Loru Forest Project — Serakar Clan Community Carbon, Espiritu Santo (Vanuatu)

The Loru Forest Project, established in 2013 on the north-eastern coast of Espiritu Santo island in Vanuatu, is the flagship initiative of the Nakau Programme, the Pacific region's first payments-for-ecosystem-services scheme, developed with implementation partner Live & Learn Environmental Education Vanuatu. What distinguishes Loru within the Plan Vivo family of projects is that the Serakar Clan, the customary landowners, legally hold and manage the carbon rights themselves rather than ceding them to an external intermediary, keeping control and revenue with the community.

The clan protects 293 hectares of coastal rainforest from conversion to pasture and copra production — the counterfactual baseline used in its Plan Vivo carbon accounting — providing habitat for threatened species including the Vanuatu megapode and coconut crab. The project's verified emission reductions are registered on the IHS Markit Environmental Registry; carbon retailers reselling its credits report figures ranging from roughly 26,500 to over 44,000 tCO2e depending on the reporting vintage, a discrepancy that has not been reconciled in public sources and is noted here for transparency rather than resolved by assumption. Community income includes direct forest-protection payments plus revenue from a native tree nursery and garden produce.

Loru's community-ownership model won the United Nations' 2019 Equator Prize and was the subject of an independent 2020 master's thesis at Victoria University of Wellington examining its social and economic impacts on Indigenous landowners — one of the few academically scrutinised small Pacific Plan Vivo projects. Reported beneficiary numbers also vary across sources, from around 50 individuals in five extended families to 130 individuals; this range, rather than a single figure, is the honest state of public documentation.

Read the full analysis: https://nakau.org/projects/loru-vanuatu