Can a Global Forest Network Equip Carbon Markets to Work for Our Planet?

One of the 19th century’s great scientific minds, William Thomson, better known as Lord Kelvin, famously said, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” More than a century later, his maxim is being ignored, and as a result, the global community is failing to take all the steps necessary in the battle to reduce carbon emissions and prevent runaway global warming.  

Most of the world’s governments and major companies are lining up to make carbon neutrality pledges and looking for ways to invest in carbon sequestration in order to remove this climate-warming gas from our atmosphere. Businesses are joining the effort, leaning into voluntary carbon markets and investing in projects that trap carbon as a way of offsetting the emissions they create elsewhere. And celebrities purchase carbon credits in an attempt to offset their carbon footprint as private jets whisk them from airport to airport.  

But how do you actually pull carbon from the air and put it somewhere safe at a global scale?  

There are two very large natural habitats that do this work: oceans and forests. Together, these habitats absorb over half of the excess emissions we produce each year. But today, we need to turn up the carbon-absorption capacity of these big carbon sinks. That is where forests have gotten a lot of attention because the way to make forests absorb more carbon is to grow trees. However, we have lost almost half the of the world’s forests already, and the majority of the remaining forests are not large mature forests. Instead, they’re a mixture of secondary or degraded forest. Meaning there is a lot of space globally for improving forests’ capacity to pull carbon from the air. 

So why isn’t this happening all over the world? The answer, as Lord Kelvin would say, is measurement. Yes, nations spent billions to put satellite technology in place to monitor forests from space, but satellites cannot see carbon. And unless they are calibrated by measurements on the ground — the same measurements, made in all forest types, in all forest conditions, all over the world — they can’t measure carbon with the accuracy the world needs. 

And because we have not invested in the fundamental nuts-and-bolts calibration — our “standard weight” for earth-observation satellites — we have essentially built a fantastic space-based solution to a global challenge and then failed to connect that solution to the problem it was built to solve.  

The result is large-scale skepticism in the carbon markets. It is very hard to get excited about a market if you can’t keep track of the thing you are investing in, and it is very hard to agree on how many credits to award for a project if you can’t easily measure the carbon in the forest. Without a global, reliable system for the impartial measurement of forest carbon, no current or future participant in the process can be sure of what they are buying and selling, making it impossible for the market to achieve the viability and vitality needed to significantly offset carbon emissions. More perilously, without a rigorous, open system of measurement, it is difficult to track changes in the ability of forests to absorb carbon as climates change.  

Today, that system is being built. It is called Geo-Trees, and it is a structure being built collaboratively by leading scientists at the Smithsonian, the European Space Agency, two of France’s research centers, the University of Leads, and leading scientists in Colombia, Brazil, the Philippines and Côte d’Ivoire. They’re working side-by-side with earth observation and forest-focused partners around the world. 

The goal is to establish a global network of forest plots that cover all types and conditions of forest. In each of these plots, we will identify and measure all the trees, use drones and planes to get ultra-high-resolution imagery of each forest, use ground-based laser-scanning to create detailed maps of the architecture of each forest, and sample below-ground carbon biomass. 

All of this data then "speaks" to satellites looking down on earth, creating a codex to interpret, enrich, calibrate, and translate real-time information from space into reliable measures of forest carbon — in any forest type, in any forest condition, anywhere in the world. This work on the ground is what is needed to accurately use satellites to measure carbon at the scale that landholders, investors and governments need.

This is a global initiative, supported by the Bezos Earth Fund, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the European Space Agency and others. It’s connecting forest researchers from around the world, and linking a broad range of ground-based and space-based technologies to provide a globally accessible codex to carbon in the world’s forest. 

The Geo-Trees network is starting in the tropics, the most carbon-rich forests in the world, and establishing research sites across the world. In the coming years, the program will extend to all forests, providing hundreds of monitoring sites where satellite-based measurements of forests can be combined with detailed information on tree identity, wood density, tree architecture and soil carbon.  

Upon completion, the measurement of carbon in a particular forest, and the impact of human actions on that carbon, will be almost as seamless and simple as measuring the weight of your apples when leaving the store. You don’t worry about the quality of the scale at the check-out counter because the scale has been calibrated. This is the foundation needed to support and reward actions that pull carbon out of the air and put it in trees all over the world.

Far more important than his rhetoric, Lord Kelvin devised the scale that established absolute zero, which became an international standard for temperatures that still bears his name. He should serve as a reminder of, and an inspiration for, the work we still need to do to establish a measurement to contain the damage of carbon emissions.