How we measure, verify, and issue carbon credits.

Our principles.

Everything we do comes back to four principles. When methodology questions get hard — and they do — these are the rules we fall back on.

1. The farm is always named. No anonymised bundles. Every credit on Savanna Carbon traces back to a specific GPS-mapped farm, a specific farmer, and a specific practice. Buyers can see the farm. Farmers can see the buyer.
2. 80% goes to the farmer, always. This ratio is non-negotiable and baked into our contracts. Where cost pressure appears, it appears in our 20%, not theirs.
3. One credit, one retirement, one registry. Every tonne is issued on the Plan Vivo registry, retired on sale, and flagged with a serial number. No double counting. No re-sale.
4. Conservative over optimistic. Where the methodology allows a range, we use the lower bound. Fewer credits issued, higher confidence per credit.

Why we chose Plan Vivo.

Plan Vivo is the oldest carbon standard in the world — founded in 1994, specifically designed for smallholder farmers and community-led land-use projects. It is the standard for carbon projects where the person planting the tree is also the person earning from it.

What Plan Vivo requires

• Community governance. The project must be led by or co-designed with the communities involved. Savanna Carbon's regional partners are Kenyan NGOs and farmer cooperatives, not external project developers.
• Proven methodology. Pre-approved models for the carbon benefit of each practice type — agroforestry, reforestation, conservation agriculture, and regenerative farming. We cannot invent our own numbers.
• Benefit sharing. At least 60% of project income must reach participants. Our 80% exceeds this substantially.
• Annual technical reports. Submitted to the Plan Vivo Foundation, publicly accessible. Any buyer can read ours.
• Independent validation and verification. External auditors check project design (validation) and performance (verification). The auditor cannot be paid by us to look favourably on our work.

Why not Verra or Gold Standard from day one?

Verra (VCS) and Gold Standard are both larger, both more recognised by buyers, and both substantially more expensive and complex to get certified under. They are engineered primarily for industrial-scale projects — a 10,000-hectare reforestation concession, a cookstove distribution at country scale, a utility-grade solar farm.

For a network of 500 Kenyan smallholder farms aggregated into a Plan Vivo project, the math is different. Plan Vivo is purpose-built for exactly this — which means certification cost per tonne is lower, and that saving stays in the farmer's column of the split.

That said, Gold Standard now offers a smallholder pathway, and we plan to pursue dual certification once we scale past 10,000 farmers. See Phase 2.

Ranges indicative. Exact fees depend on project size, methodology, and auditor.

The MRV process.

MRV — Monitoring, Reporting, Verification — is the backbone of any credible carbon project. Here is exactly how it works on each Savanna Carbon farm, every year.

Monitoring

When a farmer registers, a field agent from our partner NGO or cooperative visits the farm. They GPS-map the boundary, count and species-tag every tree (for agroforestry/reforestation) or record the area under each practice (for regenerative/conservation), and photograph key features. This becomes the farm's baseline record on our platform.

Ongoing monitoring happens three ways: (a) seasonal visits from the field agent, (b) satellite imagery scans every 90 days for tree cover change and fire, (c) farmer self-reports via a mobile app designed for feature phones using USSD prompts in Swahili and English.

Reporting

Each year, the farm's year-over-year carbon benefit is calculated using the Plan Vivo-approved model for its practice type — updated for actual tree count, actual survival rate (trees can die; we account for this conservatively), and practice continuity. This aggregates up to a project-level annual technical report submitted to Plan Vivo.

Verification

Once a year, an independent auditor — registered with Plan Vivo and with no commercial tie to Savanna Carbon — conducts verification. They physically visit a random sample of farms (typically 10–15% of all farms in the project), cross-check boundaries and tree counts against our records, interview farmers on practice continuity, and check payment receipts against M-Pesa records.

Any discrepancy is flagged. Our issuance for that year is adjusted downward accordingly. In the event of systematic error, we lose the right to issue credits until remediated.

Five-layer verification.

A credit on Savanna Carbon passes through five independent layers before it reaches a buyer. Each layer has a different set of eyes and a different set of incentives.

Each layer can block the layers above it. If the field agent finds a farm has been abandoned, the platform will not issue credits for that farm that year. If Plan Vivo rejects the annual report, no credits are issued for any farm. If the auditor finds discrepancies, issued credits can be retroactively invalidated.

The carbon math.

How do we actually calculate how many tonnes of CO₂ a farm has sequestered in a year? Here is a worked example for one of our real farms.

Worked example: Kiptoo Family Farm

Daniel and Mercy Kiptoo's 4.2-acre farm in Kericho, Rift Valley. 840 indigenous trees intercropped with tea, planted 2019 onward. Species mix: Grevillea robusta (60%), Markhamia lutea (25%), Cordia africana (15%).

Leakage deduction accounts for the small risk that the practice displaces emissions elsewhere (e.g., the farmer clearing another patch of land). Permanence buffer is a shared pool held against the risk that trees die, are cut, or burn. If a farm loses trees, its permanence buffer covers the shortfall. This is how we guarantee that every credit sold represents a real, permanent tonne of carbon.

Where the numbers come from

The "58 kg per tree per year" figure is not invented. It is the average for a medium-growth indigenous tree in Kenya's ecological zones, from peer-reviewed studies compiled in the Plan Vivo methodology AR-TGB (Agroforestry — Tree Growth on smallhold Boundary). We do not use carbon values higher than this methodology permits, and we apply the lower bound of each range.

The 80/20 split, in detail.

Our most-asked question from buyers: where does the other 20% go? Here is the breakdown for every $10 credit sold.

Three things worth noting. First, our platform share (10%) is roughly a third of what a typical African carbon intermediary takes. Second, the Plan Vivo and audit portions pass through — we do not mark them up. Third, if buyer pricing goes up over time, the 80/20 ratio is fixed; the farmer's absolute payment rises in proportion.

Phase 2: Verra & Gold Standard.

By the end of Year 2, we aim to have 10,000+ farmers under Plan Vivo certification — enough scale to justify the cost and complexity of Gold Standard co-certification on a subset of the network.

Gold Standard and Verra both have stronger brand recognition among international buyers, particularly in the EU and North America, where some corporate procurement policies explicitly require one of these two standards. Co-certification means the same farm, the same practice, the same credit — verified under both Plan Vivo and Gold Standard, with both registry entries.

This is not a replacement for Plan Vivo. It is an addition. Plan Vivo remains our foundational standard because it is the right one for smallholder work; Gold Standard adds optionality for buyers whose procurement rules require it.

We will not chase Verra REDD+ methodologies, which have been subject to serious integrity concerns in recent years. Our focus is on afforestation/reforestation (ARR) and soil carbon methodologies where the science and measurement are well-established.

Integrity guarantees.

No double counting

Every credit has a unique serial number from the Plan Vivo registry. Once sold and retired, it cannot be resold. Buyers receive a retirement certificate linking to the public registry entry. You can verify on the Plan Vivo website that the specific serial number you received is retired to your organisation's name.

No greenwashing claims

We do not make claims on a buyer's behalf. If you purchase 1,000 tonnes from us, you have offset 1,000 tonnes — not "rendered your entire supply chain carbon neutral" or "achieved net zero." We provide the data; you make the claims you can defend.

Permanence

A risk inherent to any tree-planting project is that trees die. We manage this three ways: (1) conservative mortality adjustment baked into every issuance, (2) a 15% permanence buffer withheld from every farm and pooled, (3) ongoing satellite monitoring that triggers buffer compensation if tree cover declines. Credits we sell are backed by this pool.

Farmer rights

Farmers can leave the program at any time. If they do, future credits stop being issued — but past credits remain valid, because the carbon was already sequestered and paid for. Farmers retain full ownership of their land and trees at every stage.

Audit trail access

Any buyer purchasing from Savanna Carbon has the right to request the full audit trail for their credits — GPS coordinates, field visit records, Plan Vivo annual report reference, auditor findings, payment confirmations. This is included in the standard buyer pack for purchases above 500 tonnes; available on request for smaller purchases.