Project name: Boomitra Grassland Restoration

Preserving soil organic carbon is an urgent challenge globally. Unsustainable ranch management and lack of water conservation activity in Northern Mexico has led to severe land degradation, desertification, and loss of soil carbon. Lands that were formerly vibrant grasslands have been converted into barren surfaces with loosely scattered shrub vegetation. 

Boomitra’s Improved Grasslands Management Project is a nature-based carbon removal project located on 1.6 million acres of privately held and community lands (ejidos) in northern Mexico’s Chihuahua and Sonoran deserts.

The project acts to reverse land degradation and restore ranches to their native state, working with private landowners and communities to implement rotational grazing and water conservation practices using carbon finance. The project is currently undergoing validation and verification and is expected to receive CCB certification.

To follow best practices of conservative carbon accounting, the project only credits GHG removals. This reduces the risk of baseline manipulation e.g. having to prove counterfactual emissions scenarios.

Rotational grazing

Typically, ranching practices give livestock ongoing access to an entire pasture, leading to overgrazing. This causes soil degradation and loss of vegetative cover. In rotational grazing, only one portion of the pasture is grazed at a time, allowing for remaining pasture to rest. The resting pastures experience increases in soil carbon levels and sequestration of CO2 as the grass regrows.

Implementing water conservation efforts

Arid and semi-arid regions of Northern Mexico experience severe water scarcity. The region is prone to flash floods where rainwater moves quickly across the land surface. Less water infiltration occurs in degraded lands with sparse vegetation; much of the rainwater is lost and unavailable for regenerating the land. Implementing key lines, gabions and ponds/microbasins (interventions vary based on geography) help arrest surface water runoff and support the organic growth of biomass, as well as mitigating erosion. 

The project supports continued land ownership and preserves private and community ownership of working ranch lands. It also helps to ensure that landowners are compensated for implementing project interventions. Carbon credit payments provide a direct additional source of income for ranchers through project benefit sharing mechanisms.  

Landowner livelihoods are further improved through the increased productivity of the land. The regenerated lands also become much less likely to undergo land use change due to better sustained livelihoods. The Chihuahua Desert is considered the most diverse desert in the Western Hemisphere and is among the World’s most biodiverse arid regions.  

Restoration of degraded grasslands helps reduce further loss of habitat for the fauna of the region and promotes regeneration of natural flora (helping to restore the lands back to their native state). The project is designed to improve and conserve overall biodiversity and natural ecosystems, in support of initiatives including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), 1992.