Improvements in technology and measurement are showing that forest conservation projects do work – and should be accelerated, says Antoine Rostand, Co-founder of Kayrros.

The voluntary carbon market continues to divide opinion. Just recently, the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) provoked a backlash – including from within the organisation itself – when it revised its Corporate Net Zero Standard to let companies use environmental attribute certificates, including carbon offsetting schemes. A group that claimed to speak for the “overwhelming majority” of SBTi staff said they were “deeply concerned’ by the move”. SBTi later appeared to backtrack, saying that there were “no changes” to its standards and a formal draft of rules on carbon offsetting would be presented in July.

The strength of the reaction shows how polarised – a now-familiar term – the conversation has become. This does no one any good: we’re all conscripts in the battle to prevent the climate crisis spiralling out of control. Taking swipes at each other merely wastes precious time. We need to find a way to direct the flow of money from those who have a lot of it to those who have much less, and who are, by virtue of where they live, charged with protecting resources on which we all depend.

The climate finance gap – the difference between the amount of funding allocated for climate-related activities and the amount actually needed to effectively address climate change – stood, as of late 2022, at US$2.61 trillion a year. According to BloombergNEF’s ‘Long-Term Carbon Offsets Outlook 2024’ report, carbon credits could reach US$238 per tonne in 2050, and the market could be worth US$1.1 trillion annually by the same year.

Support for the green transition

The world cannot afford the green transition without the carbon market. This is the hard truth of the matter. The good news is that, despite the scepticism and the bad press, the carbon market does, in fact, work. In June last year, we used our Forest Carbon Monitor to assess more than 90% of the Amazon, which is the world’s largest rainforest and one of the world’s largest carbon sinks. Our analysis, which we ran by processing terabytes of satellite data with AI, showed that of 75 reviewed conservation and emissions-reduction projects funded by the carbon market, just five showed the same static deforestation rates. In other words, 96% were working.

More recent analyses have yielded similar