The Financial Times’ Agenda featured ReSeed’s unique business model of bringing carbon credits directly from farmers to the market among an article that provides a great overview of climate tech that companies are using to step up their reporting on climate change matters. Read the full article here, and we’ve excerpted the part featuring ReSeed:
“Similarly, Josh Knauer is the co-founder and president of Reseed, a company facilitating the sale of carbon credits to companies looking to offset their emissions through absorption by plants and the soil. During the Obama administration, Knauer served on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, where he created and implemented open data initiatives.
In recent years the biomass carbon removal sector has been plagued with accusations of flawed or fraudulent accounting. Consequently, Knauer and his co-founders, Vasco van Roosmalen and Zak Zaidman, have created a company that employs several layers of technology to provide its clients with reliable, traceable data that can be reported to regulators looking for granular information.
Reseed currently works with more than 8,000 farmers in Brazil that derive revenue from using their land and plants to offset emissions. Reseed provides the farmers with access to corporate clients and others on the world market and uses a software platform to map farms, Google Earth satellite imaging technologies to verify the plant life and blockchain to track all the data and carbon credits.
The company has also developed a method to calculate the carbon emissions absorption rate by biomass, which its founders hope could become an industry standard. Knauer has been tapped by the World Economic Forum to help develop guidelines and best practices for the carbon offset sector.
“We’re trying to do this right, and one of the biggest potential weaknesses in methodologies such as ours is fraud detection. And so we’’ve built in many layers of redundancy around the data,” said Knauer, who is also an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
This year Reseed is expanding into Tanzania and will soon also be active in Nigeria, Egypt and Guatemala, he said.”
Financial Times’ Agenda: https://www.agendaweek.com/c/3993024/516704
