Technological Advancements Represent the Future of Forest Carbon Project Development
“The job of the Research and Development (R&D) team is to deliver data products and tools that allow our colleagues across the company to more efficiently deliver carbon projects of the highest quality that use cutting-edge technologies to ensure project accuracy and integrity.”
– Jordan Golinkoff, Sr. Director, Research & Development
Since our founding in 2009, Finite Carbon has been a pioneer of the carbon markets. From our inception, we’ve been on the cutting-edge of developing technologies that impact forest carbon project development. Through the more than 60 forest carbon projects we’ve developed across more than 4 million acres in the voluntary and compliance markets, we’ve had the unique opportunity to continuously evolve our approach as the market grows and matures, deploying advanced technologies and tools as they become available.
Our teams are structured with innovation in mind, integrating our professional foresters with a robust team of natural resource specialists, forest biometricians, remote sensing scientists, and software engineers. This multidisciplinary approach enables us to both think outside the box and maintain the highest degree of quality control—resulting in greater consistency and transparency through the entire project development lifecycle culminating in rigorous verification processes leading to credit issuance, transfer, and retirement.
Research and Development at Finite Carbon
Our R&D team is focused on leveraging cutting-edge remote sensing tools, spatially explicit forest growth and yield modeling, and machine learning and artificial intelligence to turn scientific concepts into practical tools that are used to improve the project development process. Remote-sensing technologies paired with advanced forest biometrics allows for a detailed understanding of the current state and change of forests through time across larger areas with increased speed, accuracy, and precision to allow internal teams to work more efficiently.
The team is led by Jordan Golinkoff, Senior Director of Research and Development, and includes PhD scientists with extensive research experience.
“By pairing remote sensing with traditional sampling and forest growth modeling, the R&D team is able to estimate carbon storage at scale while developing data products that provide insights into the
state of the forest,” said Golinkoff. “Having these two distinct backgrounds on the same team is the perfect complement to address the climate challenges we’re trying to solve.”
The work comes to life in the development and delivery of data-driven products and tools focused around four primary areas:
- Evaluating the current state of a forest.
- Detecting forest disturbance.
- Modeling forest growth across different forest management regimes.
- Building tools to provide better insights with increased speed, accuracy, and precision to allow internal teams to work more efficiently.
Tools That Power Real Innovation
Finite’s CORE Carbon® is an advanced, digital mapping platform that streamlines forest carbon project development for small landowners with between 40 and 5,000 acres, underpinned by products developed by R&D.
CORE Carbon features an easy-to-use online enrollment process to give landowners immediate estimates of the amount of revenue they can potentially earn if they enroll their land in a carbon project. The key innovation of CORE Carbon is the ability to reduce measurement and verification costs, making project development and ongoing monitoring more efficient while delivering greater value to landowners. Multiple remote-sensing data sets were combined to simplify how landowners engage with the platform. They can simply enter their property’s location to find out how much carbon it contains and how much revenue they can generate. Launched in the southeastern United States in 2023 and expanded to the northeast in the spring of 2024, CORE Carbon is now open to qualified landowners in 26 states under ACR’s Improved Forest Management (IFM) on Small Non-Industrial Private Forestlands methodology.
Forest Models for Additionality
Detailed models of the forestland across 26 states on the East Coast of the United States, and the projected growth of the timber stocks on that land has been modeled by R&D to form the basis of our understanding of forest value and the additionality of the credits we generate. These models, paired with our forest disturbance detection tools, ensure the integrity of all credits generated and allow us to accurately monitor and identify any changes on the land.
This work is critical because forest carbon credits are based on the concept of additionality – meaning the landowner needs to proactively take an action that otherwise would not occur in the absence of a carbon project. All the models we generate are regularly updated to ensure they correspond with the most recent rules, regulations and best practices found at the federal, state and county level. For example, in some counties, privately held land close to riparian areas have specific harvest restrictions. Therefore, the team needed to ensure that the CORE Carbon platform would not allow that land to be included in any project development area. The ability to leverage cutting edge tools to apply these specifications to the CORE platform provides an additional layer of assurance that the resulting carbon credits are high-integrity and verifiable.
Photo Credit: Chris Gauthier/Lightchaser Productions
The Opportunity Ahead
In July of 2024, ACR published v2.1 of its Methodology for Improved Forest Management (IFM) on Non-Federal U.S. Forestlands. The updates included in v2.1 provide us with a clear opportunity to leverage our collective experience, R&D expertise, and existing technology. As v2.1 was taking form and since publication, our team has worked together to assess existing and potential projects under the new methodology framework which outlines a prescriptive approach using remote sensing data to establish project baselines and dynamically evaluate baselines over time. We are on pace for a seamless transition and for the creation of a comprehensive technology driven solution for project development under ACR v2.1.
Our continued investment in R&D innovation reinforces Finite’s commitment to ensuring project development continues to evolve and be robust, accurate, and result in high quality offsets while evaluating new ways to apply our expertise to an even broader set of forest carbon projects.
“The combination of expertise and effort required to bring down the cost of measurement and verification of a forest carbon project without sacrificing accuracy cannot be overstated,” said Carrie Gombos, Finite Carbon Co-CEO. “The work our R&D Team has done to make this vision a reality is truly impressive. I look forward to building off this momentum to continue to streamline and improve the project development process.”
Recent Recognition
The unique and innovative data products and tools that power the CORE Carbon platform have been recognized with a US patent for its usefulness for forest landowners seeking to better understand the state of the forest they own. In addition, Finite Carbon’s Forest Disturbance Tool received Google’s ‘Geo Impact for Good Award,’ for our usage of Google’s mapping tools in real time monitoring for forest carbon project integrity.