SoilWatch

The reviewers and our partners already know that thriving ecosystems are essential to protect biodiversity and natural watersheds, manage climate risks, reduce socio-environmental conflicts, and provide income and wealth for local communities. They and our partners know that land and coastal areas must adapt to more extreme weather. And that there are contextually and culturally appropriate nature-based solutions that reverse desertification, increase resilience to flooding, drought and storms, protect coastal areas and increase food security, all while removing CO2 from the atmosphere.  This includes but is not limited to grassland and mangrove restoration.

We also know that there is an unmet demand for trusted and transparent CO2 removals from voluntary carbon markets. McKinsey’s 2021 report estimated that there is already a shortfall of around 1 gigatonne of supply to demand of CO2 removals to 2025.

But this new financing is not funding adaptation or restoration of ecosystems. There is an explicit demand from large CO2 removal buyers such as Microsoft for climate equity and to support projects in the global south, but it is not happening. At current publicly available prices, there are 10s of billions of dollars of potential funding for CO2 removals that could be put to use for increasing resilience of coastal communities as well as communities in savanna and drylands, but it isn’t.

Why not?

According to the communities, buyers, market makers, project designers and journalists, there are three main bottle necks.

The first is a justified lack of confidence in the validity of CO2 removal claims, with high profile stories this past year. Methodologies are open to manipulation, double accounting has occurred and correlation rather than causation is accepted by some certifications.

The second bottle neck is the high costs of monitoring, reporting and verification, so high that they can absorb all of the revenue of a small scale project, limiting projects to the global north and areas and communities with high capital.

The third is the administrative complexity and burden of projects funded by carbon financing, requiring long project documents that require a particular level of expertise to complete to a degree acceptable by funders. This has the related impact of distancing aspects of project development and administration from the communities carrying out the work. 

Combined, these bottlenecks have resulted in potentially 100s of thousands of square kilometres of land and coastal regeneration projects missing out on a new source of funding. Thousands of communities in the Least Developed Countries missing out on a potential additional source of income for activities with massive SDG co-benefits. The Great Green Wall across the Sahel is just the most famous example where agro-forestry, Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration, Forestry, regenerative agriculture and rotational grazing offer solutions to degrading land while removing CO2, not to mention mangrove restoration, but lack funding opportunities.

We use open-source, high-resolution high frequency satellite imagery to monitor and measure land and coastal degradation, change, biodiversity and biomass production. We combine these with optimised field sampling locations and biogeochemical process models to estimate CO2 removals. Everything is based solely on published peer reviewed research and we publish on GitHub. But what does this mean in practice? It means that the costs of monitoring, reporting and verification are dramatically cut while the scientific rigour is maintained. In fact, the use of biogeochemical process models and methodologies to demonstrate causation mean that it is the only solution that meets the highest level of the EU regulation on carbon removal and, crucially and unlike other systems, makes our solution future proof under Article 6.4 of the Paris agreement. The solution is used for carbon credits that are certified but is also used to provide transparent, rigorous and verifiable information on climate impact for organizations that prefer that on its own without the third party certifiers.

Lower cost, greater scientific rigour, transpareny. Designed from the ground up to meet the bottlenecks of trust and cost reported to be holding back carbon financing. Built on scalable open systems with Google Earth Engine and similar technologies that allows reporting and to be carried out by local communities themselves as well as providing actionable insights for them to ensure the best possible outcomes for themselves.

Our experience of working with community based organisations also allowed us to map out methods to simplify and automate the creation of project documents in order to overcome the third bottleneck. This "Typeform for Carbon Projects" will be open and free to use to ease its further translation and localisation.

Technical: Degradation can manifest itself with the loss of soil organic carbon and other soil compounds, biomass loss above and below the surface of land and water, and biodiversity loss which can be induced by unsustainable land and coastal management practices. Carbon can be sequestered back into the biomass and soil if land and coastal areas are managed sustainably by communities with ownership. Using operationalizing decades of research in ai,  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 restoration/conservation potential by tracing back the degradation trends of the past decades to understand severity of land degradation,

2. Support design and planning of carbon/biodiversity-financed projects in suitable areas.

3. Estimate a soil organic carbon stock/biomass baseline and changes over-time through an optimized field soil sampling design the use of process models and the use of radar. Use established open peer-reviewed methodologies for above ground biomass. 4. Remotely monitor in near real-time land management practices, biomass production, land use and feed process models in an ongoing basis so that we can advise projects on the impacts of their activities so that they can make informed choices to maximise CO2 removal.

5. Combine ai, remote sensing and citizen science to monitor biodiversity.

Our focus are communities in East-Africa and the Sahel where we have direct on the ground experience and networks from over a decade of working in humanitarian emergencies and development. These are small scale farmers, pastoralist and coastal communities in Kenya, Mali, Senegal, Niger and Sudan who lack non-destructive opportunities for jobs and income, even when traditional practices or repurposing degraded land might support both people and nature in the long term. This context is well known to have a gender component with women being disproportionately the people that we serve.

However, the bottlenecks outlined above mean that they are currently underserved despite the massive potential funding from carbon markets. At the same time, overseas development aid budgets are being cut and financing for climate adaptation and for loss and damage is not materializing. The result is that livelihoods are becoming more precarious or being lost when possible solutions could be preventing this but go unfunded.

From rangeland and mangrove restoration, to regenerative agriculture and Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration projects, the increased transparency through openness, through scalable ai supported tech and interfaces creates the means to ensure that the vast majority of carbon revenues go to the local communities and organisations carrying out the activities are able to use the tools themselves. Over a projected 30 year project lifecycle, this means an additional source of income in regions traditionally experiencing socio-economic neglect and deprivation.

On land, 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.

At the coast, enabling finance for nature-based solutions such as mangrove restoration will increase resilience to the impacts of climate change and increase food security

Our solution is the missing verification and development 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. It is also the tool so that work that is currently carried out at a great distance from these communities can be done by them or as close to them as possible.

Our team has experience living in the region, comes from the region, and 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.

Although our application team lead is currently based in Europe, we began our work in South Sudan and operated from Sudan until our team had to evacuate to Kenya last year. We are firmly on the "supply side" (the community side) in the carbon markets language and as a point we are not an outside project developer. Our team is small with an emphasis on real problems we ourselves experienced and our partners continue to experience, developing accessible technologies or technologies that increase accessibility, such as the "Typeform for Carbon Projects" an open tool, as well as an essential emphasis on partnership with local communities, CBOs and NGOs with them leading the way. And then using the tools themselves, for themselves.

We partner with local organisations and provide assistance in the design and implementation of projects. To be successful, maximise impact and prevent reversals, activities must first and foremost be owned by communities. This is not just an ethical imperative, but there is also a solid business case for this and it is backed by experience. As such, this is not a top down exercise but a community led one. We limit our work only to what is needed and provide capacity building so that as much of the work and value creation is owned by those impacted the most by climate change. By providing project design support and ongoing monitoring, we enable communities to make informed decisions on how to maximise CO2 removal and thereby income, but that decision is in the end there’s to make.

We are a remote first organisation with the team currently working also from South America, as well as the Sahel and East Africa. By being able to hire talent independent of location and being remote first, we are able to remain in proximity to potential partners and projects and maintain face to face contact which is essential in the context in which we work.

We have a functioning toolset that is capable of all of the measurement, monitoring, reporting and verification that we have described for carbon, biomass, biodiversity in a limited form, and other relevant ecosystem traits such as water, soil moisture, crop health and yield etc. It is being used both for carbon projects under Verra, for a non-certified but verified project with a Community-Based organization in Kenya and for monitoring the impact of coastal and land development work for NGOs that do not require carbon accounting. One organization is now successfully using the tool itself and work is ongoing to simplify it further to make it more accessible to more users. Estimated beneficiaries are 6000. Unfortunately due to the outbreak of war and our evacuation from Sudan, we cannot count the work in Darfur.

Solve offers the supports that we have identified as needed to overcome the barriers we face. 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 by Natural Climate Solutions so that the communities we have worked with in the Sahel and East Africa can benefit from increasing soil health and more resilient coastal ecosystems through mangrove restoration. This 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 and set a new standard in transparency in a marketplace that is dominated by closed systems. We hope that the exposure will draw attention to community based nature-based solutions as part of the solution to climate change at a time when still to be developed technological solutions are getting a great deal of attention.

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 as we do not have the resources to take on legal counsel.

On finance, we face a lag in funding for the type of projects that we work on as cashflow comes some time later. So to begin with, the award would enable us to hire another data scientist and immediately accelerate our scaling to cover more projects. Grants would also enable us to carry out more baseline creation and projections that would in turn enable projects to access carbon market funding. Finally, our actions already and future plans to make tools free to use and open mean that we are not within scope for typical investors.  The prizes through Solve would allow us to complete and make open tools that we have identified as being impactful for communities.

Current methods for carbon removal verification are using expensive and laborious recurring soil sampling or closed systems that make great claims to attract investor attention but lack scientific rigour and acceptability. Although recurring sampling 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 such as mangroves. Latest developments in satellite monitoring and ai 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 biogeochemical process carbon models and machine learning to achieve an improved quality carbon removal 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 and mangroves restorations and build the Great Green Wall. 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. Our solution is also being designed to be handed over as much as possible and step by step to communities themselves to use, something unheard of by others attempting to work in this area.

Land and coastal degradation is primarily caused by unsustainable land/coast use practices such as:

1. Extractive farming practices and lack of investment in soil health
2. Clearing and exhausting vulnerable pieces of land
3. Increasingly sedentary pastoralist lifestyles
4. Growing size of herds
5. transition to more browsing (sheep and goats) rather than grazing (cattle) livestock
6. Large-scale charcoal production, including by armed actors
7. Inefficient household food preparation and water treatment
8. Displacement-driven deforestation

The activities above leads to a variety of negative outcomes and has a feedback mechanism. But it can be reversed.


Nature-based solutions offer a way to improve livelihoods while restoring ecosystems

The vast majority of the population relies on land for their livelihood: poverty cannot be addressed in conditions of degrading soils – ecosystem restoration is the solution to poverty. Indeed, Land-based livelihoods can work with and for the environment for mutual benefit

Revisioning livelihoods and practising:

•Regenerative farming

•Multi-paddock grazing

•Agro-forestry

•Efficient charcoal and firewood use

These activities by contrast lead to Profitable and sustainable livelihoods

•Higher production

•Increased profits

•Better resilience against shocks

•Environmental and financial sustainability

Which in turn leads to Positive local and global effects

•Reversed desertification

•Alleviated pressure on resources

•Reduced conflict pressure

•Increased development

•CO2 sequestration

•Improved biodiversity



So what about SoilWatch?

SoilWatch seeks to enable systematic and scalable ecosystem restoration

Mission Statement:

To mobilise and channel funding for evidenced and measurable activities that work with vulnerable rural communities to restore ecosystems at the local level, alleviating issues with food security and conflict, and combating climate change at the global level

Approach:

Identify and fill key gaps in existing funding and implementation systems to unlock their potential for ecosystem restoration in Sahel and East Africa and other environmentally vulnerable and conflict-affected regions

Voluntary carbon markets (VCMs) are a growing source of funding opportunities, with Article 6 mechanisms beginning and set to provide further growth.

VCMs refer to mechanisms through which emitting entities (countries, companies, individuals) can purchase credits to voluntarily offset their emissions

Restoring soil quality and sequestering carbon go hand in hand

The price of a carbon credit has grown dramatically over the past years from around $5 per tonne to over $30 (anecdotally, in some cases of high quality credits, up to around $100)

Growing momentum with major corporations making monetary pledges and seeking climate equity

Projected to be a $100 billion per year industry by 2030

Complemented by regulatory and mandatory carbon markets

Carbon markets are not THE solution and they are not without issues. However, they exist and the funding will flow to tech based CO2 removal in developing countries or to women's community based organisations practicing nature-based solutions such as our partner in Kenya. That is the choice we face.

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, above ground biomass, 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 M&E, MEAL and MRV on social impacts on UN agency and NGO activities based on SDG indicators and we design and carry out, for example household surveys, in addition to insights from the systems.

High resolution, high temporal frequency open satellite data, ai, machine learning, biogeochemical process models, distributed ledgers, nature, citizen science through apps adapted to low-literacy contexts and surveys. We use very high tech to reduce the cost of monitoring reporting and verification and to ensure transparency and no double accounting. We then combine it with the very low tech, tried and tested nature-based solutions. Some are new such as Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration, and some are centuries or more old like rotational grazing.

This same tech system then enables a tool to automate and simplify the creation of project documents by project owners, the communities, themselves.

A limited public version is linked below

3 full time, 4 part time.

3 years

Our multinational, multicultural team is enabled to work remotely, which allows us to hire the best candidates regardless of the location and disabilities. In the hiring process we take care to use accessible language and tools provided by organisations such as UN women for detecting and changing coded language. Our initial founding team recognized its lack of diversity and ensured that the next founder and then senior hires would come from more diverse backgrounds

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 offer flexitime, parttime and the 4 day week as founding principles and are working to be Certified B (when legislation allows). We put our money where our mouth is and have already provided full Finland standard maternity leave and payments to a colleague who was not based in Europe and who did not qualify for any such payment/leave where they are resident. As we have not received grants or investment and are a bootstrapped social enterprise, this put pressure on our finances however we are committed to taking steps for DEI.

SoilWatch facilitates ecosystem restoration, carbon sequestration, and empowerment of low-income rural communities in countries affected by climate change by connecting local level climate action with carbon markets by providing implementer networks with state-of-the art and scalable above ground biomass and soil carbon flux monitoring, verification, and reporting (MRV) solutions and project design support.

SoilWatch’s business model is designed with the aim of combining quality with scalability. SoilWatch is designed to be lean and to make use of existing project implementation networks, either communities or non-governmental organisations, in our priority countries. We provide only services that are bottlenecks and that prevent tapping into the huge potential capacity of organisations to reorient towards integrating environmental restoration in their activities.

From the perspective of potential carbon offset buyers, one of the main current limiting factor is the lack of supply of large-scale soil carbon-based projects. All buyers that SoilWatch have interviewed such as Numerco, South Pole, Compensate, Native Energy and Climate Care struggle to source the amount of CO2 capturing projects that they are looking for.   

The main obstacles that potential project-implementing organisations have in making use of the carbon markets for project implementation are: 1) the lack of a scalable MRV mechanism to reliably measure actual carbon sequestration; 2) the lack of project design capacity due to the relatively new frameworks guiding soil carbon; and 3) the lack of linkages of carbon market buyers and potential implementer networks.   

SoilWatch will provide context appropriate and scalable MRV solutions that will be a requirement for the carbon market buyers and sellers alike. The MRV system makes maximal use of remote sensing technologies as well as machine learning to reach scalability. Although at the early stages, some in-situ samples are required, the number of samples is greatly reduced compared to traditional methods and the need for this is greatly reduced through iterations, thus making the system not only able to scale but to benefit from it;

In the early stages, SoilWatch will also have to provide more involved project development support to potential implementer networks. However, as an automated and ai aided system is rolled out with a Typeform style interface and organisations develop further capacity, we will move to providing only project optimisation advice based on the information created by the MRV system and modelling. This can be used for more informed decisions on what project activities are likely to work best in different areas as well as for making more accurate estimates of carbon sequestration that determines the project’s budgetary parameters, leading to higher likelihoods of positive impacts and fewer risks of project breakdowns;

Through market research and engagement in the carbon markets in many different fora, SoilWatch has created good linkages with potential buyers as well as an understanding regarding their priorities. This puts us in a position to facilitate the necessary linkages between buyers and implementers.

The generation of revenue depends by project and client. MRV and project design support are sold either as services by set fee or subscription.

The primary bottleneck we face is the cost of carrying our baseline creation and then projections of CO2 removal. Once these are complete, we can enable a project to access financing. Initially, we finance this activity through grants. At a later stage, we reinvest SoilWatch shares of profits from projects into carrying out baseline and projection creation for new projects.

In parallel, we offer Monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) as a service and provide software as a service in the form of graphical ongoing MRV products to carbon market makers. Profits from these activities can also fund future projects. Our day to day finances are sustainable based on revenues from these services, however product development is slow due to being bootstrapped. Investment, in particular in the form of grants would allow for massive acceleration of product development and for enabling services to be made free and open.