Carbon Project Timeline

Carbon Project Timeline & Milestone Tracker

Maps the actual dependency chain of a carbon project from PDD drafting through first credit issuance, not just a generic project plan. The carbon project lifecycle has hard sequential dependencies (you cannot verify before you validate, you cannot issue before you verify) that a generic Gantt chart tool won't know to enforce — this skill encodes them.

Standard project lifecycle phases

1. Project Design — methodology selection, PDD drafting, baseline data collection. Typically 2-6 months depending on data availability and methodology complexity.
2. Stakeholder Consultation — required before or concurrent with validation depending on registry (Gold Standard requires it earlier and more formally than Verra). Route to carbon-stakeholder-governance for the underlying documentation.
3. Validation — independent VVB review of the PDD against the methodology. Budget 3-6 months including a revision round; first-time methodology applications or novel project types run longer.
4. Registration — registry administrative step after validation, typically 1-3 months, often has a public comment period that adds fixed time regardless of project readiness.
5. Monitoring Period 1 — the actual implementation and data collection window per the monitoring plan. Length is set by the methodology, not negotiable.
6. Verification — VVB confirms the monitoring period's reported results. Budget 2-4 months; this is the step that recurs every monitoring period for the life of the project, so build it as a recurring milestone, not a one-time event.
7. Issuance — registry issues credits after verification, typically 1-2 months administrative lag.
8. Sale/Retirement — only relevant to the timeline if there's an offtake agreement with delivery deadlines tied to issuance (route to carbon-legal-agreements to check ERPA delivery terms against the realistic issuance date).

Key dependency rules to enforce

• Validation cannot start until the PDD is in a complete, internally consistent state. Don't schedule validation submission before the methodology selection decision is locked (check carbon-decision-memos for whether that decision is final).
• Monitoring Period 1 cannot start meaningfully before the project activity itself starts (e.g. first biochar application, first land management change) — don't let the monitoring clock and the implementation clock drift apart in the schedule.
• Verification cadence is fixed by the methodology and registry program rules, not by the project's cash flow needs. If the user wants faster issuance for financing reasons, the realistic lever is shortening Monitoring Period 1 (if the methodology allows a shorter first period) or structuring a forward sale against future issuance, not compressing verification itself.
• Buffer pool / non-permanence risk assessment (for removal projects) typically needs to be finalized before registration, not before validation — don't gate validation submission on a step that isn't actually required yet.

Building the timeline

Ask for or infer:

1. Target registry and methodology (pulls from pdd-generator work if already done).
2. Current phase the project is actually in.
3. Hard external constraints: investor deadlines, grant deadlines (e.g. NOFO submission dates), planting/application seasons that gate when project activity can start.
4. Whether this is a first-time methodology application (adds real time) or an established methodology with a track record at the chosen registry.

Then build:

• A phase-by-phase timeline with realistic duration ranges (not single-point estimates — carbon project timelines have wide variance and presenting false precision damages credibility with investors who've seen projects slip).
• Explicit dependency arrows between phases.
• Flagged external hard constraints overlaid on the internal phase timeline, so conflicts (e.g. "validation won't complete before the grant deadline") are visible immediately rather than discovered later.

Output format

Default to a markdown table or, if the user wants something visual, build it as an interactive artifact (Gantt-style) using the Visualizer or a React artifact with date-based layout. For investor-facing or grant-facing versions, route the same data through docx or pptx skill for a polished one-pager.

Related skills

• pdd-generator — provides the methodology and registry inputs that set phase durations.
• carbon-decision-memos — flags whether key gating decisions (methodology, registry) are actually locked before scheduling validation.
• carbon-legal-agreements — checks ERPA/offtake delivery deadlines against realistic issuance timing.