World Bank carbon credits

Baseline soil carbon stock maps for a carbon credit programme in Mpumalanga, South Africa.

Carbon credits depend on knowing how much carbon is in the soil before anything changes. For a World Bank–funded carbon credit programme in Mpumalanga, South Africa, we created the baseline soil carbon stock maps using spatial mixed models, which account for how carbon varies across the landscape and how confident each estimate is.

These baselines are the reference that every future change in soil carbon is measured against.

Illustrative example of soil organic carbon mapped with depth and summed over the whole profile, from separate work. Maps from the World Bank programme are under NDA and not shown.