Insights

VCMI Claims Code of Practice Gets It (Almost) Right The CO2eco team has been very patient while financial markets and global climate proto-regulation continue their existential battle between the forces of internalised capitalism and the drive for a just economic transition.  At stake? Only the survival of the human race and much other life on […]

How AI and Machine Learning Are Transforming Remote Sensing Data Rainforests are home to an astonishing array of plant and animal species, many of which are endangered or undiscovered, while playing a crucial role in maintaining the planet’s climate balance. But they are under threat: the tropics lost 4.1m hectares of primary rainforest in 2022 […]

  Overpromising and under delivery of carbon offsets have underpinned the 20 year-long debate: can the voluntary carbon market tangibly contribute to net zero? Seeking to establish a global benchmark, the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (IC-VCM) issued draft Core Carbon Principles [ref 1] for a public consultation run on its behalf by […]

The call to arms on the climate crisis gets louder and louder for consumers, companies and governments. An alphabet soup of action groupings and regulatory bodies has emerged, but are they themselves doing enough? One of the most robust initiatives is the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD), established by G20 Finance Ministers and […]

The Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) emerged in 2015 with the world’s first science-based certification. A coalition between CDP, UN Global Compact, World Resource Institute and WWF, the certification provides guidance for companies and financial institutions on how to best reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in order to meet global net-zero. However, does ambition meet […]

Despite covering just 3 percent of the world’s land, peatlands store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests, (UNEP) demonstrating just how vital Peatland restoration is in our efforts to reach net-zero. Restoration, however, isn’t simply an effort to capture more carbon. Peatland degradation caused by drainage for agricultural, horticultural and energy production […]

Monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) of carbon captured by trees, crops, soils, hedgerows and other ‘nature assets’ requires effective technology. This is usually by earth observation from satellites where algorithms are used to convert the images obtained to leaf area index and biomass enabling authoritative information on the state of the nature asset and estimates […]

In my work as a land agent, I deal with a variety of landowners and farmers across the UK. Much of this covers day to day land management matters, but inevitably the conversations move to what the future holds for the rural economy. Agriculture as a sector is unique in so far as being both […]

Imagine a not-too-distant future where humans have become a wholly urban species. Eleven billion of us crammed into mega-cities, divorced from a rewilded rural environment. Science fiction? Perhaps it’s not that far-fetched given the pace of change — our insatiable appetite for growth, our reliance on technology and our need to find solutions to ever-decreasing […]