Carbon and restoration projects: safeguards screening with land tenure and consent flags
Carbon and restoration projects live or die on their safeguards file: whose land the project polygons are on, whether the community's free, prior and informed consent has been sought, whether a protected area or an international designation constrains the activity, and what lives there. The major crediting standards ask for stakeholder consultation and for FPIC where Indigenous Peoples' lands and resources are affected. ERWAY Legality Assessment produces the desktop part of that file per polygon: tenure status, the consent flag, protected-area and designation overlaps, and a species context kept separate from the outcome.
Project polygons come in as GeoJSON with the parcel or landholder reference as identity. Each is checked against land-tenure records for Indigenous Peoples and local communities — documented, recognised but undocumented, claim submitted, customary — and against protected areas, heritage and wetland designations and threatened-species records. The project counts its polygons needing community consent and names the source that decided each outcome. The country panel gives the tenure-security context and says it describes the country, not the parcel. The Indigenous-land screening page details the tenure logic; the threatened-species page covers the species panel.
Tenure before consultation
Consultation is a process; tenure is a record. The screening establishes the second so the first can be planned: which polygons lie on recognised Indigenous land, which on a community's customary pasture, which on a claim under review. An absence of records is not an absence of rights, as the product states on the source card — but a documented title on three of forty polygons is something a project developer wants to know before the first village meeting, not after.
Designations and species
A restoration polygon inside a Biosphere Reserve's core zone is tier 1; one in its transition zone is tier 5 and may need a permit; one near a wetland boundary is a question for the wetland authority. Threatened-species records inside and within a kilometre are grouped by threat category with a risk from none to high; they never change the outcome, and the species panel states this on every view, because a record of a critically endangered species is context for the safeguards, not a legal restriction.
What remains the developer's
Consultation and consent, the grievance mechanism, the baseline, additionality and the validation. The screening is preliminary and every finding is labelled accordingly; where a national register is the authority, the page tells you to consult it. Its output is the dated file — per polygon, with source and tier — that the validator's safeguards review starts from. For a forestry or plantation project the same record serves the certification.