Key Procedural Changes

Up until this point, the Plan Vivo has issued ex-ante and ex-post PVCs, primarily for tree-planting and ANR/REDD projects respectively. The assignment and retirement of both unit types has been possible. In order to offer greater transparency around when climate benefits are delivered, Plan Vivo has identified the need to re-define its unit types.

Concluding meetings and consultations with key stakeholder groups, the Plan Vivo Foundation proposes creating three different categories of PVCs to offer greater transparency of what Plan Vivo project activities are currently delivering: 

A conversion process will be created for PVCs that are allocated to the Non-Permanence Buffer. This will act in a similar manner to the conversion process for saleable PVCs. E.g., upon a successful verification, a project that issued fPVCs or rPVCs will have a proportion of the PVCs, which they previously allocated to the Non-Permanence Buffer, converted into vPVCs.

If a claim is made on the Non-Permanence Buffer, due to a force-majeure reversal event, then any reversed credits will be compensated by buffer credits of a corresponding type. E.g. reversals of vPVCs will be compensated only by vPVCs in the Non-Permanence Buffer.

Projects with the capacity to generate climate benefits of less or equal to 10,000 tCO2 annually are considered microscale. Projects with the capacity to generate climate benefits of more than 10,000 tCO2 annually are considered macroscale.

Whether a project is considered macroscale or microscale will influence the routes by which a project can be audited. Specifically, macroscale projects must undertake validations and verifications using Validation & Verification Bodies (VVBs), whilst microscale projects can complete validations and verifications through the Internal Validation and Verification Process. The objective of this change is to minimise the financial pressure of the auditing process on the smallest of projects, whilst also maintaining a high level of quality assurance to buyers.

For more information, please see the Validation & Verification requirements and the draft Validation & Verification Guidance.

Under the 2013 version of the Plan Vivo Standard, projects could submit their own bespoke Approved Approaches to estimating climate benefits, or apply a generalised Approved Approach that had been prior reviewed and accepted by the Plan Vivo Foundation.

Under the new version of the Standard, projects may only apply methodologies that meet the criteria outlined in the Methodology Requirements and that have been prior approved by the Plan Vivo Foundation. Projects currently using Approved Approaches must re-submit their Approved Approaches for approval prior to applying under the new version of the Standard. Alternatively, projects may migrate to a new methodology that has been prior-approved under the new version of the Standard.

This move to methodologies is to ensure that the Standard continues to meet the best practice of the VCM, to ensure that markets are available to projects in the future, and to reduce the barrier to project coordinators that may not have the capacity to create bespoke Approved Approaches.

The Plan Vivo Foundation aims to develop methodologies for all major project types that are certified to the 2013 Plan Vivo Standard. All new methodologies will be available for public consultation before they are officially released. If any project coordinators or developers would like to create a methodology and submit it to the Plan Vivo Foundation for consideration, please contact the Plan Vivo Secretariat for more information.

All existing projects are encouraged to migrate to the Standard V5.0 as early as possible. The maximum time frame to migrate over to the new version of the Standard is one verification cycle (typically 5 years). Any projects undergoing verifications in 2022 will be given an additional verification cycle.

All projects applying for Plan Vivo Certification from 2022 onwards will be certified against Standard V5.0.

Projects which have already submitted a PIN prior to 2022, will be able to use the previous version of the Plan Vivo Standard for project development if their validation is within two years of the PIN being submitted.

The current costs and fees associated with the Plan Vivo certification cycle are under review. We cannot yet provide specifics on the new fee structures, but we will endeavour to continue to keep costs low for projects and minimise any financial barriers to registration.

We will communicate our new fee structures to current and prospective projects as soon as possible.