5. Self-assessment

Self-assessment is the option to check your project is on track and continues to meet Woodland Carbon Code standards without third party verification.

However, if you choose this option, you won’t be able to convert any Pending Issuance Units into Woodland Carbon Units until your project is next checked by a third party verifier.

A project must be checked five years after its start date and then at least every 10 years. At year five, all projects follow the standard third party verification process.

Starting from year 15, you can choose to self-assess if:

• Your latest verification received a green status. For groups, all projects must have green status.
• You don't have any concerns about the growth and health of your project(s).
• Your last assessment was a third party verification, not a self-assessment.
• It's not the final monitoring period of your project. Full monitoring and third-party verification are required for the last period.
• There have been no major changes to the project (area, management, health etc.) 

1. Contact the Woodland Carbon Code team to check you are eligible to self-assess your project or group.

2. Complete a project progress report and a basic monitoring report (see basic monitoring requirements).

3. Upload the documents to your project on the UK Land Carbon Registry and submit as ‘self-assessed’. You can find out more about this in the registry user guide. To access the guide, sign in to the registry, then visit the help section.

4. We will review your project or group. We might request other sources of information if anything is unclear. 

If we are content with the information provided, we will approve the project as self-assessed. If we have concerns about the growth or health of the project, we may ask you to undertake full monitoring and third party verification.