Q&A

According to SustainCERT Verification Requirements for Value Chain Interventions v0.9, Leakage is the unanticipated decrease or increase in greenhouse gas benefits outside of an intervention’s accounting boundary resulting from the intervention’s activities. For example, your intervention of planting shade trees for shade-grown coffee may lead to activity shifting leakage if carried out on lands that already have other productive uses. OR, your intervention is actually a plantation project that displaces farmers and leads them to clear adjacent forests in order to grow their crops. Good project design (including stakeholder consultations) and careful site selections can help avoid such activity shifting.

In the context of 4.5, the monitoring plan is the system put in place for acquiring the parameters needed for quantification of GHG emissions. In this sense, the parameters listed in the plan are the same as ‘data’ needed for quantification. However, there are other ‘data requirements’ notably in section 5 of the SC VC Requirements v0.9.

These are good examples to follow in that there is a table per parameter (Days, number of animals, kg of food ingredient purchased, etc). As previously mentioned, it is good practice to follow these since it is a top-down methodology, already approved and recognize.  

However, note that the two sections you mention (data at validation and data monitored) are peculiar to VM0041 which is rather different from other methodologies. Studies & secondary data (meta-analyses)  inform the baseline and the enteric methane reduction factor (where the cattle informing the meta-analysis must be representative of the cows that are in the intervention). Primary and variable data is then gathered mainly for the food additive. There is also an option for continuously monitoring a control group to inform the baseline.