Karnataka Regenerative Farming

CNaught maintains a very high quality standard for all projects in the portfolios we manage. To ensure that a project meets this standard, we perform due diligence that’s backed up by third-party ratings agencies’ independent due diligence. 
 Additionality:
This project has high additionality, meaning it is very unlikely that this project activity could have occurred in the absence of carbon funding. While Karnataka has seen some growth in organic and regenerative agriculture, adoption remains marginal — certified organic farmland stood at around 93,963 hectares by 2016, compared to over 12 million hectares managed under conventional agriculture in the state. The project’s participating farmers face significant barriers to adoption, including high upfront implementation costs and the need for specialized technical knowledge, challenges that are particularly acute given that 78% of participating farmers are subsistence farmers primarily dependent on agriculture for food security and livelihood. While Karnataka’s Organic Farming Policy provides some institutional support, it is limited in scope and funding, and has not been sufficient to drive large-scale adoption of these practices across the state. Carbon finance is therefore critical to making the project viable, enabling the developer to provide the training, inputs, and technical assistance necessary to bring nearly 30,000 farmers into the program.
Over-Crediting:
This project has a low risk of over-crediting, meaning that it is likely to have accurately accounted for the amount of carbon being reduced and removed from the atmosphere. The project uses the well-established RothC soil carbon model to estimate changes in soil organic carbon over time, and has gone beyond what the methodology requires by conducting two rigorous soil sampling campaigns — collecting 397 samples at baseline and an additional 730 samples during the first monitoring period — to calibrate and validate the model. Validation results showed deviations within 15%, confirming the model performs reliably across the project landscape, and the project’s reported sequestration rate of 3.05 tCO₂e per hectare per year falls within our benchmark range of 0.86 to 3.25 tCO₂e per hectare per year based on peer-reviewed literature. The project further stratifies its 57,516 hectares into 16 distinct biophysical zones based on IPCC climate regions and soil types to ensure carbon estimates account for variability across the project area, and applies conservative uncertainty deductions where estimates exceed acceptable thresholds. While the project does not sample soil across every individual field due to the operational complexity of repeatedly sampling tens of thousands of fields, this is only likely to introduce a small over-crediting risk that is balanced by a conservative crediting deduction that the project takes to offset this risk. Leakage risk is minimal, as all project activities take place within existing cropland boundaries with no displacement of agricultural production or land conversion expected elsewhere.

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Durability:
This project activity is highly durable with low risk of reversal over the project’s lifetime. Natural hazards including fire, flooding, drought, and extreme winds pose minimal risk to the project area, with historical data confirming only low-intensity fire events and negligible flood exposure across the project landscape. The project’s own regenerative agriculture activities actively reduce these risks by improving soil structure and water retention, making soils more resilient to erosion, drought, and flooding. The highly dispersed nature of the project across 57,516 hectares across multiple agro-climatic zones in Karnataka further limits the likelihood that any single natural event could affect a meaningful portion of the project area. On the anthropogenic side, carbon rights are clearly defined and all participating land parcels are privately owned by farmers with documented land titles. Farmers are bound by long-term legally binding agreements that require sustainable land management practices to be maintained for 40 years, extending 10 years beyond the project’s 30-year crediting period, significantly reducing the risk of early farmer withdrawal. The project’s continuous training, input support, and revenue-sharing arrangement create strong and sustained economic incentives for farmers to remain engaged throughout the project’s lifetime. The project also allocates 10% of generated carbon credits to a buffer pool to account for any unforeseen carbon stock losses, providing an additional layer of protection.

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Double-Counting:
The project credits have a very low risk of being double counted. There are no regulatory obligations being met by the project activity and the project’s registry, Verra, has mechanisms in place to ensure that the project is not registered in any other programs. We confirmed that there are no other regenerative agriculture or similar nature-based carbon projects that overlap with any of the project areas.