Which carbon projects in Africa actually deliver the climate benefit
their credits claim, scored 1 to 5 across five dimensions.
253
offset projects; the average is 2.2, so a mid-range score is a credible one.
Every project is read against a fixed rubric across five dimensions: the integrity of the carbon methodology, whether the climate benefit is genuinely additional, the project's financial viability, the risk of the country it sits in, and how it is structured around its communities. Each dimension is scored 1 to 5 from public data, then combined into one weighted composite. The credibility of the carbon claim and the capital risk carry the most weight; community structure carries the least. Scores come from a fixed formula rather than case-by-case judgement, so the same inputs always produce the same score. The weights themselves are a judgement, and one input, a certification overlay, is kept by hand.
Honest limits. C-CARBON reads what public registry data supports. It is not a substitute for due diligence on management quality, buyer terms, or community relationships on the ground. Coverage is effectively single-registry, so read it as one slice of the African market rather than all of it, and community structure is the thinnest-covered dimension.
A carbon rating asks whether a project's credited carbon is credible. Separately, Canopy measures the forest itself. NASA's GEDI spaceborne LiDAR reads canopy height, canopy cover and above-ground biomass across the protected areas in the PACE cohort, aggregated over the whole mission window into one structural fingerprint per park, and split by vegetation class (forest, savannah, shrubland, grassland, wetlands) where the land-cover maps agree. It is an independent, measured read of how tall, dense and carbon-rich the forest actually is, a physical complement to the credited-carbon score, never an input to it. The same read is run over each carbon project's own boundary too, so an individual project page shows its measured forest structure beside its score.