Sherwood Platform: A smart platform for monitoring nature-based carbon removal

The project focuses on the increasing need for trust and transparency in the nature-based carbon removal market. The market globally for voluntary carbon removal has doubled in the past year to just over $1bn and is set to increase by 2030 to a $50bn market, the majority of which will come from lower-cost natural solutions (such as tree planting, peat restoration, mangrove restoration and other schemes). The importance of such actions is now clearly underlined by the IPCC reports stating that Paris alignment - limiting global warming to 2C and aiming for 1.5C - is no longer possible without actively removing CO2 from the atmosphere. This is underlined at a national level with the UK Climate Change Committee's target for 30,000ha of tree planting per year as well as restoring upland peat by 50% and lowland peat by 25%.

Two fundamental technical issues arise from this: 1\. How do we accurately calculate the CO2 removed and stored in these complex ecosystems?, and 2\. How do we then track this action over time and ensure that payment, via carbon offset credits, are accurately tracked through supply chains as the market grows rapidly?

This is a problem for both corporate offset buyers who are set to be the main buyer and liability holder for their emissions and the carbon offsets they use to remove unavoidable emissions, but also policy makers as they decide on incentive, subsidy and international trade schemes.

This project is chiefly focused on developing the Treeconomy Sherwood Platform, a software solution designed to solve these two challenges. Treeconomy has built the remote sensing tools to analyse nature-based carbon removal projects and more robustly quantify the carbon stored within them. We have the core solution for forest-based projects at prototype stage and are currently in an R&D stage for peat projects. This project focuses on the need for smart databasing to then catalogue the data collected at the asset level, to monitor and update this data over time, and to track transactions in an automated manner. The solution proposed involves the use of a sustainable blockchain application and integration with our remote sensing data. The end solution will be an automated carbon offset tracking software system, with the power to geotag and trace every tonne of CO2 back to the exact tree, trees or area of land that the credit stems from - a radical increase in accuracy and transparency.