November 2021 - Dr Anil Madhavapeddy
Dr Anil Madhavapeddy, Pembroke College Fellow, Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology, and Director of the recently launched Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits (4C), discusses how the Centre aims to create a trusted marketplace for nature-based solutions
The world is facing a large-scale environmental crisis. Two parallel and related strands of this are, first, the crisis in biodiversity and the rapid extinction of many species, recently addressed at the COP15 UN Biodiversity Conference in October, and second, the threat of climate change, the topic of last month’s COP26 summit in Glasgow. Pressure is growing on governments to execute nature-based solutions which will offset some of the most damaging impacts of these crises. While COP26 built some momentum, there is still a long way to go to turn promises into lasting change. More engagement with the private sector is urgently needed.
The solution to the crisis is two-pronged: we must engage in behaviour change to reduce unnecessary harmful emissions, and also invest in nature-based solutions at global scales to not only reduce, but ultimately reverse the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss.
The newly-established Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits (4C) is an initiative established by myself, along with Professor Andrew Balmford from the Department of Zoology, Professor David Coomes and Dr Thomas Swinfield from the Department of Plant Sciences and the Cambridge Conservation Institute, and Professor Srinivasan Keshav who works with me in the Department of Computer Science and Technology. Our aim is to link computer science with naturalist knowledge to improve nature-based solutions to the climate crisis, for example to support reforestation and rewilding efforts. We will do this by issuing trusted carbon credits that are scientifically verifiable, and reputable, and which links to trusted primary observations. This will allow corporations to confidently invest in nature-based solutions, working with conservationists and communities to implement the changes today that we need to reach our 2030 emissions goals.
At COP26 in Glasgow, over 100 world leaders pledged to end deforestation by 2030. According to the IPCC, this pledge is not enough – we need to not only stop deforestation immediately, but also plant around a billion hectares of new trees in the next ten years. Deforestation has increased almost every year since 2001 and our planet has seen an overall decrease in tree cover of 10% since 2000 – there is a long way to go. Our urgent challenge is ensuring that we can verify that deforestation solutions are working, alongside tracking the associated carbon credits used to offset emissions.
Nature-based solutions are one of the primary mechanisms we can deploy to reverse the adverse impacts of climate change. Examples of these solutions include rainforest conversation, re-forestation efforts, and peatlands renewal. These solutions are currently funded with the voluntary carbon credits market – this is small, but likely to grow massively by 2030, especially considering the pledges that came out of COP26. However, this current market is also flawed, involving labour-intensive manual auditing, as well as being peppered with scams that have damaged overall trust in the market among potential investors.
4C therefore aims to create a trusted and decentralised marketplace, where investors will be able to fund nature-based solutions with confidence, by purchasing trusted carbon credits in order to implement independently verifiable and accountable nature-based solutions. To achieve this, we are using a combination of large-scale data processing and decentralised Tezos smart contracts to create verifiable transactions that link back to trusted primary observations.
For now, these efforts are focused on preventing deforestation. Planting trees and engaging in re-forestation efforts are worthwhile but do not go far enough, especially considering how long the process of growing new trees takes. Forest preservation is a much more immediate solution, especially considering that old forests will have significantly better biodiversity. It is vital to identify ways in which we can avoid deforestation being the only viable financial option. Beyond deforestation, this technology may also be applied in other areas such as seagrass and peatland conservation.
The trusted primary observations will come from satellite imagery, which allow us to accurately track deforestation processes. We will then use digital twinning techniques to form metrics around this and build a voluntary carbon market based on Tezos carbon tokens. The use of Tezos opens the door to engagement from a variety of market makers to improve the ease with which trusted carbon offsets can be tracked, but without imposing large transaction fees for proxies as are present in the current carbon trading world.
In doing this we must consider three properties. The first is additionality, referring to the new interventions we will be putting in place to reduce deforestation. The second is leakage, meaning the possible negative consequences which this intervention might have elsewhere (for example, reducing supply in one area increasing demand in another). Finally, we must consider the permanence of these interventions – once a given project ceases, will outcomes revert to their prior values, or will we (ideally) see some stabilisation of long-term solutions.
4C is hoping to benefit from meaningful engagement with Pembroke’s Corporate Partnership Programme and the wider College community. Deforestation prevention is just the first target for our marketplace, and we are planning to deploy additional primary observation techniques in 2022 involving batteryless sensors, drone sensing and hyperspectral sensing technologies. All of these will enable us to scale out the supply of nature-based solutions while retaining the all-important verifiability we need to reduce our overall emissions worldwide. Personally, I am also looking forward to the creation of the new Interspatial Room on the Mill Lane site; a low-latency ubiquitous computing room which will also function as an interactive gateway to explore our global conservation efforts.
Anil Madhavapeddy is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Technology in the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. He has worked in industry (NetApp, Citrix, Intel), academia (Cambridge, Imperial, UCLA) and startups (XenSource, Unikernel Systems, Docker) over the past two decades. He directs the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits (4C) and also conducts research into functional programming and systems research. He is a long-time maintainer on open-source projects such as OpenBSD, OCaml, Xen, and Docker, and a seasoned entrepreneur who advises companies on technology strategy (currently Zededa, Tezos Foundation, Tarides, and others).