What is the name of your organization?
Climate Justice Standard Lab
What is the name of your solution?
NCS Equity Platform
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
An AI-powered platform that streamlines the development of equitable, community-led nature-based carbon projects.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Oakland, CA, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
United States
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
The climate crisis is accelerating, yet the people who steward many of the world’s most important ecosystems are systematically excluded from climate finance. Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) manage lands that store nearly 300 billion metric tons of carbon—including vital blue carbon ecosystems like mangroves, wetlands, and peatlands—yet receive less than 1% of voluntary carbon market finance.
This exclusion is not due to lack of relevance, but rather to high transaction costs, complex methodologies, and carbon market infrastructure designed for more commercial actors. As carbon markets grow—projected to reach $100 billion by 2030—there is an urgent need to ensure IPLCs can lead and benefit from high-integrity climate solutions.
Our solution addresses this access and integrity gap through an AI-assisted platform that simplifies the entire carbon project cycle for IPLCs and their allies—from early-stage design to monitoring, reporting, and verification. The platform embeds social and ecological safeguards while reducing project development time from 2–4 years to just 4–6 months.
By making project development more accessible and community-driven, we can scale ethical natural climate solutions that protect ecosystems, uphold rights, and accelerate climate impact.
What is your solution?
The NCS Equity Platform is an AI-assisted digital platform that enables IPLCs to lead equitable, high-integrity carbon projects. Built with and for IPLCs, the platform simplifies every stage of the carbon project cycle—from early design to monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV).
Through AI-guided prompts, geospatial data, and customizable templates, the platform lowers the technical and financial barriers that often prevent IPLCs from accessing carbon markets. It provides user-friendly tools to define project baselines, track carbon and biodiversity benefits, develop benefit-sharing agreements, and meet verification requirements—all while centering Indigenous knowledge systems and local priorities.
The platform is grounded in the principles of the Climate Justice Standard, ensuring that social and ecological integrity are upheld. A project based on the Standard is currently being piloted with Indigenous partners in the Ecuadorian Amazon and is designed to scale globally with the support of the NCS Equity Platform.
By reducing transaction costs and increasing access to ethical carbon finance, the NCS Equity Platform aims to accelerate the deployment of community-led natural climate solutions that mitigate climate change, protect biodiversity, and support local livelihoods.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
The NCS Equity Platform serves Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) who are frontline stewards of forests, coastal ecosystems, and other vital carbon sinks. These communities protect lands that store nearly 300 billion metric tons of carbon, yet they are largely excluded from climate finance and from leading climate solutions. Most carbon market systems are designed for large-scale developers—not for community-led initiatives grounded in Indigenous governance and values.
IPLCs face steep barriers: complex methodologies, high upfront costs, limited technical support, and verification systems that ignore their worldviews. As a result, less than 1% of carbon finance reaches them.
Our platform shifts that dynamic by providing AI-assisted, user-friendly tools to help communities and their partners design, monitor, report on, and verify carbon projects aligned with both global standards and local priorities. The platform is multilingual, adaptable, and rooted in the Climate Justice Standard.
The impact is profound: communities can access funding to support their life plans. In Sarayaku, for example, climate finance will fund solar electrification, intercultural schools that integrate traditional knowledge, and health centers combining modern and ancestral medicine. The platform enables IPLCs to lead climate solutions while improving community well-being and advancing environmental and cultural integrity.
