Yaeda-Eyasi Landscape REDD+ Project (Tanzania)

The Yaeda-Eyasi Landscape REDD+ Project was established in 2011 by the Tanzanian social enterprise Carbon Tanzania to protect roughly 110,500 hectares of forest and savanna in the Yaeda Valley of Mbulu District, northern Tanzania. The land is the ancestral territory of the Hadza hunter-gatherers and Datoga pastoralists. The project uses the Plan Vivo standard to issue verified carbon certificates for measurable avoided deforestation, generating revenue from the voluntary carbon market rather than relying on external donor grants.

The project aims to protect Hadza and Datoga ancestral land from deforestation by turning avoided emissions into a saleable carbon asset that funds village-run forest protection. It also seeks to reconnect the Yaeda Valley to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area as part of a wider wildlife corridor.

Twelve participating villages hold annual votes on how carbon revenue is spent, typically funding Village Game Scout patrols against poaching and illegal logging, alongside health posts and household support. Carbon Tanzania measures and verifies avoided deforestation against a historical baseline under the Plan Vivo standard to issue certificates for sale on the voluntary carbon market.

By the end of 2022 the project had avoided a cumulative 652,082 tonnes of CO2 against its deforestation baseline, with 511,817 Plan Vivo certificates issued and sold since 2012. At least 60% of carbon revenue flows directly to the twelve participating villages under a formal revenue-sharing rule. Independent reporting notes the return of species such as the Masai giraffe along the restored wildlife corridor into the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, though no quantified biodiversity monitoring dataset was found in the sources reviewed. The project won the UNDP Equator Prize in 2019 for community-led conservation.

The project has scaled from an initial three-village pilot to today's twelve-village landscape over more than a decade of continuous operation. As with most REDD+ schemes, its avoided-deforestation baseline relies on a modelled counterfactual rather than a randomised control, so its carbon figures should be read as Plan Vivo-verified but methodologically observational evidence of impact.