ECOTRUST Bio-Credits Programme — Bugoma–Budongo Wildlife Corridor (Uganda)

The Environmental Conservation Trust of Uganda (ECOTRUST) runs a biodiversity-credit pilot in the Albertine Rift landscape between the Bugoma and Budongo Forest Reserves, an area supporting an estimated 5,000 remaining Ugandan chimpanzees and, regionally, 52% of Africa's bird species and 39% of its mammal species.

Pay landholders directly for restoring and maintaining habitat connectivity between the two forest reserves, rather than for carbon storage.

The pilot covers roughly 2,000 hectares of community and degraded land, including a mapped 1,228-hectare linkage segment reconnecting Bugoma to the smaller Wambabya forest, plus ten additional degraded community-land patches earmarked for restoration. The design was developed with IIED, ValueNature, Conserve Global and Plan Vivo, and funded in part by the UK government's Darwin Initiative.

As of the most recent public reporting, ECOTRUST and its partners had outlined the payment mechanism and pilot boundaries but had not yet confirmed sales of the biodiversity credits themselves; IIED's own project write-up notes the team hoped to reach credit sales in the pilot's second year.

There is, correspondingly, no independent pre/post verification yet of species recovery or habitat-quality change on the ground, and the scheme reports no carbon, water or fire-related outcomes — it is scoped purely around habitat connectivity.