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.

Advances in Project Risk Mitigation

Our Nature Sustainability commentary on carbon and biodiversity credits, led by Thomas Swinfield and Sophus zu Ermgassen, advocates for selling credits only after they have been proven to be demonstrably additional using robust statistical techniques ('ex-post'). However, another breakthrough in our work came through 2024 with the development of predictive release schedules ('ex-ante') for nature-based solutions, addressing a pressing challenges in carbon credit markets: how to finance projects upfront while maintaining credibility.

The key innovation in our risk mitigation work is developing "release schedules" that predict future drawdowns and allow issuing extra credits when actual performance exceeds conservative predictions. This approach, detailed in our NBS risk paper, removes the need for traditional buffer pools entirely while bounding the risk of project failure.

This work addresses the critical financing question of where early project finance comes from if projects can no longer sell ex-ante credits credibly. As Siddarth Shrikanth notes in the crossroads paper, we need to figure out which projects fall into which risk archetype and create enough trust that outputs will be valuable enough to justify upfront investments, similar to how other industries handle uncertain but potentially valuable payoffs.

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