Hiniduma Bio-Link Project — Plan Vivo Home-Garden Reforestation (Sri Lanka)

The Hiniduma Bio-Link, Asia's first Plan Vivo-certified project, was designed to reconnect two of Sri Lanka's largest remaining rainforest fragments — the Sinharaja and Kanneliya reserves — by reforesting the farmed lowland wet-zone landscape between them, part of a wider proposed biodiversity corridor of roughly 23,473 hectares. The project is run by the Carbon Consulting Company with the Hiniduma Bio-Link Society, representing smallholder farmers in Hiniduma and neighbouring villages in Galle District.

Rather than establishing new plantations, the project pays farmers in staged instalments, funded by the sale of Plan Vivo Certificates, to reforest their traditional home gardens using the Analog Forestry method, which combines native and commercially useful tree species to mimic natural forest structure. Phases I and II covered around 11 hectares; Phase III, begun in 2013, added 17 farmers managing 8 hectares. The project design document, covering up to 2,000 hectares of the wider corridor, models sequestration of 152.14 tCO2 per hectare over a 15-year crediting period, after a 20% risk-buffer deduction, with the approach recognised by the UNDP Equator Initiative.

Because the published sequestration and hectare figures come chiefly from the project design document and an academic feasibility case study rather than a recent independent ex-post audit, they should be read as credited/modelled estimates rather than verified outturn, and outcomes are likely to vary farmer-to-farmer in a smallholder home-garden model that is inherently harder to monitor uniformly than a single-block plantation.

Read the full analysis: https://www.equatorinitiative.org/2020/04/24/solution11384/