The CBP project was implemented by UNEP’s Division of Global Environment Facility Coordination (DGEF) and executed by UNEP’s Division of Early Warning and Assessment (DEWA) in association with two scientific consortiums, a Modelling Component led by Colorado State University (CSU) and a Measurement and Monitoring Component led by WWF.
The CBP consortium has developed scientifically rigorous, cost-effective tools to establish the net carbon benefits of sustainable land management interventions in terms of protected or enhanced carbon stocks and reduced greenhouse-gas emissions. The component led by CSU has developed three options for assessing the C benefits and greenhouse gas emissions of a project:
- Simple assessment—suitable for a quick assessment at any stage, including proposals;
- Detailed assessment—suitable for detailed reporting in projects with a reasonable focus on climate change mitigation;
- Dynamic or Complex modeling option—for users with a scientific background who wish to model carbon stock changes in projects with a carbon focus.
The CBP-system is applicable at various levels of scale, from national level to the project level. It is freely available from UNEP as a web-accessible system hosted by CSU.
Within the Modelling Component, ISRIC provided global soil information for carbon stock assessment across the range of world climate zones, soil types and land use. The resulting SOCref data can be used for IPCC Tier I (national scale) level inventory assessments with the CBP tool's 'simple assessment' option in data poor regions; however, the associated uncertainties are very large.
More detailed data, derived from field monitoring and long-term chronosequence studies, are needed at project-level to verify projections of the process-based models; such data sets were compiled and used for model validation by the respective test case partners.