Fire is one of the biggest threats to forests and their ecosystems, and subsequently to carbon offset forestry projects, as evidenced by last summer’s fires in California. Monitoring fires is crucial, as it allows project developers to prepare for, and try to avoid, the worst of the devastation. It also allows companies that are associated with a project to understand the risk to their project and the credits they may have used to offset emissions.
To help facilitate this process, we have recently started tracking fires across forestry projects in the VCM using NASA data and projects’ location shapefiles, and sending out alerts when there is a thermal anomaly. This allows our users to monitor threats from heatwaves and fires to projects they are following.
The fire detection is performed using a contextual algorithm that exploits the strong emission of mid-infrared radiation from fires; the dataset picks up fire, hot smoke, increase in heat due to agriculture, or other sources of thermal anomalies. The fires are picked up within a 1km area.
In order to create an alert around this, we track the thermal anomalies and overlay them on top of the shapefiles of over 150 (and counting) of the biggest forestry projects within the VCM. If there’s any overlap, our system makes note of it and includes the information about the project and the number of fires within its borders. Users can then get the data via an email notification, or via Slack (which will be soon made available to anyone associated with the projects).
The algorithm is run daily and its output takes the form of an alert which aggregates all fires detected within the last 24 hours (see a recent email alert below).
The AlliedOffsets alert system and the associated technology can be used to track a number of other developments in the market. On project location data, we are in the process of adding information on landslides, droughts, heavy rainfall, political (in)stability, biodiversity loss, and more. We’re happy to offer this service for free for project developers and consultants.
We have also launched an alert system that allows users to track project retirements from specific projects, large retirements from the 15 registries we include in the dataset, as well as issuances and retirements from the registries. Stay tuned for more on this in the coming weeks!
As always, feel free to view our demo database here.
