Work About

    ■ Carbon Scenarios Prototype, Berlin, Germany, 2023
 The project intends to create an openly accessible geospatial carbon accounting platform, which first visualizes natural carbon sinks and second simulates changes within the extended ecosystems of their territories. The platform can be used by local stakeholders and decision makers to manage existing natural carbon sinks and plan future decisions concerning policy, land use, natural preservation, and monetization through carbon credits. The tool uses interactive real-time maps based on publicly available remote sensing data collected by satellites. The maps are overlaid with the associated financial value of the carbon credits based on international carbon emissions trading schemes.
The need for a platform that can provide clear, unified, and tangible carbon accounting has become evident: There are numerous incompatible carbon trading schemes on several continents; offsetting initiatives do not follow a specific standard and are often poorly monitored, while it is difficult to understand the relation between occupied space and sequestered carbon. This leads to a lack of transparency, fraud, and inaccessibility for non-experts and most importantly makes it questionable if the alleged amount of carbon is effectively sequestered. In addition to this, there is a need for local communities to regain agency over their territories, which are often controlled by multinational companies. Our proposed platform addresses these issues by unifying data, locating it on a map, and making it publicly available. Further, it provides the function of simulating developments, such as changes in policy, zoning, or (carbon-) market-related events. This allows small-scale initiatives and local communities to manage land in a sustainable and carbon-negative but also lucrative way.