Renoster is going to tell the world which forest carbon projects are good and bad. We use remote sensing technology to track and evaluate these projects and call them out when they don’t meet their climate commitments. We’re going to share our methods, our findings, and our thoughts with everyone. We’ll build trust and propose better alternatives to how things are done today. This approach will help corporations know with confidence that the carbon credits they buy genuinely offset their emissions. We’ll let the market punish bad projects and incentivize good ones. And through this, we will protect and restore the earth’s forests, having a real impact on climate change.
Watch a detailed deep dive below.
When I finished my PhD, I went to work for a startup called Pachama as Head Scientist. I was employee number five. Our goals were ambitious: use technology to revolutionize carbon offsets, and protect and restore forests. In my time there I developed most of the technology needed to evaluate existing carbon projects. But rather than disrupt the industry, we fell into a niche, reselling existing credits and doing evaluation of the projects that we brokered. My work was locked behind closed doors. Nobody would ever know which carbon projects had cheated the system, and which projects were doing the most for climate action.
This is an example of an avoided deforestation project in Brazil. The pink line is the project boundary, and the yellow is recent deforestation that has encroached into the project — meaning the project was not very successful.
Over the course of my career, I’ve reviewed more than 100 forest carbon projects, and many of them were shockingly flawed. The system for issuing credits is easily manipulated and rife with cheaters. Phony credits go to offset real pollution, and those projects that didn’t exaggerate their alleged impact were punished by the market. Nobody knows which credits are good or bad, and there wasn’t a way for the market to correct and incentivize good behavior. This fundamental problem — being unable to tell good credits from worthless ones — plagues the industry and arrests the development of what could be a scalable, net-positive solution to climate change. Academia and industry alike are aware of this issue, yet most of the smartest forest scientists I know stay away from carbon credits like stinky cheese. I am choosing a different path.
I left Pachama in September of 2021 and did some soul searching. I traveled around the US, I made educational and inflammatory youtube videos… Finally I teamed up with my friend and co-founder Saif Bhatti to join Renoster. Here our goal is simple: disrupt and reform the carbon market through deep transparency.
Elias Ayrey
Head of Science @ Renoster.
