Isangi REDD+ Project

Inside the project

The Isangi REDD+ project (Verra VCS ID 1359), also called the Jadora REDD+ project, was an avoided-deforestation and sustainable forest management project on land that had been two industrial logging concessions operated since 2004 by Société Africaine de Bois (Safbois).

In 2009 the carbon rights to the remaining forest were transferred to US-based Jadora LLC; reported project area figures range from about 187,571 hectares (project documentation) to roughly 201,731 hectares (project databases), with the wider concession footprint cited around 348,000 hectares.

Verra validated and verified the project to the VCS and Climate, Community & Biodiversity (CCB) Standards in September 2014, with a crediting period running 2009–2038; first credits were sold in May 2015.

After Jadora CEO Donald Tuttle died, Safbois moved to buy Jadora and the project's carbon rights (process begun August 2017, completed around May 2018), bringing it under the control of Safbois shareholders Daniel, David and James Blattner.

As viewed in September 2026, Verra's registry lists VCS 1359 as withdrawn, with 1,391,623 units issued, 1,291,248 retired and 308,284 contributed to the buffer.

Image credit

SofiaStorl, Wiki Loves Africa 2019, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia CommonsImage source ↗

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Objectives

• Reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation across the Congo Basin rainforest in the Isangi concessions.
• Address deforestation drivers including fuelwood, agricultural expansion and subsistence farming.
• Deliver community benefits such as schools, roads, healthcare and clarified land tenure alongside carbon revenue.
• Generate verified VCS carbon credits over a 2009–2038 crediting period.

Approach

• REDD+ avoided-deforestation methodology under Verra's VCS, with credits backed by a buffer pool held as insurance against reversals and carbon accounted across above-ground biomass, dead wood, litter and soil organic carbon pools.
• Community-development interventions (employment, monetary benefits, tenure clarification) were intended to reduce deforestation pressure, with periodic monitoring and verification reports filed to the Verra registry over the crediting period.