The Kenya sites passed their first independent carbon check

An outside auditor spent two weeks on our oldest Kenyan plots in November, measuring the carbon stored there from scratch rather than taking our word for it. Their verified figure came in 6% below our own estimate, and we are genuinely glad about that.

The logic is simple once you think it through. When an independent team measures less carbon than you claimed, it means your own method was not flattering you, and that is the thing you most need to know. When they find more than you claimed, you got lucky on this occasion and your method is still suspect.

Ours came in a little under, and within the error bound the method paper sets out. That is roughly where a careful estimate should sit, slightly conservative, never reaching for the highest number the data could bear.

Dr Amara Okonkwo's tightening of the carbon method over the past year is part of why the two figures were close at all. A looser method could easily have been out by a quarter in either direction, and an audit then tells you nothing useful.

The audit did more than check a number. It flagged two plots where tree survival was meaningfully worse than our own records had shown, which means our monitoring had missed something on the ground.

We have sent a team back to those two plots to work out why the survival is poor before we plant the next phase anywhere near them. There is no point repeating a planting that is quietly failing, and the audit doing our doubting for us is exactly what an audit is for.