Carbon protocols moving towards direct biomass metrics: Chloris
Quantum Commodity Intelligence – Forest carbon crediting methodologies are bound to move over time to direct biomass measurements due to the increased availability of better technology, taking over from current protocols that focus on forest area loss, according to US data company Chloris Geospatial.
The firm, founded by remote sensing experts in 2021, provides a portal where its clients can request biomass measurements over time for a given area as well as an independent assessment of forest degradation, loss and gain for REDD+ projects registered under US-based registry Verra's Verified Carbon Standard (VCS).
Chloris said there is increasing evidence that forest degradation – the process of gradual biomass loss not resulting in land cover change – is both a significant source of emissions and a leading indicator of future forest loss.
And yet degradation and the opposite phenomenon, called sequestration, are not covered by most REDD+ protocols available in the voluntary carbon market (VCM).
The tech firm says it can estimate degradation in a forest by using a range of earth observation sensors over time across several forest biomes, thus providing a globally consistent dataset that can be used to estimate carbon dioxide losses and gains.
Marco Albani, Chloris' chief executive, said the technology "has changed what deforestation means".
"It's a process that carries out over a few years. It might be preceded, it might be followed, forests might bounce back, or there might be partial losses... it is a rich picture," he told Quantum.
Chloris’ clients mainly use it to identify areas where projects would be suitable, but lately, a second use case has emerged: monitoring deforestation and forest degradation at existing schemes.
“What we see with this data is that actually a lot of the big losses, a lot of the deforestation events actually come after a series of degradation events,” said Alessandro Baccini, the company's co-founder and chief scientist.
“It becomes almost like an alert system, an information that you can actually leverage before it's too late,” he added.
Range of performances
The tech firm said it is also increasingly focusing on large jurisdictional REDD+ programmes in tropical forests, which keep springing up around the world and are seen by many as the future of the nature-based industry in the VCM.
Earlier this month, Quantum revealed that Pará, one of Brazil’s largest states situated on the country’s deforestation frontier, is contemplating such a scheme.
By the end of March, Chloris said it will design a new product with a finer resolution of 10 metres – down from the current 30 metres – enabling it to service new needs such as afforestation, reforestation and restoration (ARR) projects, which are in high demand in the VCM.
Chloris has given Quantum access to its REDD+ library, which shows a range of performances among REDD+ projects when it comes to carbon sequestration.
The data shows many REDD+ projects that in fact sequester carbon on top of the avoided deforestation they were created for, a service that they are currently not rewarded for.
One of them is the Makame REDD+ project (VCS1900) operated by Carbon Tanzania, a unit of Level, which grew its carbon stock by 26% between 2016 and 2022, despite being located in the dry forests of east Africa.
However, many other REDD+ schemes have lost carbon since implementation, the Chloris data also shows, often as a result of ongoing forest degradation, and sometimes because of clear cutting.
Carbon stock losses
On average, the 50 or so projects currently included in the Chloris REDD+ library have lost 2% of their original carbon stocks since their creation in the VCS registry and lost 233,000 hectares of forest between 2014 and 2022, the same data shows.
"For many projects out there that we may actually be under-representing some of the additional climate impacts that are being provided on the sequestration side," said Jo Anderson, chief executive of Level.
Chloris said biomass and carbon metrics are likely to be the new frontier in forest carbon methodologies, with many registries already working on incorporating those into their work, and a growing list of remote sensing players lining up to offer those services.
Last year, US tech giant Planet announced its first global carbon measurement product based on the amount of carbon present in the world’s forests.
"It will help to move the methodologies at a faster speed... A variety of service providers means that then the market can embrace this and operationalise without being reliant on a single service provider," said Chloris' Albani.
