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and similar communal landscapes thus exemplify contexts where climate vulnerability, racialized inequality,
and forest conservation converge .
[25]
Avoided-deforestation projects and jurisdictional REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and
forest Degradation) programs are a central pillar of efforts to channel finance towards forest conservation,
but their credibility has been weakened by evidence that methodological choices around baselines have
frequently led to substantially inflated emission-reduction claims [26-28] . In response to these concerns, new
governance initiatives in the voluntary carbon market - notably the Integrity Council for the Voluntary
Carbon Market (ICVCM) - have begun assessing crediting programs and methodologies against
“high-integrity” Core Carbon Principles, and several updated REDD+ frameworks, including VM0048 and
its Jurisdictional and Nested REDD+ Framework, have been revised and approved in line with this agenda,
for example, locality-matched or jurisdiction-based reference regions, probability-based accuracy assessment
for map-derived activity data, transparent baselines and explicit leakage analysis [29-34] . However, these
frameworks remain largely actor-neutral, meaning a hectare of forest is treated largely the same whether
governed by smallholders, large landholders, or traditional communities, provided safeguard conditions are
met. Therefore, the livelihood vulnerability and social equity barriers can’t be addressed properly [35-37] .
Additionally, empirical cost studies show that implementing such best practice entails substantial fixed costs
for monitoring, reporting and verification - including participatory planning, institutional coordination,
remote-sensing analysis, field measurements and repeated audits - which tend to scale poorly in small,
heterogeneous territories [38-41] . In practice, this combination of largely actor-neutral integrity rules and
scale-dependent transaction costs tends to favor large, contiguous conservation areas and jurisdictional
programs, while creating a structural barrier for smallholder and traditional-community landscapes, even
though they are often on the frontline of both deforestation risk and climate vulnerability, and they are the
best problem solvers.

To address this gap, a recently developed vulnerability-based avoided deforestation methodology
SCM0011 integrates two features not present in most ICVCM-aligned REDD+ approaches: (1) a
[42]
locality-matched, smallholder-specific dynamic baseline, and (2) a quantitative livelihood-vulnerability filter
that serves as part of the additionality assessment and identifies which dimensions - such as livelihood
strategies, financial stability and access to basic services - require targeted support [5,29,42-45] . This study applies
the methodology in a smallholder-dominated community in the Curiaú Quilombola territory, located in the
municipality of Macapá, Amapá, Brazil. It evaluates (1) Curiaú community’s livelihood vulnerability profile,
(2) whether a dynamic, reference-region baseline indicates a non-trivial risk of future forest loss in the
absence of targeted support, and (3) whether the potential carbon credits derived from conservative
estimates of avoided deforestation could make a meaningful contribution to climate resilience. Through this
real-world application, we show that a smallholder-centered, vulnerability-based methodology
simultaneously strengthens integrity in forest carbon markets and supports smallholders' welfare in frontline
smallholder communities.

METHODS
Study area
Curiaú is a peri-urban Quilombola territory, approximately 3,130 hectares and around 505 households,
where livelihoods rely on small-scale agriculture, extractivism, wage labor, and public transfers [Figure 1].
Quilombola communities are Afro-Brazilian traditional communities with collective land rights ,
[46]
historically associated with social marginalization and heightened exposure to socio-environmental risks .
[5]
Its mosaic of native forest, floodplains, and smallholder land-use lies in the surroundings of Macapá and is
increasingly affected by urban expansion and climatic variability. Recent flooding events in the Amazon,
Vale do Ribeira, and southern Brazil have underscored the frontline position of Quilombola communities in