10119532Coastal ecosystem accounting software to accelerate private sector investment into underserved blue carbon and biodiversity creditsClosedUnknownInnovate UKCoastal ecosystems of mangroves, tidal marshes, and seagrass meadows provide numerous benefits that are essential for climate change adaptation, including protection from storms and sea level rise, prevention of shoreline erosion, regulation of coastal water quality, provision of habitat for commercially important fisheries and endangered marine species, and food security for many coastal communities. Perhaps most critically, these ecosystems sequester and store significant amounts of coastal blue carbon from the atmosphere and ocean (significantly more per acre than terrestrial forests), playing a critical role in climate change mitigation. However, despite this potential, investments in blue carbon ecosystems, have so far lagged significantly behind land-based carbon sequestration investments, the lack of robust and scalable Monitoring, Reporting and Verification approaches required for private sector investment and limited available data to underpin investment decisions cited as common barriers. With Innovate-UK grant support, Ocean Ledger aim to develop a scalable approach to coastal natural capital accounting to address this challenge, helping developers (commercial & NGO) involved in protection/restoration projects to design, implement and verify carbon credits for commercialisation, and equally private investors (funds, corporates) to invest in high integrity blue carbon and biodiversity credits with greater ease and confidence. The proposed cloud based accounting software solution combines innovations in Big data and analysis with AI to empower its users to effectively map and evaluate coastal ecosystems as valuable assets and in doing so exploiting a carbon credit market expected to reach $30-50bn by 2030, 75% will go towards nature restoration, of which blue carbon should capture a valuable share. With design input from a range of industry stakeholders, the proposed 9-month Industrial Research project will progress the concept from TRL3-5, led by a team with the required technical and commercial capability to ensure successful delivery.