Delta Blue Carbon

Inside the project

Indus Delta Capital partnered with the Government of Sindh in 2015 to restore the arid-climate mangroves of the Indus Delta, a Key Biodiversity Area on Pakistan's Arabian Sea coast. The Sindh Government provides the land while IDCL finances the restoration, which spans roughly 350,000 hectares in Phase 1.

Registered under Verra's VCS and CCB standards (triple-gold CCB) using the VM0033 tidal-wetland methodology, the project is projected to sequester about 142 million tonnes of CO2e over 60 years, roughly 2.4 Mt per year. Its first issuance yielded approximately 3.1 million credits, bought by buyers including Microsoft, Trafigura and Respira International.

The project is built around its communities: roughly 60 villages and 43,000 residents sit inside the project area, with more than 11,000 people working directly as stewards who plant, measure and monitor the forest, and an estimated 15,000 jobs created.

Objectives

• Restore arid-climate mangrove across the Indus Delta tidal zone
• Deliver triple-gold VCS+CCB carbon removals under VM0033
• Employ 11,000+ community stewards and create ~15,000 jobs
• Protect threatened species and a Key Biodiversity Area
• Build a wall-to-wall digital MRV measurement stack

Approach

• Delta Blue Carbon combines thousands of community-collected ground plots with a digital MRV stack: UAV/drone surveys, LiDAR and multispectral imaging for wall-to-wall biomass coverage, fused via spatial-regression and allometric models.
• Multi-temporal NDVI/EVI satellite analysis confirms no flood or cyclone dieback, a soil-carbon coring program replaces generic IPCC default rates with delta-specific values, and all of it is externally audited under Verra.