The Standards Body Behind a New Generation of Nature-Based Carbon Credits

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Nature-based solutions are our entire focus, not one part of a broader portfolio.

We pioneered a purpose-built standard: deeply connected to the people and projects shaping the nature-based carbon market, and focused on the innovations needed to help it scale.

Today, we can see forests in unprecedented detail, model change more precisely and track outcomes in ways that were previously impossible. Our approach was built to translate those advances into stronger incentives for conservation & restoration, greater confidence for buyers, and better outcomes for people, nature, and the climate.

Over the past several years, that approach has led to a series of important firsts for the market.

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1. First credits issued across three pillars, not one

“For us, meeting Equitable Earth was a true miracle, we found a space where our ideas about ecological restoration and social development for Indigenous communities found an echo and support." The Pachaillariy Association

Carbon was never the only outcome we certified. From the first project, every credit has had to stand up across three pillars: ecological condition, livelihoods, and carbon. This a condition of credit issuance, not an optional co-benefit.

Climate impact depends on the health of the wider ecosystem, and on the people whose lives, rights and livelihoods are inseparable from it. Our approach has been shaped by time spent with projects and communities on the ground, where the connections are impossible to ignore: forests cannot be protected over the long term if local people do not benefit, and carbon gains cannot endure if ecological health is treated as secondary.

In practice, every project must assess the ecological condition it starts with, then define and track actions to protect or restore native biodiversity, soil, water and connected habitats. Project objectives and interventions must be co-designed with core stakeholders, including Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, with formal agreements in place before anything begins. Projects must also deliver measurable social benefits that would not have happened without them.

The result: the first credits to treat carbon, nature and livelihoods as equally important outcomes.

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2. Bringing issuance and retirement fully digital

“This approach establishes new quality standards among current methodologies and tackles long-standing industry challenges.” Sylvera

For a long time, certifying and managing carbon projects meant navigating fragmented systems: exchanging hundreds of pages of static PDFs, jumping between portals, and waiting through months of manual back-and-forth. It’s an administrative burden that slows down finance when projects on the ground need it most.

We built an end-to-end digital platform from the ground up to change that.

Every phase of the project lifecycle- from initial onboarding and spatial data ingestion to automated baseline calculations, third-party verification, issuance, and final retirement- lives in a single, seamless environment. This means:

A unified, frictionless workspace: Developers submit project boundaries, track progress, and manage documentation through a user-friendly digital interface.

Streamlined verification: VVBs, technical partners, and the standard collaborate directly within the platform, significantly cutting certification timelines.

Built-in data pipelines: Centralised access to high-resolution geospatial datasets and automated carbon accounting models, removing the need for developers to build and maintain complex data stacks independently.

Automating processes: We have automated the operational heavy lifting, meaning project developers spend less time managing administrative tasks and more time protecting and restoring nature. For buyers, it provides complete digital traceability.

Together, these capabilities have enabled the first nature-based carbon credits to be issued and retired through a fully digital platform.

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3. The first satellite-derived nature-based carbon credits

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Traditionally, forest carbon estimates have relied on measurements from a sample of field plots, surveyed by hand and extrapolated across much larger project areas. Their accuracy depends on how representative those plots are, while collecting sufficient data across large or remote landscapes can be costly, logistically complex and pose risks to field teams.

M001 introduced a different approach. Above-ground biomass is estimated from satellite data at pixel-level resolution across the entire project area, providing consistent, wall-to-wall coverage that captures variation across the landscape.

This marked a market first: the issuance of the first satellite-derived nature-based carbon credits.

The methodology also introduced innovations in both how impact is credited and which restoration pathways are recognised. Credits are issued ex-post, only after observed gains have been verified against a synthetic counterfactual built from comparable reference areas outside the project. It also recognises natural regeneration and secondary forest growth as eligible restoration pathways, rather than only tree planting.

Together, these innovations established a new model for forest restoration that has quickly gained traction. At the time of writing, Equitable Earth has more projects using this next generation of forest restoration crediting than any other standard.

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4. A new operating model for forest conservation

“The first widely applicable REDD+ methodology that can create credits for stopping forest degradation as well as deforestation, and that uses the full data available from satellite carbon maps.” Ed Mitchard, Space Intelligence

Protecting standing forests remains one of the most urgent challenges of our time. It is also one of the most complex areas of the carbon market: technically demanding, closely scrutinised, and shaped by lessons learned over many years. At a time when confidence in REDD+ depended on solving difficult questions around baselines, data access, and local ownership, we felt, and still feel, that the answer was not to step back and avoid that complexity, but to build a framework capable of addressing it. That is why we developed M002, our methodology for forest conservation projects under REDD+.

In legacy REDD+ frameworks, project developers are tasked with setting their own baselines and selecting their own reference regions, creating a structural conflict of interest in which they’re asked to make assumptions that directly determine how many credits they generate. At the same time, they rely on binary classifications (‘forest’ vs ‘non-forest’), leaving severe forest degradation difficult to measure and account for.

M002 changed that architecture entirely.

It makes carbon accounting and baseline setting the responsibility of the standards body. Equitable Earth centrally calculates jurisdictional baselines, risk models, and crediting volumes across all projects using the latest remote sensing data and standardised rules designed to account for uncertainty.

Rather than classifying canopy cover as simply present or absent, M002 tracks changes in above-ground biomass pixel-by-pixel across entire landscapes. For the first time at scale, this captures not only clear-cut deforestation but also quieter, more gradual carbon losses which legacy systems can miss.

To ensure high integrity doesn’t create insurmountable cost barriers for local developers and communities, we centrally license enterprise-grade geospatial datasets from leading providers like Chloris Geospatial, Sylvera, and Kanop, democratising access to best-in-class data.

The market response to M002 was immediate. Within its first year, 16 million hectares of forest entered certification, 16 jurisdictional risk maps have been produced, and leading rating agencies have ranked it among the lowest-risk REDD+ methodologies.

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Our mission: protect and restore nature, equitably

We believe in a future where the people who protect and restore nature are recognised and rewarded, and where these efforts can outcompete the forces driving its loss. Everything we have built and everything we do is driven by the conviction that this future is possible. Bringing forward practical solutions will remain our entire focus.