Carbon projects often generate co-benefits in addition to climate mitigation (reduction or removal of greenhouse gas emissions). These impacts can be described in terms of their contributions to the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
VAI displays SDG contributions from two sources:
1) SELF-REPORTED
These are the SDGs claimed by the project proponent under their respective standard’s SDG framework, if available. Depending on the registry, projects may either be required to disclose SDG contributions or choose to voluntarily pursue SDG contribution recognition. The following “frameworks” are currently displayed on the platform:
- SDVista (VCS)
- SustainCert (Gold Standard)
- American Carbon Registry (ACR)
- Climate Action Reserve (CAR)
In general, the contribution claims vary in their alignment with the SDG targets and indicators, in part because of differences in interpretation and the broadness of certain targets. Hence, the VAI assessment serves to normalize these claims across registries.
2) VAI’s ASSESSMENT
VAI conducts an independent review to determine SDGs satisfied by each project. VAI’s assessment is presented in two stages:
- Preliminary:
- The preliminary stage includes a review of the project methodology. Almost 400 active and inactive methodologies from VCS, GS, CDM, CAR and ACR are evaluated to determine whether their allowed mitigation activities inherently impact any of the targets under the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
- If a methodology gives certainty that a target is being addressed by the project activity it supports, the target is assigned to projects across the board that utilize a given methodology.
- Complete:
- The most granular evidence we have to sustain SDG contribution claims are the project implementation documents. When VAI’s assessment is complete, SDGs from the preliminary stage are displayed along with SDGs identified through the project documentation.
- This stage of the assessment is meant to enhance existing SDG claims and shed light on the co-benefits from projects that do not have an additional SDG certification.
- To assess the contributions embedded in the project implementation documents (monitoring and verification documents), VAI uses a natural language processing model that has been developed and trained in-house to identify and extract sentences that indicate active contributions to specific SDGs and their underlying targets.
- The VAI SDG assessment allows users to compare SDG contributions across projects and registries since it normalizes claims and interpretations of the SDG targets.
Click here to download the full VAI SDG Evaluation Methodology..