Methodological issues in developing a community forestry greenhouse gas emissions mitigation project in Mancherial forest division of Andhra Pradesh, India

There are several contentious issues related to forestry mitigation projects. The special report of the IPCC and literature published so far have shown that permanence, leakage, baseline establishment, measurement, monitoring, etc., could be addressed satisfactorily using existing scientific methods and accounting rules. To understand the methodological issues of developing community forestry projects, a case study was conducted in Mancherial forest division of Adilabad district in Andhra Pradesh, India. This paper addresses: the setting of project boundaries, baseline selection, establishment of additionality and the calculation of carbon sequestration as a result of the project, prior to project implementation. The steps involved in development of the project and the different methods used for establishing baseline, estimating leakage and transaction cost of developing a community forestry project are presented. The stock is projected to increase by $1480\times 10^3$ t C during 2000–2012 over the baseline scenario under the modeling approach and the cost of establishing a baseline and project formulation for a project extending over 32,956 ha is estimated to be US\$ $1.25 ha^{-1}$ and US\$ 4 t $C^{-1}$