Remote sensing — or using technologies like satellite imagery, radar and laser-based measurements known as LiDAR — to assess the growth of forests, has the potential to accurately assess and verify carbon removal projects, according to a new report Meta commissioned from carbon management firm Carbon Direct. Without leadership and standardization, however, the industry is struggling to implement the technology, per the report.
Carbon removal projects are “unavoidable” if companies and governments are to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2022 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the carbon credit industry has come under fire in recent years, with a 2023 investigation by the Guardian, German weekly Die Zeit and SourceMaterial determining that 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by the world’s biggest certifier, Verra, were “worthless.”
About 87% of carbon offsets used by 20 major companies were at “high risk of not providing real and additional emissions reductions,” according to a 2024 study in Nature Communications. In July, an investigation by Reuters found that 24 of 36 conservation projects in the Brazilian Amazon offering carbon offsets were linked to illegal deforestation.
Nevertheless, on July 1 the European Union announced it would include carbon credits in its strategy for reaching 2040 climate targets.
“To ensure a carbon credit meets a high quality standard, one has to have high confidence that it represents a [metric ton of carbon dioxide] emissions avoided, via avoided deforestation, or removed, via reforestation,” Sanna O’Connor-Morberg, director of strategy and markets for Carbon Direct, said in an email to ESG Dive.
Remote sensing technology — like high-resolution scans of treetop heights taken with LiDAR from a plane or drone — combined with on-the-ground measurements and sophisticated software models can determine with greater accuracy where forests are and how much carbon is present, according to O’Connor-Morberg.
“As we say in the report, we are entering the digital age of forest management,” she added.
However, infrastructure and governance are still lacking, according to the report based on surveys and interviews with nearly 40 forest carbon project developers, carbon credit registries, diligence providers and landowners.
O’Connor-Morberg said “the remote sensing stakeholder community is very aligned on working together towards a common goal — pioneering actionable and industry-wide standards” for remote-sensing measurement, monitoring, reporting and verification (MMRV).
The stakeholders contacted for the report supported the creation of a forest carbon MMRV consortium for the carbon credit industry that would set crucial standards for the sector. These would include defining acceptable workflows for the use of remote sensing, deciding the regions in which datasets and models are applicable, standardizing how data uncertainty is calculated and folding that uncertainty into how carbon credits are issued. In addition, the industry needs a dataset of global benchmarks against which to calculate the progress of individual carbon capture projects, as well as a portal where relevant data could be available to all stakeholders, the report said.
The report does not identify a specific organization that should spearhead the consortium, but O’Connor-Morberg said “it will be critical that this organization is a trusted entity, playing an impartial yet scientifically-expert role in facilitating this public-facing discussion.”
Another barrier to implementing remote sensing is the prohibitive expense of acquiring data, such as LiDAR, the report found. Meta has released a fan open-source map of forest canopy height, but some degree of direct field measurement and data gathering will always be necessary, O’Connor-Morberg said.
Despite challenges, some carbon registries are starting to incorporate remote sensing, she said. “Our hope is that greater knowledge sharing and upskilling will particularly support project developers to make use of remote sensing technologies, in combination with direct field measurements.”
