FLINTpro Accelerates Carbon Project Development

Summary

Compassionate Carbon, a California-based company and subsidiary of Eden Reforestation Projects, dedicated to providing nature-based solutions through restoration, wanted to upscale carbon project development across their global landscape restoration efforts. The FLINTpro team integrated our tools into their global team’s workstreams, equipping them with a set of tools and data that strengthened existing processes while adapting to their local needs. As a result, Compassionate Carbon was able to fast-track and streamline project development at every stage, with FLINTpro proven to be an invaluable addition to their project development process going forward. 

More than 20 project sites assessed

The FLINTpro methodology now used to perform assessments was consistent, reliable, backed by IPCC guidelines, and defensible. This gave them greater confidence in their own feasibility studies. That, in turn, allowed them to pull more projects into their pipeline, focus technical teams on other project aspects, and present updates much more easily to their stakeholders and potential investors. 

Over 10,000,000 hectares simulated across 3 continents

With fewer technical team members needed for each project, they were able to move faster and share otherwise inflexible resources across projects. As a result, Compassionate Carbon’ now has a way to quickly prioritize sites and move them through early project assessments and beyond more easily, building a more sustainable system for their diverse range of global projects.

Detailed Tier 2 and Tier 3 models supported customised simulation configurations

As projects were qualified, more data was collected, and site visits began, the Compassionate Carbon team leveraged the flexibility of FLINTpro’s models to implement Tier 2 and Tier 3 analyses for project sites. By using alternate remote sensing and field-collected data in FLINTpro, they were able to get a clearer picture of the project opportunities and risks, with tailored assessments for each site. 

Understanding the problem

Compassionate Carbon was looking to scale its restoration portfolio globally at all stages: identifying opportunities, obtaining investment, and implementing meaningful carbon projects with confidence.

Operating under its not-for-profit parent organization, Eden Reforestation Projects, Compassionate Carbon uses the financial returns from carbon projects to facilitate the scaling of restoration efforts to bolster its financing beyond philanthropic donors. The key issue, however, is that qualifying any project opportunity is a huge data- and time-intensive burden.

Investors want to understand the project potential of certain sites and expect a fast turnaround of quantitative and qualitative assessments. Running a lean operation, Compassionate Carbon needed to create capacity to efficiently scale up these assessments with their project portfolio expansion; they were looking for a solution that could reduce the hours of doing site qualification and abatement potential assessments. Communicating without consistent, well-understood data sources backing them was making it difficult to confidently qualify projects.

Co-developing a solution

The success criteria were simple: affordable, flexible, and fast.

One of our greatest selling points is the ease of use in getting going quickly and efficiently. However, there are so many new tools that claim to be the silver bullet that it can be a challenge for clients to sift through their points of difference. 

While other products may have been useful for performing a single initial qualification assessment for Compassionate Carbon, FLINTpro offered a suite of applications that could be implemented across their organization, solving multiple problems within a single platform. This was especially important as they had various projects at different stages of development and needed a solution that could service their entire portfolio.

By using FLINTpro, Compassionate Carbon could quickly prioritize between projects, as well as identify what data they needed to improve. This allowed them to stop spending money on data they didn’t need. Furthermore, regular adjustment to the complexity of data, inputs, and assumptions as each project moved through the life cycle meant they could easily monitor updates and test solutions against other or future projects. 

In supporting Compassionate Carbon, we leveraged our deep expertise, helping them not only solve the problem of qualifying projects with confidence but also helping them to better understand the problem itself. FLINTpro provided Compassionate Carbon with a framework, model, and library to organize data sources, experiment with data, assess project variables such as forest cover thresholds and planting regimes, and establish an enterprise system for their portfolio expansion. 

Moreover, instead of simply addressing the symptoms, our methodological and organizational framework looked at the root problem of establishing and growing a project development team.

What success looks like

Ultimately, Compassionate Carbon saw several major highlights in our relationship. From an organizational perspective, they got the expertise, engagement, and honesty about what their needs were that other tools couldn’t offer; from the software perspective, once onboarded, the ease of use, transparency, superior methodology, and flexibility gave them more confidence in moving forward on their own, feeling comfortable knowing the team had our support wherever needed.

For an organization of Compassionate Carbon’s size and scope, the importance of performing more feasibility assessments on more projects, and doing them faster, meant a major change in access to capital, which they could then reinvest into their capability development.

Get in touch with our expert team to discover how FLINTpro can help accelerate your unique project assessment and development at a global scale.