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【Abstract】

CTrees is a nonprofit that has it’s eye on the world’s trees: literally! This organization was started by NASA scientists, who have created a state-of-the-art satellite monitoring platform to accurately calculate, in real-time, the carbon capture amount of individual, regional, and global trees.

In an era of exponential interest in reforestation and carbon credits to act on climate change, CTrees aims to address the blind spot of real-time data on global forest cover, at micro, meso and macro levels. Forestry projects have been previously plagued by double-counting, over-reporting, and other ills, such as changing climate, forest fires, and illegal logging. CTrees provides the data for all these aspects that were previously difficult to monitor. For carbon credit and nature-based solutions investment, as well as nationally determined carbon drawdown initiatives, CTrees provides accurate, transparent, and secure data to help legitimise forestry carbon reduction initiatives.

【Sustainable Development Goals Chart】

【Main Highlights】

Problem: Carbon levels in the atmosphere continue to rise, and the earth currently holds 414.72ppm in the atmosphere. Cutting carbon is necessary, but many scientists also say that without some aspects of drawdown of the carbon from the atmosphere, we will not be able to achieve climate goals. Deforestation alone is responsible for between 10-15% of global CO2 emissions.

Context: Attention on the health of forests falls within the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, 2021- 2030. More and more approaches that fit within these international guidelines are being applied at local, regional, and national levels: reforestation; tree planting; carbon credits; carbon sequestration (drawdown); payment for ecosystem services; nature based solutions, etc.

Solution: CTrees is a nonprofit that is a science-driven, satellite forest monitoring system, that creates accurate and reliable real-time data on the condition and carbon storage potential of forests globally. The CTrees system was built by NASA scientists, applying their satellite knowledge to the problems of the earth. The founders seem to have followed the Drawdown pledge, that “every job is a climate job.”

Impact Statement: CTrees scientific approach can work with forests of any size – global, regional or even individual trees in a reforestation project. In their bold words, through their platform, “organizations can bring data to the climate fight, accurately measuring, reporting and verifying (MRV) the carbon in every tree, everywhere.”

CTrees website shows a tree comprised of pixelated trees. Their monitoring technology claims to be able to calculate carbon storage of every tree on the planet.

【Case Overview】

CTrees falls within the context of international actors looking at forests as a key piece of the puzzle for ‘solving’ climate change. Realizing the immensity of the global carbon crisis, solutions that can be scaled up often receive the limelight. To solidify these efforts, the UN has proclaimed 2021-2030 as the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. This goal was flagged as crucial by over 70 UN signatory countries. In order to restore forests, the UN holds that, “Restoring forest landscapes means enhancing landscapes in ways that ensure lasting benefits. These include better local climate regulation, improved flood and erosion control, increased variety and availability of food and non-food products, and economic opportunities for local communities.” Programs that work to these aims include the Trees in Cities Challenge (to reforest urban spaces); working groups on climate and biodiversity; etc.

Other actors dedicated to reforesting and other forestry initiatives include the World Economic Forum (WEF). The WEF has the aspiration to conserve, restore, or plant one trillion trees through their ”1T’ program. WEF has framed the situation as an opportunity, as they hold, “Forests are an essential part of the solution to tackle climate change and biodiversity collapse. Healthy forests are also important for jobs and sustainable livelihoods through forest products and activities such as conservation and restoration. Forests make us healthier and more resilient; they filter air pollution and reduce heat islands in cities; and they can propel new drug discoveries to treat current and future diseases.”

Moreover, in the race to create reforestation projects, various levels and scopes of action are being applied – such as private tree planting, national tree planting, and maintenance of private and public forested lands. For instance, through the Bonn Challenge (an international effort to catalyze restoration), India pledged to restore 26 million hectares of deforested and degraded land, and through the Paris Agreement Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), India pledged to sequester an additional 2.5 to 3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent through increased forest and tree cover by 2030. Essenatially, the enthusiasm for reforestation and restoration has also brought with it a rush of new and global initiatives. In some cases, there have been criticisms for credits and programs double counting on ambitious targets – which can easily go unnoticed without proper monitoring of large claims.

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Levels, we can monitor it, but globally there has been no dent in the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere, even during the pandemic

【The CTrees Difference】

CTrees holds that they are, “the first global monitoring system to enable robust forest carbon accounting with methods and data that are transparent, accurate, and actionable.” Their motto is cheeky: “see the forest, and the trees.” The platform was developed, notably, by NASA scientists and engineers. CTrees was born out of a passion to use their unique skill set to do something beneficial for the planet. For instance, Sassan Saatchi, a senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is helping lead CTrees as a side project.

The CTrees team built the platform with a mission, “to serve a larger community of project developers, investors, supplier countries, and decision makers with sustained and operational science-driven data.” In 2021, for instance, CTrees estimates the world’s trees stored 400 billion tons of carbon – that’s a lot of accounting! To put this figure in perspective, the entire US generated 4.87 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) in 2021.

CTrees is not the first company to use AI and satellites to monitor trees, however, their technology allows them to do so with the highest accuracy of any platform to date. Technology even a decade ago would not have been able to provide the accuracy and detail as found in the CTrees system, but now with attuned satellites, they can accurately look at the jurisdictional level of forest health, and even down to the local level to examine individual trees, such as young trees planted in a restoration effort. With considerations like climate change, forest fires, illegal logging, etc., a real-time satellite monitoring approach allows landholders and carbon credit buyers to monitor the state of forests, so that claims accurately reflect the reality on the ground. This real-time assurance was not available before, and surveys would have been more lengthy and costly.

WIth so much investment going into carbon credits and selling carbon assets these days, the CTrees platform can be used to help countries convince buyers they’re maintaining trees, as well as buyers to monitor their forest investments. Other uses for the technology include: monitoring city trees (i.e. to address urban heat island effect); monitoring deforestation (illegal logging, damage due to pests, damage due to climate change); and monitoring other forest intrusions (illegal building).

CTrees provides jurisdictional carbon trends, examples shared on their site include California; Chiapas, Mexico; Indonesia; the Congo; and Brazil.

【Impact Statement】

As one of the key activities for carbon sequestration is restoring and maintaining forests globally, CTrees’ platform provides accurate monitoring and accountability for this growing sector. With their new data-driven technology platform, double-counting and claiming forests are healthy and storing carbon when they’re not becomes much harder. The CTrees technology gives, for the first time, an accurate picture of what is happening with forests globally.

The case touches a number of the SDGs including:
#9 Industry Innovation: NASA scientists and engineers crafting a satellite platform to monitor the trees of the world.
#13 Climate Action: finding new means to address climate reduction through assisting drawdown and reforestation efforts.
#15 Life on Land: Supporting the growth and stewardship of healthy forests.
#17 Partnerships for the Goals: cross-sector collaboration between scientists, engineers, orgnaizations,
businesses, and nations looking to address climate goals.

【Systems Perspective】

Does managing for just one variable – carbon – omit other factors? In other words, do we only ‘see’ what we are measuring? Carbon storage, for instance, does not necessarily equate to biodiversity, habitat creation, watershed replenishment, soil regeneration, etc. There are other issues that matter – beyond carbon – for forest and overall ecological health. Managing for the variable of ‘carbon’ is a form of reductionist and not systems thinking. Moreover, looking at forests just in terms of carbon is an anthropocentric view of forests, and not necessarily what forests need to be healthy. For instance, trees in a certain area, like the high altitude desert of Ladakh, India (where many recent tree-planting initiatives have taken place) could actually further disturb already distressed ecologies through the albedo effect, as well as depleting near-irreplaceable groundwater stores. Although much-lauded and receiving significant amounts of support/finance, tree planting projects in inappropriate ecologies can actually cause more harm than good.

As briefly mentioned above, double counting of carbon credits or ecosystems services provided by forestry projects is also a consideration to monitor. However, deception in these sorts of projects is not new. The researcher found a paper from over 10 years ago that detailed the areas where double counting was an issue (keep in mind research papers also take several years to come out between researching and publishing). The researchers report that double counting can occur in the case of: “ambiguous definitions and inconsistent classifications of ecosystem services, poor understanding of ecosystem complexity, inadequate recognition of exclusiveness and complementarities of individual ecosystem services, spatio-temporal scale dependence of ecosystem services, and overlap and lack of cross-referencing between ecosystem service valuation methods.”

Tree planting projects have also been criticised for their role in privatising the commons. In many parts of the world, forests are areas for communal grazing, firewood, and other forest product harvesting (mushrooms, herbs, etc). When lands are purchased or leased for carbon storage/carbon credit purposes, often this means closing off this area to communal use. Thus, local people lose access to a valuable source of livelihood. The UN REDD+ payment for ecosystem services program, for instance, has received such criticism, as it overlooks the social and political considerations of conservation. There has been much written in recent years also, about the hazards of moving local communities off and out of the forests, and managing the forests for a sole variable. Some scientists even attribute the devastating and uncontrollable fires along the West Coast of the US, due to moving native populations off the land, and the subsequent century of inappropriate forest management by the USFS (documented extensively in the book Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares by Nancy Langston).

Importantly, climate/environmental equity is not a theme addressed in the CTrees public discourse. When considering who benefits from carbon credit schemes, often it is local communities who should be benefiting, yet as mentioned above, local forest land is given at their expense to international bidders. If CTrees refocuses to add a climate equity piece to their platform, they would for instance give subsidised or sliding scale rates for their technology if it was going to be used to benefit a community in a non-Western context (i.e. local land stewards in India, or the Congo).

One last consideration is the growing issue of space debris, or space waste, or orbital debris (artificial material orbiting earth). The more satellites we have orbiting the earth, the more we have material fragmenting off and entering into space. NASA estimates currently there are some 27,000 space debris orbiting earth. Due to their extremely high speeds, even small fragments of space waste can cause serious damage to other satellites and the space station – and also fragment off pieces creating more space debris. Moriba Jah of NASA recently won a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship for his work on this timely and little researched topic. As we increasingly enter a digital age, our impact on space is also a point for consideration.

Pitfalls of massive tree planting campaigns. For instance, mono-crops of non-native tree species; or species that are highly water-dependent in water scarce regions.

【Links and Contact Information】

Albedo Effect in Forests
https://anthropocenemagazine.us2.list- manage.com/track/click?u=fecc70e48b1b7920119ac5984&id=54e481c5f9&e=7de2858eb2

A NASA Scientist Designed a Platform to Track the Carbon of Every Tree on the Planet
https://www.fastcompany.com/90789651/a-nasa-scientist-designed-a-platform-to-track-the-carbon-of- every-tree-on-the-planet

Phantom Forests: Why Ambitious Tree Planting Projects are Failing
https://e360.yale.edu/features/phantom-forests-tree-planting-climate-change

REDD+ Pitfalls
https://www.boell.de/en/2020/08/28/redd-pitfalls-market-compliant-forest-conservation