talked to the communities living in the project area. We are covering this in detail in our next blog post — stay tuned!
And yes, Papariko has its own little office in Kwale. Here you see Shilpa from KBS and Isabella, Camilla and Robin from Vlinder happily posing in front of it when the hard work is done.
***
Vlinder is a climate tech company that plants mangroves and reinforces climate projects with early funding and innovation. Vlinder’s goal is to enable carbon mitigation of 10 million tons of CO2 every month, the combined footprint of Switzerland and Austria.
