ofi’s carbon monitoring tool reaches final of sustainability awards
Image: Pexels/ Cojanu Alexandru
A new carbon monitoring tool developed by food ingredients supplier, ofi, and Google geo-spatial partner NGIS, was a finalist in the “Net-Zero Innovation of the Year” category at this year’s edie Awards, which celebrate sustainability leadership.
The tool is designed to measure carbon gains and losses across supply chains. It uses satellite imagery and machine learning to track changes in forest cover and carbon stocks at a granular level – down to the individual farm. This data is helping ofi to identify areas at risk of deforestation and prioritise conservation efforts on cashew, cocoa and coffee suppliers’ farms and in sourcing landscapes.
Climate action manager at ofi, Dr Pedro Lafargue said: “We are delighted to be recognised for our innovative solution that is helping us monitor and measure GHG emissions and progress towards net-zero goals. Part of this is about driving transformational change in strategic landscapes which means keeping growing and retaining more trees on and around farms.
“Planting more trees is one of the ways to move towards net-zero, but carbon sequestration potential is highly dependent on tree species and farm typology. The tool allows us to assess the optimum level of planting for different farmers and farms so we can create more efficient agroforestry programs that maximize both yields and carbon storage.”
ofi’s customers, who are some of the world’s largest food retailers and manufacturers, can access results of the data-driven sequestration efforts in their joint supply chains via performance metrics on ofi’s sustainability management system AtSource. These insights can help them monitor and reduce their climate risk and meet science-based targets, as well as prepare for compliance with new EU rules and disclosures in relation to nature and climate risks.
The move by ofi to take carbon stock monitoring from a manual, desktop-based process to an integrated pipeline which leverages cloud computing, is allowing ofi to progressively scale this analysis across multiple commodities and regions – covering over 950,000 farms so far.
But Lafargue says that there’s a role for industry partners to play to scale up the innovation and progress towards net-zero at scale: “While the tool can help our customers quantify the ecosystem services provided to supply their ingredients and invest efficiently in better farming systems, we need them to recognize the efforts made by farmers to plant trees and maintain agroforestry systems with financial incentives, like annual premiums, to scale up these efforts over the long-term.”
Looking ahead, there is potential to take the tool beyond ofi supply chains to quantify carbon stocks and removals across entire production landscapes to provide better data for the industry on land use change and carbon removals.