Socio-environmental solutions for low carbon agriculture
Based on a partnership between Treevia and GSS Carbon and Bioinnovation, with support from the Land Innovation Fund, the Arbaro Carbon platform will combine state-of-the-art technology with technical and legal expertise to measure and sell environmental assets
Treevia's and GSS Carbon and Bioinnovation's proposal is to facilitate farmers’ access to different technological tools and financial instruments that enable payment for environmental services, earning additional revenue by conserving native vegetation areas and enhancing the value of standing forests. Together, they are implementing a green, sustainable economy project for soy growers in the Cerrado biome, with support from the Land Innovation Fund. By combining Treevia's expertise in machine learning and IoT technology for forest measurements with GSS Carbon and Bioinnovation's knowhow in developing and selling carbon-market assets, the companies are launching Arbaro Carbon, an integrated innovation platform to do remote sensing with cloud computing and artificial intelligence along with a portfolio of projects for the sale of environmental assets, to generate additional income for farmers through environmental preservation.
Arbaro Carbon combines technological development with the construction of technical, legal, and financial instruments to enhance the transparency and potential of an environmental assets market to conserve forests in Brazil. "One of the project's goals is to spread the idea that permanent preservation areas and legal reserves are money-makers for farmers. Getting there will be a great indicator of success and a valuable lever to renovate the carbon market as a whole," believes Esthevan Gasparoto, Treevia's CEO.
The Treevia & GSS consortium are planning to make Arbaro Carbon an integrated innovation platform for the digital measurement, reporting and validation (MRV) of data from sensors deployed in the field, instead of traditional manual measurements that involves risks for people doing the work. "Using sensors means making real measurements in the forest rather than estimates based on auxiliary variables. Associating real, constant measurement with remote sensing makes the initiative transparent, and is a huge differential for the project," explains Esthevan.
For Treevia and GSS, the carbon market, a major focus for asset generation, has developed unevenly in the last decade. It is already on the private sector’s ESG agenda, but gaps remain in data collection and validation, methodologies to validate the issuance of credits, and more accessible information for farmers to understand the importance of conserving the environment to both mitigate climate change and pay financial returns for keeping the forest standing. But it hasn't always been like this. A few years ago, the first thing people asked was whether these actions were compulsory, and they told us to come back when it was. Today we see a voluntary pursuit of alternatives coming from several stakeholders", explains Paulo Zanardi, a partner at GSS Carbon and Bioinnovation.
While they are developing the platform's business model and technology, Treevia and GSS are promoting engagement and disseminating content on climate change, carbon markets, and ESG practices to raise awareness in society at large, and among farmers in particular, about the environmental and financial value of standing forests. The platform's website is already online, and they will soon begin their work in social networks and online events. "We believe in the importance of environmental education. We want to produce quality, user-friendly content about the carbon market to share with the population, broadening the understanding that agriculture can be a great ally of a green and low-carbon economy," explains Philippe Niemiz, Project Coordinator at Treevia.
Stages in the project:
Because of its advanced legislation on payment for environmental services and its significant coverage with remnants of native vegetation, Tocantins was the state chosen to launch the project. They first processed individual CAR data from 63 municipalities in the state, with more than 39,000 farms covering more than 14,000 hectares, broken down into six micro-regions – Miracema do Tocantins, Porto Nacional, Jalapão, Rio Formoso, Dianópolis and Gurupi – and then identified the farms with surplus native vegetation giving them a potential to receive payment for environmental services projects.
At the same time, the Treevia and GSS teams are evaluating climate dynamics and biomass variations in the project’s six microregions, and their influence on forest evapotranspiration and the rates of biomass accumulation and degradation. This monitoring enables more accurate estimates of carbon absorption potentials and of restoration trends each region. Besides this technical-scientific analysis, the initiative also maps methodologies with the greatest potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the main carbon certification options available in the market, in order to choose the one most suitable to the project's needs.
The companies work in partnership with the University of Tocantins to validate the technical data collected in the field, and with farmers' associations and rural extensionists to engage farmers themselves. They hope to ally and dialogue with a variety of regional players to strengthen the project's significance and scope, before starting implementation in the field, which is planned to begin in July.
Pilot farms:
Treevia and GSS are now working to pick seven farms with diverse profiles for the pilot project. To ensure the selection’s diversity, the project will work with 1) a large soy farm with about a 400-hectare preservation area, already selected and with a survey underway; 2) two medium-sized soy farms with about 200-hectare preservation areas; 3) and four small soy farms, with preservation areas of about 50 hectares each. Only landholdings in compliance with the CAR’s legal and social-environmental requirements are eligible to participate in the project. Farms on indigenous lands and conservation units, or smaller than 50 hectares, are not.
The Três Irmãos I e II farm, located in the municipality of Gurupi, TO, was the first chosen for the project's baseline development. The ranch had a history of raising beef cattle when the family decided to test a soy crop on an area of about 400 hectares. The first harvest’s positive outcome spurred the owners to invest in expanding the soy fields until they covered the entire pasture area of 4,000 hectares. A field visit observed phytophysiological differences in the property's plant cover – some areas covered with denser forest and others with smaller and more sparsely spaced trees, typical of the Cerrado – and installed a Treevia sensor, positioned 1.30 meters above the ground, for testing and initial analysis. The data collected on the pilot farms will determine the baseline and be decisive for the project's next steps.
"The Treevia and GSS Carbon & Bioinnovation initiative combines the three objectives of the Land Innovation Fund in a single project: an innovative solution enabling socio-environmental projects to optimize their outcomes and promote sustainable, climate-smart agriculture, for a deforestation and conversion-free soy supply chain; a partnership action that blends expertise and enhances knowledge sharing to develop integrated solutions; and a focus on the farm, with actions to engage and attract the participation of farmers to expand the project's impact in the field," says Carlos E. Quintela, director of the Land Innovation Fund.