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are broadly consistent with these magnitudes, showing substantial increases in SOC stocks when annual
cropping systems are converted to tree-crop associations, with stock gains on the order of 25%-40% in the
upper soil layers compared to conventional cropland and global assessments highlighting a large technical
[88]
potential for additional SOC storage in agroforestry soils .
[89]

In Brazilian pasture systems, a meta-analysis of 169 paired comparisons across 14 states found that
degradation of grasslands leads to SOC losses of about 0.25 tC ha yr in the upper 0-30 cm, whereas
-1
-1
recovering degraded pastures to nominal or improved management can sequester SOC at rates of roughly
0.25-0.54 tC ha yr -1[90] . Converted to CO -equivalent, these gains correspond to roughly
-1
2
0.90-2.0 tCO e ha yr of additional removals.
-1
-1
2
Applied to Curiaú’s 2023 land-use structure - where approximately 17 ha of temporary crops and 174 ha of
pasture, as classified in the MapBiomas land-cover dataset , constitute the officially titled community area
[61]
that is distinct from the 915 ha forest block used in the avoided deforestation analysis - a stylized scenario
used only for order-of-magnitude illustration, in which all cropland shifts to conservation-agriculture
management and all degraded or nominal pasture is restored to well-managed condition, would therefore
imply on the order of 180-350 tCO e yr of additional soil-related removals. Under the same illustrative
-1
2
carbon-price band of US$20-40 tCO e used above, this corresponds to a supplementary revenue band of
-1
2
roughly US$4,000-14,000 yr , over and above the avoided deforestation potential estimated in Section
-1
“Potential emission reductions and carbon credit generation”.
Taken together, these stylized comparisons reinforce that revenues from avoided deforestation carbon credits
in smallholder-dominated mosaics can play a partial yet potentially catalytic role in supporting
climate-resilient livelihood trajectories in Curiaú community. Even under relatively favorable price
assumptions, such revenues can finance the re-establishment of only a limited area of staple crops and
pasture and the incremental expansion of agroforestry systems, while leaving limited room for covering
transaction, monitoring and certification costs that are necessary for high-integrity projects and for enabling
both forest-conservation and soil-management interventions. In this context, beyond the combination of
high-integrity avoided deforestation and regenerative-agriculture methodologies, complementary private or
public instruments become central. In Brazil, the National Policy on Payment for Environmental Services
(PES) (Law 14.119/2021) and program-level initiatives such as Floresta+ Amazônia explicitly aim to
[92]
[91]
channel payment-for-environmental-services resources to family farmers and traditional communities and
can, in principle, contribute to covering enabling costs such as technical assistance, organizational support
and certification-related expenses. Aligning methodologies such as SCM0011 with policies and programs
would increase the likelihood that communities can appropriate a larger share of carbon and PES revenues,
strengthening existing forest-conservation practices while facilitating a gradual transition towards
agroecological, agroforestry and other regenerative production systems, in line with broader evidence on the
design of effective payment for environmental services and benefit-sharing arrangements [80,81] .

Limitations and implications for implementation
The present application has several limitations that should be made explicit. First, as discussed in Section
“Livelihood vulnerability”, the LVI thresholds used here are operational screening values under the applied
methodology rather than universally valid vulnerability cut-offs [43,45,50] . Relatedly, the LVI functions as a
time-bound entry diagnostic, based on recent household conditions, and therefore does not capture the full
temporal evolution of vulnerability over the project duration. Although the applied standard allows
reassessment across project cycles, this design implies a trade-off between operational feasibility and
temporal representativeness in the use of vulnerability as part of additionality. Second, the livelihood
diagnosis is based on a non-probability household sample and should therefore be interpreted as