A Buyer’s Guide to High-Accountability MRV

November 01, 2022

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by Anu Khan and Peter Minor (Carbon 180) Introducing our early thinking and a tool to help -- ... Trust underpins the success of this field; without it, we lose two groups of constituents that are necessary to achieve gigaton scale by 2050. The first group is communities that will host carbon removal solutions. The second are taxpayers whose support can unlock massive investment of societal resources — capital, energy, human resources, and political will. Both groups need to see that carbon removal projects bring real climate and economic benefits.

To build trust in the carbon removal sector, we believe that robust monitoring, reporting, and verification, or MRV, is a fundamental prerequisite. MRV is the process of accounting for all of the emissions, energy use, environmental and public health impacts associated with a carbon removal project to determine its net climate impact. It tells us if the work was done safely and effectively, and provides receipts.

If designed properly, MRV enables accountability and thus, trust. What does this look like in practice? For MRV to be a tool for both accounting and accountability, four things must happen.

Direct Accounting of Removals and Impacts: The best MRV protocols measure all variables associated with the project including removals and impacts to human health and ecosystems.
Traceability Over Time: After measuring the removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere, monitoring stored carbon and ongoing health and ecosystem impacts is needed to establish durability and safety. Even after a project ends, impacts persist.
Data Transparency: How project information is made available to stakeholders is just as important as measurement and monitoring of the initial collection of data. Without data transparency and accessibility, there is no accountability.
Appropriate Incentive Structure: Verification of removals must take place within a financial incentive structure that minimizes fraud and maximizes public benefit.

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But emphasizing MRV rigor inevitably means facing off against some very difficult technical challenges. For example, collecting soil core samples to assess changes in carbon content is a manual, time consuming, and expensive process today. But this is solvable, and we’re already seeing advances in both in-field and remote sensing technology to make it cheaper and easier for farmers to realize the economic benefits of carbon removal. If we focus only on what’s possible for MRV today instead of in the future, then we’ve set the bar too low and may face disastrous long-term consequences, including loss of public trust in the field, rampant fraud, and a potential collapse of the industry.

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We recognize this will be challenging, so we’ve built a tool to help: a matrix that breaks down the four principles of high-accountability MRV, all tied to specific actions that foster greater degrees of accountability. Each is contrasted with the characteristics of middling and lower examples to better clarify where improvements can be made compared to the state of play today. This tool is a first draft, which we hope to continue developing alongside organizations with similar intentions to build an effective and just carbon removal industry.

To date, procurers have been using advanced market commitments and long-term off take agreements to spur innovation. We’d like to offer up an idea: maximizing high-accountability MRV on early purchases is how buyers of carbon removal can also help kickstart trust-building for the industry early on. They can do this by adopting three simple practices:

Emphasize accountability for communities and the public by working with suppliers to take the actions described in the MRV principles matrix,
Select suppliers based on MRV quality, and continue pushing the boundary on expectations to incentivize continued innovation, and
Openly acknowledge when choices are made to accept lower MRV certainty, in exchange for lower cost and complexity. READ MORE

Keep all carbon removal approaches on the table at COP27 (The Hill/Carbon Business Council)

Sustainable Farming Has an Unlikely Ally: Satellites -- Growers are using images taken from space to quantify how much carbon is stored in their soil and validate the credits they’re selling. (Wired)

Scaling the CCUS industry to achieve net-zero emissions (McKinsey & Co.)

Excerpt from Wired: Enter Perennial, a startup based in Boulder, Colorado, that says it has the answer. While studying at Brown University, chief innovation officer David Schurman met CEO Jack Roswell and president Oleksiy “Alex” Zhuk, passionate engineers from family farms in Michigan and Ukraine, respectively. When they got to Brown, they were surprised to discover that “agriculture as a whole was essentially forgotten” by technologists, says Zhuk. Today, their ambition is to produce “the infrastructure that underpins the full vertical of the soil carbon market,” says Roswell. “No technology is solving a problem unless it’s solving the problem at scale and in a cost-effective manner,” says Roswell. “We’re actively monitoring every field for carbon removal and net emissions, in the US and beyond.”

Jim Kellner, a professor at Brown University and Perennial’s chief scientist, explains that the company’s technology relies on multispectral satellite imagery. This means measuring the reflected light from Earth in narrow bands across a broad range of the electromagnetic spectrum, capturing information that’s invisible to the human eye. Kellner says analyzing the spectrum of reflected light allows accurate identification of carbon in the soil, even using satellite images with a spatial resolution of only 10 meters. By comparing the amount of light reflected at different wavelengths, “you can learn to identify materials, even without the picture,” he says.

Satellite images are fed into a machine learning algorithm, along with environmental data about the field in question—such as elevation and climate—to produce a measurement of the soil’s carbon content. To train the algorithm accurately, the team gathered thousands of soil samples, digging holes in fields all across the US to calibrate their models for different climate conditions and types of crop. By training their model on these representative physical measurements, the team enabled the algorithm to remotely quantify carbon in the ground. The company sees this as a critical step to unlocking the soil carbon market. “If you solve the problem of quantifying carbon but it’s dependent on sending someone into the field with a stake or shovel, you’re not going to reach global scale,” says Zhuk.

That’s all very well, but are farmers really willing to convert to sustainable agricultural practices and change how they grow food? Zhuk thinks the answer is yes. In the context of severe soil erosion worldwide, and the rising prices of chemicals for farms, he hopes Perennial will offer farmers the financial boost they need to move away from environmentally damaging practices and restore their land. “Our approach produces a standard measurement anywhere in the world—a farmer in Ethiopia that puts a ton of carbon in the soil will get recognized and paid the same as one in Iowa, transcending borders and inconsistent verification standards,” he says.

Right now, the company is working on training its algorithms in new countries and continents, as well as tackling new types of land—such as grazing and pasture lands—in addition to crop fields. Zhuk’s goal? “To move agriculture from just an industry that feeds us to an industry that is a major contributor to offsetting our emissions and reversing climate change.” READ MORE