Sustainable finance company Likvidi on Thursday announced a strategic investment and partnership deal with Israeli startup Albo Climate.
Through the partnership, the two firms have launched ‘Veriforest’, a new global digital registry forestry platform, to enable small landowners (small-scale farmers) and medium sized forest administrators (firms owning lands and forests) to access the carbon offset markets.
The carbon credit market has been inaccessible to such landowners due to high transaction, monitoring, and reporting costs that have discouraged their participation.
The global digital registry forestry platform, therefore, removes barriers preventing small landowners and midsize forest administrators from accessing the carbon offset markets. The platform will make it possible for millions of such landowners to commit themselves to sustain their land’s legacy for future generations.
Albo Climate applies AI to satellite imagery to map, measure, and monitor carbon sequestration and scale-up carbon removal.
Agriculture and forestry activities are sources of GHG emissions. The good news is that forest landowners can generate carbon offsets through new afforestation, and reforestation projects, among others. This ensures that land use has a positive impact on livelihoods, food supply, the economy, environmental restoration, development goals, and climate targets.
To do this, Likvidi and Albo have launched the global technology-enabled platform for carbon sequestration (removal). This global platform provides entry to the international carbon market for small-scale forest landowners who are realizing agroforestry projects for carbon sequestration through biomass growth, majorly through trees, which is measured with the help of satellite monitoring.
The platform supports the initiation and development of such agroforestry projects and facilitates the subsequent trade of the so-called ‘carbon removal units (CRUs)’ that are generated from the sequestered carbon.
The launch of the new platform is set to enable landowners to get a real-time value assessment of how much income their forest properties could generate in the voluntary carbon market.
Landowners who choose to enrol their forest or land properties on the digital registry platform would lock in multi-year payments for the resulting carbon offsets from buyers seeking to offset carbon emissions. There is no cost to landowners to use the digital platform.
Veriforest combines blockchain with Albo’s satellite and AI capabilities to accurately monitor the carbon sequestration of forestland which will make carbon credits more tangible than ever before.
Veriforest has therefore created an end-to-end solution that offers tokenized carbon credits for offset to individuals and firms.
The new partnership means that forested areas can now be quickly and accurately assessed for carbon storage and credit issuance and logged in the Veriforest registry platform. The Veriforest solution can scale to meet the massive demand for measurements of carbon-related data and can bring carbon credits to market faster than existing traditional methods.
Albo Climate CEO Dr Jacques Amselem talked about the development and said: “It’s a pleasure to work with our fellow passionate technologists at Likvidi and to be able to bring our satellite imagery analysis products to enhance the Veriforest solution that Likvidi is building. We look forward to years of partnership ahead.”
Israeli startup Albo Climate has built a revolutionary technology for the estimation of carbon stocks and sequestration. It’s AI technology uses proprietary Deep Learning algorithms to analyze satellite imagery and validate carbon credits for forestry projects anywhere across the world. Satellite-mounted sensors are able to scan vegetation and pick up information not visible to the naked eye.
Albo’s technology uses AI (artificial intelligence) and ground truth datasets to produce an in-depth profile of carbon storage over a huge area. The analysis has applications for both small- and large-scale projects.
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