SoilWatch

The fast-growing Voluntary Carbon Market has immense potential in scaling climate action and landscape restoration while improving resilience in communities on the front lines of the climate emergency. This can only happen though if there are trusted Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) solutions that validate carbon sequestered by projects. Existing systems are opaque, resource-intensive and methodologically incomplete, limiting growth of a diligent and responsible Market, in particular one that benefits communities in inaccessible regions. SoilWatch was founded to provide transparent MRV tools based on published peer-reviewed research to project developers and land users to model and monitor environmental change regardless of location. These ecosystem monitoring tools increase visibility and improve the transparency and quality of carbon credits. A healthy environment enables healthy people by providing communities with ample Ecosystem Services (ES): fertile soil, clean water, a pathogen-free environment – even a cooler microclimate. All this while mitigating climate change.

Rangelands refer to lands on which the vegetation is predominantly grasses, grass-like plants or shrubs, and often with trees that are grazed or have the potential to be grazed by livestock and wildlife. Rangelands cover 54% of the global terrestrial surface which equals to 79,509,421 km2. Across rangelands globally, according to land degradation neutrality measurements (Rangeland ATLAS 2021) between 2001-2015, 11% of rangelands (approximately 8,000,000 km2) degraded. To give just one example from the region in which we have worked: Sudan has 60 million hectares of degrading rangelands. With appropriate management, degraded rangelands can be regenerated, leading to sequestration of 8-30 tons of carbon per hectare. Sudan’s degraded rangelands alone could sequester almost a gigaton of carbon over a 30-year period. 

Poor rangeland management resulting from inadequate land use policies in the last decades, such as the expansion of mechanized agriculture in semi-arid rainfed landscapes, has caused severe land degradation in the form of soil erosion (carbon loss from soil to the atmosphere) and biodiversity loss. SoilWatch’s solution can identify areas of severe degradation and carbon sequestration potential, and support the development of a sustainable landscape restoration plan.

We use open-source, high-resolution multi-temporal satellite imagery to monitor land degradation at landscape level. Land degradation can manifest itself in the form of soil erosion, which is the loss of soil organic carbon and other soil compounds, and biodiversity loss which can be induced by unsustainable land management practices.

Carbon can be sequestered back into the soil if land is managed sustainably. Using machine learning and the petabytes of open satellite imagery archives available, we enable that this is effectively done by taking the following steps:

1. Scoping areas of landscape restoration/conservation potential by tracing back the land degradation trends of the past decades to understand severity of land degradation, 

2. Support design and planning of (carbon-financed) environmental projects in suitable areas.

3. Estimate a soil organic carbon stock baseline and changes over-time through an optimized field soil sampling design to train our state-of-the-art algorithm.

4. Monitor in near real-time land management practices such as no- or reduced-tillage, cover cropping, crop residue management, development of agro-forestry systems to report on progress of the implemented project to enable informed decison making by communities.

With the help of our inexpensive MRV, the immense potential of the carbon market will be available for local communities in East-African rangelands, the Sahel and beyond. In rangeland restoration, regenerative and FMNR projects, most of the revenues go to the local communities as incentives to manage rangelands and drylands sustainably. For example, Sudan’s degraded rangelands alone could sequester almost a gigaton of carbon over a 30-year period. With current carbon prices, 1 GT of carbon is worth 52 billion euros. Two of our co-founders are positioned in Khartoum, Sudan, and are actively engaging with local decision makers and stakeholders on setting up large land restoration projects in the vast rangelands of East-Africa. Our team has experience in working in emergency humanitarian contexts and has networks that span the drylands of the Sahel and East Africa regions allowing our service to expand to meet communities precisely where this service is needed most. Carbon sequestration will crucially increase the water retention and food security in the area, which has faced multiple and severe humanitarian crises, induced by severe droughts and floods, originating from land degradation and loss of soil carbon. Our solution is the missing verification tool for areas that have an enormous potential for land restoration and the greatest impact concerning the lives of the local people living in uncertainty and fear of the next drought, flood, or conflict.

The SoilWatch MRV solution provides an inexpensive ecosystem condition tracking, such as degradation and regeneration of rangelands in areas where comprehensive and constant soil sampling would be too expensive and difficult to execute. Our solution enables large scale rangeland and drylands restoration funding by the carbon removal market, meanwhile directly increasing food security and water quality in crisis sensitive areas of Sahel and East Africa. The revenue from the carbon credits will mostly be directed to the local communities and people who have successfully transformed to sustainable land management practices, such as regenerative farming and holistic grazing.

We are currently at the TRL 4 in the following areas: 

1. Scoping Areas of highest sequestration potential

2. Optimize Soil Carbon Sampling Locations

3. Continuous Monitoring of Land Management Practices

And at the TRL 3 in the following area:

4. Remote Estimation of Soil Organic Carbon Content

Current methods for carbon credit verification are using expensive and laborious recurring soil sampling. Although it gives rigorous verification for the soil carbon stock, the method is unsuitable for areas of the Sahel and East Africa and other large scale and difficult to access carbon sequestration project areas. Latest developments in satellite monitoring and machine learning technologies and accumulated knowledge of the ecological carbon circulation model have enabled the development of an inexpensive remote monitoring and verification system. We are combining the most advanced satellite data with predictive carbon models and machine learning to achieve the same or improved quality carbon credit verification than the old and expensive method can provide. In addition, we are doing so in an open, transparent, replicable way which will increase confidence.. Satellite and machine learning based monitoring and verification systems are scalable, meanwhile the conventional method is hardly scalable for large scale projects. Large-scale carbon sequestration enabling methods, such as ours, will increasingly attract investors to fund African rangelands restorations. By leading by example with openness, other organisations will adopt our methodology leading to increased confidence in the market overall and thereby increased funding for activities that benefit communities where need is greatest.

We are not currently directly serving people in our work to monitor biodiversity.  The rangeland restoration project we are currently working with will impact around 60,000 pastoralists and farmers in Sudan. By 2026, SoilWatch's restoration projects will have directly improved the livelihoods and resilience of over 800 000 pastoralists and farmers living in the areas that are the most impacted by climate change.

We are monitoring and verifying carbon sequestration, and are constantly tracking multiple natural events on the project areas. These events include for example: erosion, bare soil time, soil organic carbon, carbon sequestration by the vegetation, vegetation type, biodiversity, and more. These methods are based on peer-reviewed studies and our expertise, and are under continuous development. Our team has many years of providing third party MRV on social impacts on UN agency and NGO activities based on SDG indicators which we will use once projects commence.

Currently: Full-time staff: 2

Part-time staff: 3  
An additional 2 full time first hires have been identified for when revenue/ a grant/investment allows.

Our team’s skills, background and experiences are fundamental to our Unique Selling Proposition. Our core team, currently working full-time (1) and part-time (4) have nearly 20 years collective experience in earth observation, data science, land cover, regenerative agriculture, Monitoring Reporting and Verification, agribusiness management, environmental science, climate change policy, water and conflict, data collection in challenging contexts and emergency famine relief coordination, primarily in the East Africa region. This core team has been working without compensation. We also have two first hires identified for when we begin to receive revenue, or a grant/investment. As staff or third contractors for UN agencies and NGOs, our team has been working across Sudan, South Sudan, Kenya and Tanzania for these past years, working directly with the communities that we now wish to serve through SoilWatch. We developed company technology based on needing a solution to a problem, rather than having a solution and seeking a problem. It is based on the specific challenges and needs identified by these communities and as a result also has applicability for less challenging contexts. Transparency, openness and agency are core to our solution in which essential decision making is by the communities we serve. This is not just our philosophy though. We also believe that such ownership makes good business sense, increasing sustainability and demand from customers who demand a story behind credits and are more sensitive to the social and gender issues of agriculture in this context that we also seek to improve.

Our multinational team is working remotely, which enables us to hire the best candidates regardless of the location and disabilities. The team has a history of activism in gender diversity, migrant rights, LGBTQI+ activism, and has committed to EU social policies such as increasing representation on boards, which will soon become a legal requirement for receiving certain funding (a founder was active in the campaign for this prior to SoilWatch). We are volunteers with the Brussels Binder (increasing diversity on panels) and RANA (Refugees Are Not Alone) and have a dedicated advisor offering consulting on gender, ethnic and social inclusiveness. We have flexitime and the 4 day week as founding principles and are working to be Certified B (when legislation allows.).

We are applying to Solve because we believe that our work is perfectly aligned with the mission of the challenge, and because it offers precisely the supports that we have identified for overcoming the barriers we face. We are currently operating below our team’s capacity due to the lag in funding for the type of projects that we work on. At the opening level, the award would enable us to cover development and other IT costs at a faster pace, while higher levels would enable us to make our first hires such as administrative staff that would free up the founders to carry out more development and sales work.

The opportunities presented by being part of the Solve cohort are of great importance to us. Our mission is to improve confidence in carbon removal credits so that the communities we have worked with in the Sahel and East Africa can benefit from increasing soil health relies on the sharing of ideas and critiques from peers. The exposure provided by Solve will also benefit this methodology of openness, enabling us to lead by example.

We go into it in more detail in a later answer but the mentoring and strategic advice are invaluable to us as a new company. We have the field contacts, expertise and technical knowledge, but we are certain there are unknown unknowns that we could be guided through with this support. In kind resources, especially legal, have been identified also as extremely valuable

We are currently operating over a year ahead of schedule, with two full-time staff member and 3 part-time. As such, we have not developed our capacity in many of the above mentioned fields:

Human capital: we are certain that there are unknown unknowns in this regard and are open to critical analysis.

Business model: Although demand scoping has confirmed the market for our product we believe that external criticism of our business model and strategy would help us to improve them.

Financial: We believe that critical analysis of the previous two points, and awarded grants would significantly increase our investment eligibility, especially given many may not even be aware of the potential of soil or recent research and developments.

Legal or Regulatory Matters: We are a remote first company operating across a number of borders and jurisdictions. We have highlighted legal matters as an area where support is needed where we are unfamiliar with contexts.

For Public Relations, Monitoring & Evaluation, Product / Service Distribution, we have expertise in house in these areas however we do not currently have the human resources to perform as well as we could. Advice and critical analysis would always be welcome.

Technology: although we have expertise in this area, our culture of openness and mission to lead by example would be greatly aided by critical support and analysis at all times.

We are dedicated to improving confidence in carbon removal credits so that the communities we have worked with in the Sahel and East Africa can benefit from increasing soil health. We believe that transparency, openness and a foundation in published peer reviewed research can achieve this by leading by example. As such, we are open to, and have already begun discussions, with groups such as the Finnish Meteorological institute and our competition about partnerships to achieve that aim. The networking opportunities and ability to share best practice are of great appeal to us with MIT faculty and SOLVE members and we wish to partner with everyone with an interest in remote sensing, regenerative agriculture and pastoralism, Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration, blockchain and especially with those working on topics that we have not even realised have potential synergies.

Our solution has openness and transparency at its core and the activities it supports will be most successful when shared and when inspired by national and international best practice. To this end, we have already signed up to RESTOR and FMNRhub and wish to take what is learned these platforms and our work and share it where it is needed most.

Our solution is fundamentally based on advancements in AI, machine learning and cloud based computing, without which it would not be possible. We use these tools to monitor carbon, biodiversity, soil moisture (enabling sustainable water management) and to predict crop yields in communities on the front lines of the climate emergency.

Carbon: The requirements for field soil sampling to support Soil Organic Carbon monitoring are constricting due to the large number of samples required to be representative for the monitoring area, leading to very high monitoring costs and extensive field intervention. Through a data-driven approach relying on spatially-explicit environmental data and satellite imagery, we deploy a soil field sampling strategy aiming to cover the full range of soil properties in the monitoring area. Using satellite imagery observations of bare surfaces, we exploit the spectral sensitivity of the sensor to automatically generate the optimal number of point sample locations for the monitoring area. The generated sampling locations are then used throughout the project lifecycle to provide a consistent sampling framework and enable long-term accurate SOC stock estimation.

Remote sensing for biodiversity monitoring:

Spectral heterogeneity of multi-spectral sensor (e.g. Sentinel-2) is related to environmental heterogeneity (Spectral Variation Hypothesis) and is suitable as a proxy of species diversity. Clustering spectral information in an unsupervised manner should result in pixels from the same species naturally grouping together (Féret & Asner, 2014). So-called spectral species can be used straightforwardly in order to compute Shannin index for alpha diversity, and Bray-Curtis dissimilarity for beta diversity.

There have been many stories of double accounting and projects that did not do what they claimed that have hurt confidence in carbon removal projects

We intend to use blockchain technology for the 5Ws (Who, What, When, Where, How) of carbon removal credits in order to increase confidence.