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Planet Labs’ Forest Carbon Monitoring system

Planet Labs PBC, a provider of daily Earth data and insights, has released its Forest Carbon Monitoring product, consisting of quarterly, 3-metre resolution measurements of forests globally. Source: Business Wire This new product offers partners and customers an unprecedented dataset to support voluntary carbon markets, regulatory compliance, and deforestation mitigation. “The climate crisis is the biggest challenge humanity faces in the 21st century, yet our greenhouse gas emissions are still rising,” said former US Vice President Al Gore. “Planet’s Forest Carbon Monitoring system is an important tool that helps the world monitor, protect, and manage one of the important resources in absorbing carbon from the atmosphere — our global forests. This kind of information is vitally important to governments, scientists, and advocates working to safeguard humanity’s future.” This quarterly dataset estimates aboveground carbon, canopy height, and canopy cover over the entire Earth dating back to 2021, setting a new standard for monitoring forest growth and change. Forest Carbon Monitoring equips stakeholders with a cost-effective way to monitor forested areas, scaling from a single tree to the entirety of the Amazon rainforest. In order to measure forest carbon stocks, stakeholders typically use ground measurements, fly expensive airborne missions over select areas, or pay for temporally and spatially patchy satellite data. But by leveraging Forest Carbon Monitoring data built using Planet’s extensive archive of PlanetScope imagery and a global library of airborne and spaceborne LiDAR data, with processing by AI users can derive precise, scalable, and affordable measurements without sacrificing scientific rigor. Achieving this level of granularity at a consistent cadence is indispensable for emerging voluntary carbon markets and governments. For countries implementing policies to reduce deforestation and sequester carbon, establishing an accurate baseline to quantify the current state of their forests is a critical step. Then they can draw on Forest Carbon Monitoring data to track changes and assess policy impact and effectiveness. “To protect our planet and preserve its resources, we have to value carbon and nature into our economy. Step one is measurement. To date we faced the choice between tape measures around tree trunks, which is accurate but not scalable, or inaccurate global systems. Planet’s forest carbon data is meant to fix that gap: scalable and precise forest carbon data, at the individual tree level, updated quarterly,” said Planet CEO and co-founder Will Marshall. “We believe this dataset will underpin global carbon markets — a multi-trillion-dollar transition.” Forest Carbon Monitoring can be leveraged by companies aiming to comply with the new EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). Measuring tree canopy and carbon stock change of sourcing regions can help mitigate and track any commodity-driven deforestation risks. And in the case of EUDR, ensuring compliance can help companies avoid fines and help jurisdictions sustainably maintain agricultural exports. Planet partner, BeZero Carbon, a global ratings agency for carbon markets, gained exclusive early access to the Forest Carbon Monitoring product and has leveraged it to further enhance its carbon ratings methodologies. With the 3-metre resolution dataset, BeZero’s carbon ratings offer insights with increased granularity and spatial accuracy. Last year, BeZero was also the first partner to utilize Planet’s Forest Carbon Diligence product, an archive of 30-metre resolution forest carbon data going back as far as 2013. Leveraging both of Planet’s Forest Carbon products — the deep archive of data and the high-resolution monitoring data — BeZero’s customers can better manage risk in their investments and closely track the performance of carbon projects. “Tackling climate change requires significant investment in carbon projects. BeZero Carbon’s 80-strong science team interrogates these projects using the most timely and complete data possible, so that investments can be made with a clear view of credit quality,” said Dr. Phil Platts, VP of Geospatial and Earth Observation at BeZero Carbon. “Planet’s Forest Carbon Monitoring product is the first and only dataset delivering high cadence, global forest carbon estimates at 3-metre resolution. That level of granularity can make a big difference for monitoring forest intactness, management practices, or scattered trees on farmland. “We rate hundreds of projects, of all kinds, all over the world. Doing so requires an enormous range of data, which we evaluate and combine project by project. Having Planet data in the mix is incredibly helpful, and we are using it to detect individual trees, right up to jurisdictional accounting.”