Trusted Carbon Credits

The Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits is an initiative I started with Andrew Balmford, David A Coomes, Srinivasan Keshav and Thomas Swinfield, aimed at issuing trusted and verifiable carbon credits towards the prevention of nature destruction due to anthropogenic actions. We researched a combination of large-scale data processing (satellite and and sensor networks) and decentralised Tezos smart contracts to design a carbon marketplace with verifiable transactions that link back to trusted primary observations.

In around 2019 Srinivasan Keshav joined the Cambridge Computer Lab from Waterloo, and we got chatting about ways that computer science could be applied to helping our colleagues in conservation with their quest to improve nature-based solutions (both deforestation and rewilding efforts). We wrote down our initial thoughts with some colleagues in "How Computer Science Can Aid Forest Restoration" and ran a summer UROP set of projects (writeups here) which had to be done remotely due to the 2020 lockdown.

Later during the pandemic, Srinivasan Keshav and I joined up with Andrew Balmford from Zoology and David A Coomes and Thomas Swinfield from Plant Sciences and the Cambridge Conservation Institute to establish a centre dedicated to combining classic topics from computer science (big data processing, reproducible computation and distributed consensus) to the pressing problem of issuing trusted and verifiable carbon credits towards the prevention of nature destruction due to anthropogenic actions. Our centre was announced later in 2021 officially.

You can follow the outputs and publications from 4C directly on the website at https://4c.cst.cam.ac.uk.