• REFLECT addresses a long-standing challenge in climate and nature finance: understanding whether projects and programmes are delivering fair, lasting benefits for people.

• REFLECT offers a credible, community-informed alternative to top-down monitoring, making social outcomes visible, participatory and grounded in lived experience.

• REFLECT launches with two solutions — a participatory evaluation service and a tech-enabled social monitoring platform — developed and tested in collaboration with ConnectGo and Carbon Tanzania.
  

London, 25 June 2025 — Global conservation business Level has launched REFLECT, a new approach to understanding and evidencing the social value and outcomes of climate and nature projects. Developed over three years through deep field collaboration, REFLECT is being introduced at a time of growing scrutiny of social claims from climate and nature project developers, and a clear demand for evidence that interventions are delivering real benefits for people.

REFLECT equips organisations with a participatory, practitioner-led approach to understand what’s changing for communities, not just what’s being implemented. It helps answer a key question facing climate and nature finance today: Is this working for the people it’s meant to serve?

While environmental metrics have become standard, the human dimension remains poorly understood. Existing monitoring approaches are often extractive, generic or compliance-driven, and rarely reflect lived experience. REFLECT changes that by combining rigorous social science with insights from real project delivery.

Jo Anderson, CEO at Level and co-founder of Carbon Tanzania, said: “For years, social outcomes have been assumed or glossed over. We wanted a credible way to understand how our work at Carbon Tanzania was really affecting people, so we built REFLECT. Shaped by field experience and co-design, REFLECT helps us listen, learn and adapt. By shifting how social value is understood, measured and communicated, it has real potential to build trust in climate and conservation finance for developers, funders and communities alike.”

Dr Kate McAlpine, Founder of ConnectGo: “I’m proud of what we’ve built with REFLECT. It’s the result of years spent working alongside communities to understand what meaningful change really looks like and how to measure it through participatory methods that reflect community voices. REFLECT is rigorous but human, surfacing honest insights that are essential for making better decisions in climate and nature work.” 

REFLECT is launching with two tailored solutions:

• REFLECT for Nature: A bespoke evaluation service that helps nature conservation and restoration projects and organisations quantify social return on investment, track outcomes, and strengthen accountability to communities.

• REFLECT for Carbon: A tech-enabled platform that integrates social monitoring, reporting and verification (sMRV) into carbon project workflows – providing community-informed, credible data to support integrity, learning, and adaptation.

REFLECT has been field tested across Carbon Tanzania’s community-led forest conservation projects in Yaeda Valley, Eyasi, and Makame WMA. It’s already helping drive improvements, highlighting successes like higher school attendance and greater local security, while also uncovering inclusion gaps among women, youth, and more remote households that are now being actively addressed.

Kisaro Thomas Lombutwa, Makame Savannah Project Manager, Carbon Tanzania said: “As a community at the heart of a carbon project, we’ve always seen ourselves as active partners, not just beneficiaries. REFLECT gave people a real voice and a chance to say what’s working, what’s not, and how we can make the project stronger. That kind of honest feedback will help the project grow and make sure the community stays at the centre.”

Ends

For interviews, media materials or further information:
Diane Millis, Media Advisor – diane@jenstebbing.com

About Level

Level is a global conservation business that creates a direct financial link between those who want to protect and restore nature and those best placed to do so.

Our results-based approach recognises and values the contribution of those who protect nature, addressing the imbalance between the worlds of business and conservation. Level ensures that local community efforts to protect and maintain the world’s most valuable natural landscape resources are valued and properly funded.

Learn more at wearelevel.com

Notes to Editors

About REFLECT
REFLECT is a social outcome evaluation approach developed by Level in partnership with ConnectGo. It is not a certification scheme or scorecard; it’s a participatory approach to understanding social change through lived experience. REFLECT is designed to help organisations that are funding, supporting or delivering nature and carbon projects, enabling them to adjust, improve and respond in real time.

About the co-developers

• ConnectGo is a purpose-led organisation founded by Dr Kate McAlpine, focused on developing human-centred tools to track and improve social outcomes in climate and conservation work.

• Carbon Tanzania is a Tanzanian social enterprise working with Indigenous communities to generate verified carbon credits through forest protection. It is a subsidiary of Level and has deployed REFLECT for Nature across multiple project areas, including Yaeda-Eyasi landscape and Makame Savannah projects.

London Climate Action Week
REFLECT will be launched at London Climate Action Week, concurrently with Level’s session at the People and Nature Hub on Wednesday, 25 June. The event, which is convened by the Natural Climate Solutions Alliance, brings together project developers, standard setters, NGOs and investors to explore the central role of community-led approaches in climate and nature finance.

Please note: this is a closed-door event and not open to the media.