Carbon credit platform Pachama has just launched the world’s very first AI-based tool for the evaluation of forest carbon projects called Project Evaluation Criteria 2.1.
The revolutionary launch aims to bring the quality and transparency of the carbon market to a whole new level thanks to the use of Pachama’s dynamic baseline approach.
The concept of dynamic baselines has been discussed before and the need for it is dictated from the criticism towards static baselines and the limited accuracy they provide.
Contrary to the outdated approach of using static baselines, Pachama’s solution offers an improvement over the status quo on several levels at once.
For one, the platform’s new tool is algorithmic and does not rely on human assumptions and calculations. And for another, the emissions are not predicted based on historical data but are observed using satellite monitoring.
Lastly, Project Evaluation Criteria 2.1 quantifies uncertainty in the baseline scenario selection as opposed to assuming that the baseline represents the project perfectly.
Relevant: Interview: Pachama Is Transforming Carbon Crediting With Cutting-Edge Technology
“Pachama uses fake carbon projects randomly selected across a region to quantify baseline uncertainty. We call them pseudo-projects. We just apply our baseline algorithm to each pseudo-project,” Carlos Silva, Remote Sensing Scientist at Pachama, explained to the Carbon Herald.
“The important thing to recognize is that both the pseudo-project and its baseline have no carbon project. So their outcomes should match. The more accurate the baseline algorithm, the more the pseudo-project outcomes and their baselines will match. Pseudo-projects allow you to immediately know a baseline’s uncertainty without having to grasp all of the technical details of how the baseline was calculated,” Silva said.
Pachama’s efforts and dedication to improving the quality and effectiveness of carbon project evaluation comes at a time when such steps can play a pivotal role in the development of the nascent carbon market.
“The urgent priority is to strengthen the integrity and transparency of carbon crediting. Pachama believes the way to do this is to move toward standardized, conservative crediting by algorithm. This would represent a real advance over today’s manual calculations,” Silva added.
Read more: Verra And Pachama Introduce World’s Largest Forest Carbon Program
Will Pechama use this tool for their own project management or the ‘Project Evaluation Criteria 2.1’ will be commercially available as a software?