Verification audit

The end of March was spent preparing for the verification audit. Around thirty plots were initially selected at random. Of these, the auditors check half, generally based on the stratum. For example, three plots sown in 2021, four from 2022, three from 2023, and so on. To ensure the site visit programme can be completed within a few days, it is also important to check that each plot is accessible.

On the selected plots, our partners at South Pole insisted that the GUIDRE teams repeat the tree measurements taken in November, to be absolutely certain of avoiding any unpleasant surprises. The tree measurements taken in the presence of the auditors must correspond exactly to those taken before the audit. There is no room for error. Yet surprises cannot be ruled out: traces of past fires or livestock grazing, a baseline tree that has been ‘overlooked’ or ‘added’… several issues that will then need to be explained and justified to the auditors. And then there are the unforeseen complications of the journey: UNHAS has once again cancelled a domestic flight at the last minute, and we’ve had to organise the auditors’ journey by road from Conakry to Linko. Covering 800 km in 24 hours to keep to the audit schedule is quite a challenge!

Despite these minor issues, the audit went very well from 7 to 11 April, thanks to everyone’s good humour and the Guinean interpreter, who was far more competent than the previous one. After all, it is not just a matter of measuring trees: the auditors also want to interview beneficiaries in the villages to ensure that all the co-benefits we claim to generate are actually real.

We were even able to save time on the programme because the auditors decided to re-measure only a sample of trees per plot. But there was a slight problem: the new measurements taken during the audit often revealed a greater number of trees taller than 2 metres than the measurements taken in November, six months earlier. The reason was quite simple: the four days of exceptional rainfall in March (due to climate change…) had immediately caused young trees to grow above the 2-metre mark!

In the field, Pranam takes charge of measuring the trees, whilst Adak interviews the landowners with the help of the interpreter:

The audit concluded on a very positive note, as the Carbon Check auditors identified just one ‘finding’ relating to fieldwork: during future checks, we will need to mark the trees measured during our forest inventory, so that only those trees are re-measured during the audit (and not those that have grown as a result of the rain).