Bezos-Backed ‘GEOTrees’ Will Earn Rainforest Nations Carbon Finance

Carbon finance is at the forefront of global climate negotiations, with many countries now firmly acknowledging the imperative for developed nations to support developing ones. The $100 billion per year pledge in 2009 kicked things off—a promise that has fallen short 15 years later.

The idea is that money and technology will flow from wealthier nations to emerging ones to compensate them for building flood barriers and deploying clean energies. Richer countries must take the lead because they are responsible for 80% of all greenhouse gas emissions, while many developing countries are rainforest nations that absorb CO2.

Measuring and accounting for rainforest preservation is subjective, slowing carbon finance. Enter GEOTrees, which touts itself as the most advanced and scalable system to monitor CO2 sequestration in rainforests. It’s a multi-pronged approach combining ground-based measurements with localized drones and distant satellites. GEOTrees will store that information in the cloud and give it to countries worldwide.

“You cannot scale the market unless you can accurately say where your commodity is,” says Josh Tewksbury, director of the Panama City, Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, during a visit to Barro Colorado Island. “GEOTrees will be the first equitably developed system to calibrate and validate estimates of carbon in any forest in any condition anywhere on the globe. Scientists worldwide are working in concert to measure carbon in forests at a scale.”

Rainforest nations must know exactly how much CO2 they store to attract investment. However, measuring carbon is complex and necessitates a global standard to avoid allegations of greenwashing.

Satellites have long existed, but they can’t see through the canopy. People must be on the ground to measure tree density, which tells us how much carbon is in the forest. Beyond that, GEOTrees deploys lasers or drones to hover over the forests, increasing the resolution. GEOTrees has 300 reference locations in all forest types and conditions globally.

Decreasing Costs And Increasing Accuracy

GEOTrees, which launched 18 months ago, aims to be operational in five years. Scientists have studied Barro Colorado for more than 40 years, making it ground zero in the effort to measure carbon intake. The Bezos Foundation provided $12 million to the Smithsonian, the European Space Agency, and the French National Science Agency to further their research. The Monroe Foundation followed up with a $12 million gift while the program has collected an additional $8 million.

“If we give that standard away, the verification standard will get far cheaper and more objective,” says Tewksbury. “Right now, project developers verify their own projects and then fly in auditors from India. You don’t self-report speeding tickets and then ask a third party to check. We can tell you where the carbon is, which will tell everyone how much carbon is sequestered on their land. No one wants to invest in a market if they can’t gauge the validity.”

For example, Microsoft Corp. has a majority stake in OpenAI and now has vast server farms running that artificial intelligence. It is investing in reforestation projects in Panama to offset those emissions. It must spend large amounts of money verifying tree growth so that stakeholders believe in its work.

However, GEOTrees will make affirmation of the sequestered carbon trivial, resolving that uncertainty. It validates and calibrates the measurements it gets from space and does it globally. That decreases the cost of monitoring, measurement, and reporting while increasing accuracy.

The goal is to increase trust, allowing rainforest nations to attract carbon financing. According to Tewksbury, carbon credits or certificates will have more value because developed nations and corporations will have faith in them. That will increase demand. “We are making everyone’s job easier and cheaper by reducing audit, compliance, and fraud risks. We are here to solve a global problem: climate change.”

According to the Global Carbon Project, fossil fuels and industrial processes now emit 36 to 40 gigatons of CO2 annually. The Amazon, Congo Basin, and Southeast Asian rainforests are the Earth’s lungs, harnessing CO2 in biomass and soil. Collectively, forests store about 8 gigatons of CO2, while rainforests absorb 2-3 gigatons annually. Rainforest preservation is, therefore, critical to CO2 absorption.

Global Warming Threatens Rainforests Too

There’s general agreement that wealthier nations must help less developed ones adapt to climate change and mitigate their risks. There’s also a universal understanding that rainforest nations are central to eco-viability. Thus, we must assist those countries by properly valuing their trees. However, the public does not trust how carbon emissions are calculated and confirmed.

GEOTrees measures biomass, volume, and tree size in a plot and converts that to carbon. According to Stuart Davies, director of Forest Geo, parent of GEOTrees, carbon is 47% of the biomass—the trunk, branches, and roots. “If we can build a representative network worldwide and demonstrate that we have captured biomass in forests, it will be hard for any proprietary interest to argue with that. The Smithsonian does not sell anything and has no financial gain in that process.”

Satellite companies are critical, asserting their technologies can already measure the CO2 stored in rainforests. But that is a much more arduous task in the dense tropics. It’s harder to detect variations, says Davies.

Others maintain the selected GEOTrees sites do not cover all possible types of forests, which limits the ability of satellites to estimate carbon storage levels. However, Davies says GEOTrees has intentionally picked field sites to cover a representative sample of the world’s forests. “If we find out we are missing something important, we can always go and add it to the reference system.

Biologists also question whether rainforests will hold their value if warming trends continue and droughts compound the problems. That would slow the rate of atmospheric CO2 absorption. While some trees could survive extreme conditions, it creates a system of winners and losers, emphasizing the importance of diversity.

“We understand tropical systems better than any other system on the planet. We are responsible for supporting a better world with science, and our institution uses evidence-based decision-making,” adds Tewksbury. “We must speed the pipeline for all things climate change. Our part of that is biodiversity and rainforests and scaling up action to lock up carbon.”

The aim is to establish a standardized process for rainforest countries to calculate and confirm the carbon they store, saving everyone involved time, effort, and money. If the market has confidence in this process, carbon financing will become more accessible and provide developing countries with additional resources to combat climate change and create jobs.

Reporter’s Note: This is the third in a three-part series on the country of Panama, where I spent eight days in September. Part one profiles Panama’s environmental and economic goals while Part two examines the relationship between the Panamanian rainforests and the Panama Canal.