In 2020, Carbon Balanced began a five-year project in Ecuador with Nature and Culture in Ecuador (NCE), aimed to expand the Maycú Reserve through the purchase of 500 hectares (1236 acres) of land to ensure connectivity with Indigenous lands across the lower Nangaritza Valley and restore degraded habitats through reforestation. The project also further promoted conservation of the Alto Nangaritza Indigenous territories by developing conservation management plans and supported the consultation process for the creation of a 20,000-hectare (49,421-acre) nationally recognised Indigenous community reserve, which will protect the valley from future legal mining concessions.

The project provided an important opportunity to complete and secure conservation objectives that WLT has been funding for over 10 years. Established as a REDD+ project, WLT predicted that the acute threat of deforestation across the landscape would impact Maycú’s at the same rate.

Today, Maycú protects 2,200 hectares (5,436 acres) of lush tropical rainforest surrounding one of the region’s emblematic tabletop — tepui — mountains. Within the reserve, NCE are painstakingly restoring some areas of pastureland back to native tropical rainforest, while other areas of intact primary forest and thriving secondary forests are safeguarded.

Since 2017, NCE have created a national-scale plan to ensure the survival of the entire Ecuadorian Amazon and have since had great success in declaring vast Conservation and Sustainable Use Areas (ACUS) in three Amazonian provinces, including Zamora Chinchipe. The ACUSs cover 4.19 million hectares (10.4 million acres) to date, including 405,720 hectares (1,002,555 acres) in Zamora Chinchipe. They also encompass the majority of the Maycú reserve and surrounding Indigenous territories.

The current stage of this project is the development of a provincial-scale REDD+ implementation plan which will attract long-term, international carbon finance to the province for conservation of native forests. This should allow WLT to step away once this five-year Carbon Balanced project comes to an end in 2025 and, in preparation to reset the project’s emissions reduction baseline, WLT has now ceased sales of carbon credits from Maycú. NCEs wider work and vision to safeguard the entire Ecuadorian Amazon will ensure the continued, long-term protection of Maycú.

From 2010 to 2018, WLT worked closely with our partner Guyra Paraguay, with funding from international business conglomerate Swire Pacific, to establish two Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) carbon projects in different regions of Paraguay. These projects protect land in the Chaco-Pantanal and San Rafael regions of Paraguay. Rich in biodiversity, culture, and vital to local livelihoods, the landscape is highly threatened by cattle ranching and intensive agriculture which have greatly increased in Paraguay over the last two decades.

In the Chaco-Pantanal, over 4,700 hectares (11,614 acres) of highly biodiverse forest were purchased in partnership with the Union de Comunidades de la Nación Yshir (UCINY) representing the Yshir Indigenous community. The Yshir communities co-own and manage the area until the end of the project’s 20-year timeframe when full ownership will be handed over to them. Meanwhile, in San Rafael, Guyra Paraguay partnered with local campesino (subsistence farmer) communities to protect over 1,100 hectares (2,718 acres) of land in the Paraná Atlantic, some of the last remaining areas of highly threatened Atlantic Forest habitat in the country.

These two projects were developed and certified under both the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) and the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Standard (CCB) and together produce carbon benefits of over 10,000 tCO2e per year. Following WLT’s role in the design, development and certification of these projects, the ongoing management of these projects was then fully handed over to Guyra Paraguay in 2019. These projects were implemented for Swire Pacific’s objectives to prioritise nature-based environmental solutions and as part of their ambition to achieve net zero emissions.

In 2014, Carbon Balanced began supporting our partner Viet Nature Conservation Centre (Viet Nature) to protect and encourage the natural regeneration of over 21,000 hectares (51,892 acres) of the Khe Nuoc Trong forest in Quang Binh province, Vietnam.

Since then, WLT and our supporters have made direct, positive impacts to the forest, its wildlife, and people. One of the most celebrated of these is in 2021 when Viet Nature successfully secured the upgrading of Khe Nuoc Trong from a Watershed Protection Forest to a Nature Reserve, bringing new levels of awareness, protection and crucial resources from Vietnam’s central government.

Over the past 10 years, Carbon Balanced has funded a team of locally employed Viet Nature rangers whose dedicated work has helped protect the forest from threats such as illegal logging, hunting, and trapping. Two new community awareness protection teams were also established to bolster patrols and organise campaigns on issues such as reducing the demand for illegal bushmeat. Alongside this protection, Carbon Balanced has helped fund wildlife monitoring and research into key species within Khe Nuoc Trong, and the advancement of the Khe Nuoc Trong Management Board to provide the resources needed for ongoing and long-term biodiversity protection.

To address the issue of local poverty as one of the main drivers of forest degradation, WLT funding has also helped Viet Nature establish programmes including the Le Thuy Forest Owners’ Sustainable Development Association (FOSDA), the An Thien sustainable forest collective, and FSC-certified timber plantation pilot projects to provide long-term sustainable livelihoods for the people living near the reserve. All these activities supported by Carbon Balanced have provided measurable carbon emissions reductions through avoiding the degradation of Khe Nuoc Trong’s standing forest.

In 2023, Quang Binh province – which includes the Khe Nuoc Trong forest – became one of six provinces covered by a pilot REDD+ project run by Vietnam’s central government. Implementation of this jurisdictional scale project was officially launched in October 2022 and covers a crediting period from February 2018 to December 2024. Although carbon credits are no longer sold through the Carbon Balanced programme, the £1.34 million funding that WLT provided to the project from 2014-2024 leaves a lasting legacy for biodiversity, climate, and the communities here.