Santa Elena 2020-2024

Ten years of monitored sequestration in Bolivia

A project by Ketrawe Foundation, part of the BosquesRC project

Every credit you buy pays for the conservation of the Amazon rainforest. It funds the long-term work of keeping that forest standing, which means protecting the habitat the wildlife there depends on and keeping the carbon in the trees out of the atmosphere instead of releasing it through clearance. The impact is measurable, and it lasts as long as the forest does.

Santa Elena is the monitored area of Ketrawe's BosquesRC carbon offsetting project in Bolivia. It covers 381.1 hectares, divided into three polygons of about 127 hectares each, all classified as evergreen broadleaf forest under the IGBP scheme.

What the monitoring shows

CarbonSpace monitored the area from 1 January 2015 to 31 December 2024.

• Net sequestration in every year of that period

• Ten-year average of -4,971 tCO2 (-13.0 tCO2/ha)

• Roughly -49,708 tCO2 sequestered in total

• Sequestration in all twelve months of the 2024 reporting year

• Monitoring verified by Control Union at system level under ISO 14064-3, so no project-level verification is required

Threats to the forest

The forest is currently at risk of being cleared for cattle pasture. Certifying its carbon is how Ketrawe intends to prevent that. All income from the credits funds that protection, covering both the area monitored here and the roughly 3,000 hectares of forest around it.

Credit stock

This credit stock is for the 2020-2024 vintage. Across those five years Santa Elena sequestered a cumulative -25,484 tCO2, an annual average of -5,097 tCO2 (-13.4 tCO2/ha), ahead of the ten-year average of -4,971 tCO2. The strongest year of the whole monitoring period falls in this vintage: 2022, at -5,609 tCO2 (-14.7 tCO2/ha). The next strongest year within the vintage was 2023, at -5,476 tCO2 (-14.4 tCO2/ha).

 

Of the verified volume for this vintage, 80% is offered for sale. The remaining 20% is held back as an insurance buffer and is not available for purchase.

In the 2024 reporting year the area recorded -4,498 tCO2 (-11.8 tCO2/ha), about 9.5% below the ten-year average. Every month of 2024 was in sequestration. Uptake was strongest in May (-553 tCO2) and November (-539 tCO2), and weakest in June (-205 tCO2) and February (-243 tCO2).

Polygon results for 2024:

 

The full monitoring dataset is in the CarbonSpace Ketrawe BosquesRC report, in the statistics section.

Ketrawe Foundation

Ketrawe developed and pioneered a planting system using native and exotic trees, a fusion of windbreaks and traditional tree plantations. The system lets farmers add value to their land while increasing agricultural yields, and it improves water conditions and fertility while reducing erosion. Farmers have adopted it voluntarily and widely. The outcomes Ketrawe reports are higher land value, increased income for farming families, fewer forest fires, and a working balance between farmers, agriculture, trees and the environment.

How the carbon is measured

The project uses CarbonSpace, a digital monitoring, reporting and verification tool that estimates Net Ecosystem Exchange: the net exchange of CO2 between the atmosphere and all ecosystem carbon pools over a period of time. Estimates come from machine learning models trained on satellite imagery and CO2 flux data from ground stations that measure carbon fluxes using the eddy covariance method. Negative values represent sequestration and positive values represent emission.

NEE accounts for all the natural carbon pools in a single figure: aboveground tree biomass, aboveground non-tree biomass, belowground biomass, litter, deadwood, soil organic carbon, and harvested biomass and residues. Using NEE rather than measuring each pool separately reduces the complexity and uncertainty involved in individual measurements.

Carbon fluxes are tracked monthly. Results pass through CarbonSpace's quality assurance process, in which output estimates are compared against reference values from eddy covariance stations for the relevant land cover, reviewed by science staff, checked against published literature where practical, and checked for consistency with known project attributes such as climatic conditions and seasonal dynamics.

Verification standards

• Methodology: CarbonSpace dMRV, Technology Version 2.0

• System verification: ISO 14064-3, independently verified by Control Union. Version 1.0 was assessed between May and August 2023. Version 2.0 was assessed from 26 September to 16 October 2025, with the verification report dated 24 November 2025

• Assurance: AA1000AS (V3), covering the preparation and communication of sustainability-related information, following a moderate review

• Eligible uses: corporate narrative claims and sustainability disclosures, corporate GHG accounting under the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard and ISO 14064-1, product life cycle assessments under the GHG Protocol Product Standard and ISO 14040/44, target setting in line with SBTi, and carbon accounting for nature-based solutions including insetting and offsetting

• Project-level verification: not required, as results are verified at system level