Deep dives
Sixty cocktails from Lake Victoria: twenty-one growers, a bike race, and the bitters bottle that pays for the forest
On a hillside above Lake Victoria, twenty-one smallholders hand-pollinate vanilla under a canopy of banana and shade trees. In May 2025 they raced bicycles through Nkokonjeru to celebrate the first harvest sold under their own name. Today that harvest is a one-ounce bottle of cocktail bitters on Amazon and on the back bar of the Beverly Wilshire. This is what it looks like when the land pays before the credits do.
Wovoka launches Ghost Dance, a field verification app that pays communities per geotagged photo
Satellites see a fraction of Mindanao on any given day. Ghost Dance turns the people who live on the land into the ground-truth layer: a geotagged photo inside a project boundary, reviewed by a manager, paid the same week. First deployment with FEMMATRICS in Bukidnon in October.
The project that vanished came back with a new name
Verra project 5584 dropped out of the registry export last week. This week it is back as Krasop Blue Carbon, with a new proponent, a new validator and a three-methodology stack. Here is what a delisting followed by a relisting usually means.
64 registered projects in Southeast Asia are late to verify. Thailand is 26 of them.
A registered project that misses its verification window is the most informative row on the registry and the least reported. We counted them.
Singapore's 12 million tonne tender is the demand signal. Authorisation is the bottleneck.
Stage two of Singapore's ITMO procurement briefed pre-qualified bidders on 23 September. The Philippines, Vietnam and Laos are eligible suppliers. None of their forestry projects hold a Letter of Authorisation yet.
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