In September we shared our thoughts following C-Quest Capital’s troubled cookstove initiative. Just this last week, we also read Matt Levine’s analysis on Bloomberg Law to CQC’s fraudulent claims and the inherently opaque and challenging nature of the voluntary carbon market.
As Levine points out, today’s Voluntary Market carbon project investors and credit-buying companies depend on the actual delivery of promised impacts by projects that usually offer very little performance transparency; meanwhile, no one in the project value chain – whether proponents, technical consultancies, investors, registries, or credit buyers – is inherently motivated to uncover bad project news once it reaches its crediting phase.
Without doubt, some players in the carbon credit market may be doing what they can to brush any failings as to the true impact of their projects under the rug. And whenever such behavior is uncovered, trust in the entire market is eroded.
Any system will have bad actors – as long as the possibility of profiting by doing so exists. The inherent problem today for credit buyers is that it can be very difficult to distinguish good projects from bad ones. Until that situation changes, the potential of the nature-based solution carbon market as a solution to climate change cannot be realized.
Impact Inside was created not only to let carbon project proponents and their stakeholders to highlight the true story of their projects using objective, transparent information, but also to avoid the possibility of reporting fraudulent outcomes. By mapping a blueprint tailored to the unique project with measurement, reporting, and communications for both public and investors, Impact Inside leads proponents down a path to high-quality credits, de-risked projects, and ultimately the higher credit prices all market stakeholders seek.
In the case of C-Quest, from the outset, the project plan was flawed. Although the intervention of cookstoves was well intentioned, the product’s design, durability, and user experience were all compromised. The data was then only delivered to the leadership team, who had a vested interest in the data being very different – it was too late for them to change course. And so the data was manipulated, staff in the know eventually spoke out, and capital that was intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, avoid deforestation, and improve the lives of households was squandered.
With Impact Inside, this all could have been avoided. The project proponent, technical consultancy, investor, and the communities impacted would all have access to the project’s Theory of Change-based plan, with real-time performance data that tracks project progress available on-demand, and with the added assurance of data integrity provided by Impact Inside. This not only would have allowed stakeholders to identify failure points early, but also to enable a documentation trail to enable due diligence by investors, registries, and certification bodies. Further, if in the planning process C-Quest had engaged target communities (as Impact Inside would have led them to do) and asked where they would use cookstoves when it rained, the product team might have known they had to provide a cookstove that could be safely used indoors.
The Impact Inside SaaS platform offers a comprehensive solution to the integrity challenges faced by carbon offsets. The platform enables carbon project proponents and stakeholders to present an authentic and transparent narrative of projects through objective data. By leveraging the Theory of Change (ToC) framework, Impact Inside helps project proponents construct robust project plans with sound measurement and reporting, helping project teams focus on critical components like baseline deforestation estimations and carbon stock measurements, assisting them in developing more accurate projections and impactful plans. The platform supports two way communication with local communities, ensuring they understand, benefit from, and can inform the initiative design. Impact Inside also uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a variety of ways within the solution to make project proponents and technical services providers’ work easier – whether in regard to plan development, measurement configuration, reporting, documentation, or storytelling.
We collectively want to see the Voluntary Carbon Market expand and scale to its full potential. However, there is a limited supply of the demonstrably high-quality projects investors need. Of late, scores of administrative bodies and overseers have described to market practitioners what good projects look like, but practitioners have few ready-made options to deliver the good projects investors seek. Impact Inside provides project proponents, technical consultancies, and investors the solutions they need to make good projects more the norm. While regrettable in themselves, we appreciate it when fraudulent carbon offset projects are exposed, because it points directly to the need for solutions such as ours. Today we invite project proponents and investors to join our beta program. We’d love to hear from you.
