Forest Carbon Project Boundaries

A global database providing geospatial boundaries for 575 nature-based carbon offset projects across 55 countries, including avoided deforestation, afforestation/reforestation, and improved forest management initiatives. Contains detailed project metadata to support verification and analysis of carbon offset efficacy.

Product Details

Visibility: Public
Owner: Cecil
Created: 28 Mar 2025
Last Updated: 21 Aug 2025

Product Contents

Overview

Nature-based climate solutions (NBS) have become an important component of strategies aiming to reduce atmospheric CO2 and mitigate climate change impacts. Carbon offsets have emerged as one of the most widely implemented NBS strategies. However, these projects have also been criticized for exaggerating offsets. Verifying the efficacy of NBS-derived carbon offset is complicated by a lack of readily available geospatial boundary data.

The original database provided the Geospatial boundaries of 575 NBS projects distributed across 55 countries. Geospatial boundaries were aggregated using a combination of scraping data from carbon project registries (n=433, 75.3%) as well as manual georeferencing and digitization (n=127, 22.1%). Database entries include three varieties of carbon projects:

Avoided deforestation

Afforestation, reforestation and re-vegetation

Improved forest management

An accuracy assessment of the georeferencing and digitizing process indicated a high degree of accuracy (intersection over union score of 0.98 ± 0.015).

Important Notes for Users

Area Definitions:

Project Area: The geographical area where project participants implement activities to reduce deforestation
Project Accounting Area: The geographical area used to calculate carbon credit issuance

This database does not represent a census of all nature-based carbon projects and does not contain all varieties of such projects

Users should verify that any georeferencing inaccuracies will not significantly impact their analyses

The boundaries included reflect data available in the registries at the time of access, with some projects regularly updating their information

We were unable to assess the accuracy of boundaries constructed from linear features or from developer-provided protocols

Database Schema

Each record in the GeoPackages contains the following attributes:

Attribute	Description
Project Name	Name of the carbon project as given in the documentation
ProjectID	Combination of registry abbreviation and project number
Registry Name	Registry hosting project information (American Carbon Registry, BioCarbon Registry, Climate Action Reserve, EcoRegistry, Gold Standard, Verra)
Methodology	Name of the methodology used for the project's implementation
Project Type	Type of forestry carbon offset program (ARR, AD, IFM)
Country	Country where the project is located
Project Developer Name	Entity or individual organizing the carbon offset project (first name only if multiple)
Project Start Date	Start date of the crediting period (mm/dd/yyyy)
Project End Date	End date of the crediting period (mm/dd/yyyy)
Date of Entry	Date when project information was added to the database (mm/dd/yyyy)
Processing Approach	Method used to obtain boundary data (Official, Georeferenced, Linear, or Method)
PD Declined to Provide	Whether the project developer declined to provide geometry information (Yes, No, N/A)
Geometry Type	Type of geometry in the database (Point or Polygon)
Project Area	WKT representation of the project implementation area
Project Accounting Area	WKT representation of the area used to calculate carbon credits
Project Reference Region	WKT representation of the area used for historical and current deforestation trends
Comment	Notes about manual referencing or other relevant information

Methodology: Manual Georeferencing & Digitization

Project boundaries were manually georeferenced using QGIS (v3.32.2) through the following process:

The map with the clearest boundary within the PDD was identified and overlaid on OpenStreetMap and Bing Satellite Imagery basemaps

Each map was georeferenced with the basemap layers using at least 4 ground control points

Geometries depicted on the georeferenced map were manually digitized

Digitized geometries were consolidated into a single geospatial layer

Special Cases:

Linear Features (9 projects):

Linear geometries were buffered by 30m
Holes were eliminated using the "Delete Holes" tool in QGIS
An inverse buffer of 29m was applied to obtain the final polygon

Protocol-Based (6 projects):

Project boundaries were recreated following steps in the PDD
Used resources like ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model (GDEM) and Copernicus Global Land Cover (CGLC) dataset

Point Geometries (42 projects):

For projects with insufficient boundary information
General location and project type were identified
Entered into database as point geometry

Forest Carbon Project Boundaries

A Global Database of Nature-Based Carbon Offset Project Boundaries

Dataset Information

Overview

Important Notes for Users

Database Schema

Methodology: Manual Georeferencing & Digitization