DCVC DTOR 2025: Innovators are finding better ways to lean on nature to remove carbon from the atmosphere

The clearing and burning of forests, mostly to create new cropland and grazing land, releases about 8 gigatons of CO₂ into the atmosphere each year, making defor­esta­tion one of the biggest contrib­u­tors to climate change. At the same time, trees and other vegetation store huge amounts of CO₂ as they grow — about 15 gigatons per year— which means the world’s forests are still a net carbon sink. It follows that nations should invest more in efforts to slow defor­esta­tion and accelerate refor­esta­tion and afforesta­tion (estab­lishing tree cover on formerly non-forested land).

Governments, NGOs, and private companies have made important moves in that direction over the last two decades, aided by the creation of a voluntary carbon market — originally laid out in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol — that allows entities investing in refor­esta­tion and other emissions reductions projects to receive carbon credits or offsets in return. Unfor­tu­nately, the carbon credit system has developed serious pathologies. Orga­ni­za­tions responsible for setting carbon standards and issuing credits have, in some cases, grossly overstated the actual emissions reductions of approved projects, inves­ti­ga­tions have found. 

To restore trust in carbon credits and get investment flowing faster, orga­ni­za­tions such as Verra and the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) are rolling out more rigorous standards for removal projects, built around principles such as quan­tifi­ca­tion and tracking, trans­parency, and third-party validation. To win ICVCM’s approval, a project’s promised carbon removals must be additional, permanent, and not double-counted. Verra’s new ABACUS label for carbon credits comes with similar requirements.

Refor­esta­tion and afforesta­tion, including agro­forestry, are on a short list of project types that both ICVCM and Verra consider effective at seques­tering carbon. Recently, a group of American technology companies called the Symbiosis Coalition — including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce — promised to buy enough carbon credits from developers of nature-based projects to remove up to 20 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere by 2030. The coalition will start by investing in refor­esta­tion and agro­forestry, using ABACUS as its standard of quality. ​“Science tells us we cannot wait to invest in nature restoration,” writes the coalition’s executive director, Julia Strong. ​“Symbiosis aims to supercharge that necessary climate action now.” 

And this is where deep-tech innovators come into the picture. It’s not easy to measure exactly how much CO₂ is being locked away in a forest as it grows. To help with the quan­tifi­ca­tion and tracking of refor­esta­tion and afforesta­tion projects — and, ultimately, to bolster investor confidence and keep the dollars flowing — there’s a new crop of companies special­izing in measurement, reporting, and veri­fi­ca­tion (MRV). A company called Kanop, for example, applies deep-learning models to inter­fer­o­metric synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) data from satellites to estimate canopy heights and overall forest biomass. Another startup called Nadar fuses multiple types of satellite data, including optical, SAR, and lidar, to monitor changes in forest stock. Upstream Tech offers a geospatial platform called Lens that lets project managers access public and commercial satellite imagery and measure landscape changes over time. All of these companies help project managers minimize field time and bypass older, more error-prone methods for estimating forest biomass, such as manually measuring the diameters of tree trunks.

According to the Nature Tech Collective, venture investors put $1.23 billion into MRV companies between 2018 and 2023. We expect to see a virtuous circle set in, as more reliable measurement technology helps unlock more investment dollars for nature-based carbon removal, in turn encouraging more landowners to undertake removal projects, in turn expanding demand for more and better MRV.

“The only method that’s ever been shown to remove atmospheric CO₂ at scale is nature-based solutions, like refor­esta­tion done right,” says DCVC managing partner Zachary Bogue. ​“We’re seeing people trying to bring out new types of data products that will actually quantify that whole market. So there’s some activity here, and it’s an area I’m actively watching.”