Giving Compass' Take:

• Adele Peters explains how satellites and drones are being used to measure forests used as carbon offsets to ensure that the forests are accurately represented. 

• How can these types of technologies advance other issues? 

• Learn about the use of satellites to track water. 

For someone who owns forested land, carbon offsets give a financial incentive not to cut down trees. Other businesses that are struggling to reduce emissions can pay to keep the trees standing and sucking up carbon from the atmosphere. Offsets for planting trees are another significant way to fight climate change: Done at a massive scale, tree-planting could cancel out a decade of emissions.

Many companies are ready to pay for these offsets. The challenge, though, is tracking what’s happening in forests around the world. Right now, in order to estimate the carbon-storing value of a particular piece of forest, teams from a verification company have to hike into the forest and wrap a tape measure around each tree to calculate the width, use a laser to measure height, and manually count how many trees are in each plot. A new startup is developing tech to make these calculations automatically.

“The market is not growing fast enough–not because of lack of funding or lack of political will, but for lack of good tools,” says Diego Saez-Gil, cofounder of Pachama, a startup in Y Combinator’s current cohort that is building a new, technology-verified marketplace for forest carbon offsets.

Read the full article about measuring carbon offsets by Adele Peters at Fast Company.