Objectives of the service
CrowdSpace is developing CarbonSpace – a satellite-based carbon emission monitoring platform with spatial resolution of up to 30 meters and temporal resolution of up to 1 week.
Most companies targeting carbon reduction and neutrality are not able to measure and effectively manage the carbon footprint of their assets in real-time. They also lack transparency on internal carbon pricing, risks from changes in carbon regulation and miss opportunities for carbon footprint reduction and offsetting.
CarbonSpace is addressing the challenge of proper estimation and regular monitoring of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions providing effective tools for companies and public entities to track their carbon footprint and perform fact-based climate actions.
CarbonSpace B2B SaaS platform will provide organizations with the following online tools:
- Carbon Map: Monthly updated global map on greenhouse gas emissions with 0.1-degree regional and up to 30-meter local resolution for the last 20 years.
- Carbon Profile: Regular automated carbon footprint estimates by assets and land areas to empower decision-making for companies and public entities.
- Carbon Analytics: Intelligent carbon profile analytics with dynamics and key trends, impact estimation and recommendations for carbon reduction activities, carbon footprint reporting
Widget/API integration of the platform with complementary partner’s products is also being developed to multiply the availability and effect of CarbonSpace data and software tools as well as leverage external data to improve carbon footprint estimation.
Users and their needs
On the initial stage CarbonSpace is focused on 3 customer segments (targeted functions are indicated in parentheses):
- Ports (strategy, marketing, and CSR managers);
- Agriculture companies cultivating plants and raising livestock (COO, sustainability officers, innovation team);
- Forestry (COO, sustainability officers and CSR managers).
CrowdSpace is cooperating with ESG-data providers, consultants, and regulatory bodies in these segments to make CarbonSpace platform a market standard for carbon monitoring.
To identify the needs of the target customers market research has been performed and interviews with potential customers in ports, agriculture, forestry, consulting, and public institutions have been conducted. Here are the key findings:
Ports:
- High costs in carbon data collection and reporting required by the IMO due to uncertainty and manual work.
- Pressure to reduce carbon footprint from environmental NGOs and municipalities.
Agriculture
- High costs in carbon data collection.
- Lack of information on carbon emissions to decide which type of crops to cultivate.
- Agricultural companies that want to sell their low-carbon produce at a premium need to quickly assess and verify their carbon footprint.
Forestry
- High costs in carbon data collection.
- Carbon sequestration projects, based on forest management, struggle to estimate and verify offsets.
- Production inefficiencies and timber side sales lead to financial losses and forest assets value reduction.
- Impact of natural disasters on forests' carbon footprint is difficult to measure.
Europe and the USA are the priority strategic markets for CarbonSpace.
Service/ system concept
Planned tools of CarbonSpace platform:
The solution is based on the combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches.
- Top-down approach leverages the publicly available space assets such as data from Sentinel-5, Gosat-1,2, OCO-2,3 satellites that measure greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere.
- Bottom-up approach leverages data on particular types and features of human-created and natural land objects including satellite multispectral data from Landsat-7,8, Sentinel-2,3 and MODIS, available inventory and ground truth data.
- Finally, the algorithm applies empirical models and matches top-down and bottom-up approaches to get optimal greenhouse gas emissions estimation at asset level.
Space Added Value
At the moment the following publicly available space assets are used: satellite GHG data from Gosat-1 (JAXA), satellite imagery and multispectral data from MODIS, Landsat-7,8 (NASA).
Gradual improvement of data update frequency enables real-time visibility and transparency on emission data in order to stimulate continuous improvements inside an organization and empower near-real-time actions on carbon footprint reduction.
CarbonSpace combines a number of innovative approaches that create its value added:
- Automation of routine reporting, compliance and planning business processes that are currently performed by high value consultants, in order to reduce costs for end clients and make it affordable even for small and medium size companies.
- Development of algorithms and methods to include a broader number of carbon emission types in automated or semi-automated calculation.
- Gradual improvement of data update frequency in order to enable near real-time actions on carbon footprint reduction.
- Best spatial (30 meters) and temporal (1 week) resolutions powered by existing multi-billion satellite and ground infrastructure without the need for additional costly rollouts.
Current Status
CarbonSpace platform is in the process of validation and development of the product and currently initiates several pilot projects with companies in Ports, Agriculture and Forestry.
The prototype has technology readiness level 6 and is being tested with several pilot customers.
Customer needs with the target segments have already been confirmed. CrowdSpace has also connected to consulting, audit and ESG-data providing companies that are interested in partnership and may act as highly scalable sales channels.
The team still needs to transform the current prototype into a marketable product, including: extension of data collected, improvement of data processing, refinement of UI/UX, development of data analytics features, development of API, etc.
In parallel, CrowdSpace has designed a plan to develop the product and business in Europe and the USA which are the priority strategic markets.
CrowdSpace is going to cooperate with ESA further and apply for the ESA demonstration project.
