Carbon Auditing Service: Commercial Exploitation Roadmap
This roadmap is for commercialisation of tools and products developed by the Trusted Data
for Carbon, Science & Finance (TruDAT) project on quantifying forest carbon compliance
with REDD+ and UN carbon reporting.
Triggers
The global carbon market is growing exponentially both in volume and value.
Internationally, 2% of all trades must be spent on verification of carbon claims and
numerous companies are offering their services to a still unregulated market to support
developing nations in reporting on compliance with the UN Framework Convention on
Climate Change Reductions of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+)
initiative. An error of a fraction of a percentage point can mean huge losses in a multibillion
dollar market. Some form of standardisation and internationally accepted best for
assessment and validation is a key requirement.
Recent surveys by Astrium have indicated that customers consider data quality information
as a key discriminator in choosing a supplier. There is an increasing demand for commercial
Earth Observation (EO) based services for forest carbon monitoring, for environment, and
for health. Data integrity allows the “fitness of purpose” of a dataset to be readily assessed
by all users irrespective of their expertise.
Targets
Auditing of forest carbon for REDD+ and carbon trading is a high value market which is
financially centred in UK in terms of trading. Maintaining UK as the international home for
carbon trading is the key government strategy and given the current progress in Kyoto
follow-on treaties there is a long term need for formal regulation and standardisation of
procedures. This is the first target.
The EO community aims to provide readily available trustable validated fit for purpose data
with sufficient quality information that allows assessment of its suitability. The second
target is to provide guidance the community needs as to what is needed, how to implement
it and how to adapt existing capabilities and establish/propagate uncertainty.
A detailed QA roadmap for the optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data used in the
quantification of terrestrial forest and carbon inventories in flagship European projects such
as Copernicus (formerly GMES), ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI) and the international
Group on Earth Observations (GEO) initiative is to be developed and provide provision to
include future datasets from these initiatives.
TruDAT Carbon Auditing Service Commercial Exploitation Roadmap
The generic principles and methodologies developed will be used to facilitate similar market
opportunities in key commercial sectors such as insurance and additional scientific sectors
such as various Essential Climate Variables (ECVs).
Market Drivers
Main market drivers for this type service are any company with a large land bank they might
want to monetise for carbon credits (e.g. oil and gas, agricultural, timber), specialist carbon
offset project developers, consultancies / developers needing to undertake environmental
impact assessment (e.g. for hydro projects), companies sourcing high risk commodities
wanting to monitor supplier impacts on deforestation (e.g. biofuels, palm oil, soy, paper),
governments (for emissions reporting and low carbon economic policy work).
The potential application areas identified are:
•
Supply chain sustainability – for retailers and manufacturers to assess whether their raw
materials suppliers are causing deforestation and associated emissions through the
expansion of their plantations or mines in to forests.
•
Carbon offset (REDD) development – for project developers and financers to estimate,
track and verify how forestry offset projects can increase the stock of carbon absorbed
from the atmosphere. This data then evidences the offsets which the developers can
sell.
•
National and corporate reporting – for governments and businesses to estimate the
impact of their activities on carbon stored in forestry on their land.
•
Environmental impact assessment - Deforestation causes ~18% of annual global carbon
emissions, and as such is a significant contributor to climate change. The REDD proposals
are a direct consequence of this and losses in bio-diversity from deforestation. A good
example would be to quantifying how much carbon might be released by flooding a
forest to build a dam.
•
R&D measurement capabilities for Climate change.
Experimental realisation or products
Once the data validation and standardisation (for carbon) has been carried out successfully
all users can derive carbon relevant information from the data with confidence (without
worrying about the deficit in the data). This provides an enormous diversity of approaches
possible. This will be the first attempt to establish a fully independently validated service for
multiple data sources. It may provide a cost effective and reliable solution for Carbon
Trading Community. The experimental product which is validated can then be tailored to
end-user needs.
It will be important to communicate the results of the project and the case study to relevant
stakeholders, particularly to the carbon research and financial Carbon Trading communities,
in order to elicit support of the recommendations made through the project. The Climate
TruDAT Carbon Auditing Service Commercial Exploitation Roadmap
and Environmental Monitoring from Space (CEMS) facility, hosted by the Satellite
Application Catapult, provides such capabilities ranging from data sale to hosting and
consultation service.
The validated data products and the processing tools from TruDAT will be available in CEMS
as data service and various other options. A detailed description of the type of service is
available in the “Added value of validated data from CEMS: Commercialisation Roadmap
(2013-2030)”.
Application of science and technology
It is important in building trust in EO data, giving an assessment of consistency relative to
estimated uncertainties. Comparative validation and knowledge of processing chain provide
an excellent tool. Comparative validation of datasets is well accepted for improving trust in
data, giving an assessment of consistency relative to estimated uncertainties.
Comprehensive and interoperable metadata is a key user requirement and the mechanism
to enable users to access dataset fitness of purpose information. Populated metadata and
documentation (communicated through certification to facilitate evolution) along with
validation are needed to build trust and act as a proxy for a trusted error/uncertainty by
indicating due process and allowing traceability.
Enabling science and technology
Availability of data “fit for purpose” in one place will promote uptake of EO data and
services. Advances in image processing, higher resolution imagery and computer power will
lead to improvements in models, interpretation and expectations driving QA and
uncertainty.
TruDAT Carbon Auditing Service Commercial Exploitation Roadmap