Improved Forest Management (IFM) projects increase the carbon stored in existing forests relative to a business-as-usual baseline, which may reflect a counterfactual harvesting scenario or, in some methodologies, an initial carbon stock level.
Project activities are diverse and can include extending harvest rotation periods, reducing harvest intensity, adopting reduced-impact logging, and converting production forest to protected forest, as well as non-harvesting activities such as increased planting, improved stocking density, and enhanced soil management.
Because these activities avoid emissions and conserve standing biomass, IFM credits combine avoided emissions with continued removals.
This white paper explains how Sylvera derives a Rating for an IFM project from material data points provided by the project and benchmarked against independent, Sylvera-derived satellite data. This contains a description of each component used in the assessment, scoring logic which breaks down the rules used to derive a quality score for each component, and the data inputs used in specific tests
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