belian.earth receives ESA funding to advance forest carbon baseline methods

belian.earth has been awarded funding from the European Space Agency (ESA)'s Business Applications and Space Solutions (BASS) Space Supporting Environmental Claims Kick-Start call, for our project "Conservation Integrity: Geo-AI powered transparency for Nature-Based Solutions".

Forest carbon markets face a fundamental credibility challenge: how do you estimate what would have happened without a conservation intervention? Recent high-profile analyses have questioned whether existing carbon baseline methods deliver accurate results, a debate our team has contributed to directly through our critique of synthetic control approaches in Science.

This six-month feasibility study will let us systematically test emerging techniques in geospatial machine learning and causal inference against this problem, with a focus on quantifying uncertainty in counterfactual estimates.

Our team brings more than two decades of field research in tropical forests, including work published in Science on carbon recovery rates, combined with operational experience in forest carbon project development and assessment. We also bring extensive expertise in cloud computing and open-source tools for reproducible ecological workflows. ESA's support lets us bridge that applied research background with new computational approaches.

We'll be sharing methods and findings openly as the work progresses. Our aim is to contribute tools that make rigorous counterfactual baseline assessment more accessible across the sector.