What is the ten-year rule?
Land proposed for a Gold Standard afforestation or reforestation activity must not have been forest for at least the ten years preceding the activity. The rule exists to ensure the project is establishing tree cover that was genuinely absent, rather than claiming credit for a forest that was recently cleared or would have regrown anyway.
It is an eligibility screen, not a scoring factor: land either satisfies it or the activity is not eligible on that land. That makes it one of the very first questions to answer about a candidate site, and one of the most expensive to discover late.
What is the protected area requirement?
At least ten per cent of the total project area must be set aside as a protected area, for the purpose of protecting or enhancing biological diversity. It is a design constraint on the project rather than a reporting obligation.
In practice it has to be planned into the land allocation from the beginning, because it affects how much of the area is productive and therefore the project's economics. Retrofitting a tenth of the area into protection after planting is considerably harder than designing it in.
Which activities are eligible?
The Land-use and Forests Activity Requirements cover a range of activity types rather than plantation forestry alone, which is what makes the standard workable for smallholder and mixed-use landscapes.
- Silvicultural systems.
- Conservation forests, and forests with selective harvesting or rotation forestry.
- Agroforestry.
- Silvopasture.
Agroforestry and silvopasture being explicitly eligible matters for the kind of work we support, where trees are integrated into working farmland rather than replacing it. See agroforestry carbon projects.
How do you actually check land history?
Ten years of land-use history is a spatial question, and it is answered from satellite imagery rather than from documents. Historical land cover for a candidate parcel can be reconstructed and checked against the eligibility rule before any commitment is made.
This is the cheapest diligence available on a carbon project and among the most consequential: a parcel that fails the ten-year test fails it regardless of how good everything else about the project is. Flora Carbon AI's land screening and land-use and land-cover mapping exists for exactly this question — see forest carbon monitoring. The rules themselves are catalogued in the Gold Standard document library.