The EX-ante Appraisal Carbon-balance Tool (EX-ACT)
EX-ACT provides ex-ante evaluation of the impact of agriculture and forestry development projects on GHG emissions and C sequestration, indicating its effects on the carbon balance.
The logic behind EXACT is based on the comparison of a dynamic business as usual scenario with a with-project scenario.
EX-ACT has been developed using mostly the Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories (IPCC, 2006) completed with other existing methodologies (ADEME2, European Environmental Agency, AFD3, A/R CDM, voluntary C markets) in order to be acceptable to the scientific community.
The EX-ACT Tool
The tool consists of a set of linked Microsoft Excel sheets in which the project designer will insert basic data on land use and management practices foreseen under the project’s activities. It adopts a modular approach – each “module” describing a specific land use – and following a three-step logical framework:
- general description of the project (geographic area, climate and soil, duration of the project);
- identification of changes in land use and technologies foreseen by the project (deforestation, afforestation/reforestation, annual/perennial crops, rice, grasslands, livestock, inputs, energy); and
- computation of C-balance with and without the project using IPCC default values and – when available – ad-hoc coefficients.
It therefore requires a minimum amount of data that are usually collected in the phase of project appraisal.
