Reforestation - Climate Forrest Grants (DK)
Challenge
Reforestation is a global agenda. Since 1990, global deforestation has had a rate equivalent to 800 football fields per hour. At COP26 in Glasgow, 100 countries agreed to stop deforestation by 2030, and significant funds have been allocated across the world for forest restoration. All over the world, reforestation is therefore a crucial part of the climate action plans.
In Denmark, the Danish Climate Forest Foundation exists to contribute to the fulfillment of the ambitious Danish climate goals through the establishment of forests and changed use of carbon-rich lowland areas from intensive farming to forestry, whereby these lands will go from causing significant emissions to sequestering CO2. The foundation has been created by the Danish government and is to combine public and private funding for new forest and maintain a carbon registry, where contributing private stakeholders and the government can off-set their emissions.
KEYWORDS
Thematic
Land use, forestry, reforestation, agriculture, sequestration, carbon credits
Legal
Danish Climate Forest Foundation Act, Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration On Forests And Land Use
Tech
Grant management, GIS
Due to the high ambitions and the importance of accountability when dealing with carbon credits, the Climate Forest Foundation needed a platform delivered fast, but with strong accountability measures such as GIS-data to ensure full compliance with international carbon credit standards.
Solution
The digital platform for the Danish Climate Forest Foundation supports grant management, including the ability to receive applications with GIS-maps, ensure an efficient case handling process and archiving, and support of the Foundation’s other case and records management.
The Climate Forest Foundation scores applications based on the price pr. sequestered unit and by giving points for synergy effects on nature, safeguarding drinking water reserves etc. To ensure a correct metric the Danish Climate Forest Foundation has developed a calculation spreadsheet for CO2 effects on reforestation that is used in the application and documented on the case.
Furthermore, the foundation needs to ensure that projects funded are truly additional to justify carbon credits. This means that each case needs documentation of not being part of other subsidy-schemes or government initiatives. Finally, the application is based on the use of GIS-maps, where the applicant uses the Environmental GIS-service, where a polygon is drawn of the land that is to be part of the project.
The application is then submitted. And the case processing begins and takes the caseworker through a checklist of controls that needs to be done, for the application to be assessed.
If the application is approved the price-scoring and the synergy-points are used to prioritize between applications. To this end the foundation extracts a list of applications with cases in ascending order based on price and points for final prioritization and approval.
Based on this the cases are updated accordingly and the platform generates letters of approval or rejection to the applicants. The check-list in the case guide continues to guide the case manager in terms of prorated pay-out and subsequent documentation and progress reports on the projects.
Moreover The Climate Forest Foundation also needed a high level of accountability to ensure, that the carbon credit system that follows the reforestation efforts remains unimpeached by irregularities with the projects.
Results
The Danish Climate Forest Foundation needed to establish their digital solution with a short lead time to deliver on their mandate.
The project was concluded in less than 12 weeks including design, configuration, implementation and training on the basic document and records management system as well as the grant management process.
The main effect for the new organization is that they can process fast and prioritize to achieve maximum effect. Forestry is by its nature a slow process. By reducing the time it takes to approve new projects the climate effect in turn is also advanced.
Moreover The Climate Forest Foundation also needed a high level of accountability to ensure that the carbon credit system that follows the reforestation efforts remains unimpeached by irregularities with the projects.
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