The Climate, Community & Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA) is an initiative led by Conservation International, CARE, The Nature Conservancy, Rainforest Alliance, and the Wildlife Conservation Society to promote the development of land management activities.
The CCBA was established in 2003 and works to increase public and private investment in forest protection, restoration and agroforestry by developing standards intended to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases.
The Climate, Community and Biodiversity Standards are in use by more than 100 projects around the world. The Climate, Community & Biodiversity (CCB) Standards enable investors, policymakers, project managers and civil society observers to evaluate land-based climate change mitigation projects by identifying high-quality projects that adopt best practices to generate significant benefits for local communities and biodiversity while delivering credible and robust carbon offsets.
CCB Standards seek to:
The CCB Standards have become a widely used international standard for the multiple-benefits of land-based carbon projects. The CCB Standards provide rules and guidance to encourage effective and integrated project design. The Standards can be applied early on during a project’s design phase to validate projects that have been well designed, are suitable to local conditions and are likely to achieve significant climate, community and biodiversity benefits. This validation helps to build support for the project at a crucial stage and attract funding or other assistance from key stakeholders, including investors, governments and other important local, national and international partners. The CCB Standards can be applied throughout the life of the project to evaluate the social and environmental impacts of land based carbon projects. The standards can be combined very effectively with a carbon accounting standard, such as, the CarbonFix Standard (CFS), the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) or the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS).
Only projects that use best practices and deliver significant climate, community and biodiversity benefits will earn CCB approval. Gold status is awarded to projects that satisfy one of the optional criteria by providing exceptional benefits including explicit design for adaptation to climate change, benefits for globally poorer communities, or conservation of biodiversity at sites of global conservation significance.
The CCB Standards can be combined with many other standards, such as the Clean Development Mechanism, or the Verified Carbon Standard. In this case, the CCB Standards provide a basis for evaluating a project’s social and environmental impact, while the carbon accounting standard enables verification and registration of quantified greenhouse gas emissions reductions or removals. In this way, the CCB Standards verify the social and environmental benefits generated by the project, enabling investors to select carbon credits with additional benefits, while screening out projects with unacceptable social and environmental impacts.