Isometric - CDR Registry Interview

‍What is Isometric?

Eamon Jubbawy - Isometric is a carbon crediting platform. We are a standard and registry, and our job is to issue the highest quality science-backed carbon credits available anywhere in the world. We are a team of 50  with over 200 scientists in our Network who've helped us create and launch the most rigorous carbon removal protocols the market has seen. Ultimately, what we are selling is trust. We help carbon removal buyers, giving them the confidence to make large purchases and limiting the reputational risk of buying bad credits. We help the highest quality suppliers signal their quality and credibility to buyers, allowing them to sell more tons.

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Project Selection Criteria

What is the selection criteria and vetting process for projects listed in your carbon credits registry, and how do you ensure their credibility and environmental impact?

Eamon Jubbawy - Everything we do to determine creditworthiness is covered by the Isometric Standard, which we unveiled at Carbon Unbound Europe in late 2023. All projects must meet the stringent requirements of the standard, as well as adhere to a pathway-specific protocol that defines how the monitoring, reporting and verification should work to qualify for credits. The criteria are primarily around the verifiability of the removal: “How well can we measure what's happening with confidence?” 

To ensure credibility, we have pioneered a hyper-transparent approach. The level of data we share and information associated with the credit is more easily accessible and legible than anything that has come before Isometric. 

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Ensuring Inclusivity and Diversity in Projects

How does your platform address the challenge of ensuring inclusivity and diversity in the types of carbon removal projects featured, considering various regions and technological approaches?

Eamon Jubbawy -  In terms of technological approaches, we’re currently working with multiple suppliers to try to support all kinds of carbon removal activities across multiple pathways. Today, enhanced rock weathering, ocean alkalinity enhancement, direct air capture, bio-oil geological storage and biomass geological storage are all covered. This covers many of the significant activities in carbon removal today – but we have plans to expand our coverage further in 2024.

Regarding the geographical split, there are currently suppliers from six continents working with us, which is great because we know there can be a bit of bias towards US and Europe-based projects, at least regarding funding and coverage. But we are working in some capacity with projects in South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania: we’re committed to supporting projects worldwide. There are certain pathways with very high potential in tropical regions, which we're excited to support as they develop. We aim to help bring transparency and credibility to any carbon removal activity anywhere in the world that meets a certain bar. Our job is to set that bar so buyers don’t have to make that decision themselves.

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Scalability of Projects

Scalability is often the elephant in the room regarding the CDR industry. Everyone agrees we need more buyers to enter the market quickly. How are you educating or encouraging companies to push the industry forward?

Eamon Jubbawy - We're fortunate that we don't need to do much. There's some degree of education on technical aspects of the various pathways we work with and how we approach MRV. Still, in terms of the desire to (1) build confidence to make large off-take purchases and to (2) limit the reputational risk associated with buying bad credits, buyers are generally well-versed in the approach they would need to take to achieve those two goals. Mostly, they have been waiting for a third-party registry with incentives aligned with the buyers; in other words, they can finally trust a registry to represent them and help them with those two goals. 

So the question really becomes: “How can a registry help buyers build confidence to make large off-take purchases and limit the reputational risk associated with buying bad credits? 

The first way is to focus on science to calculate actual carbon removal rather than accounting tricks to justify credit issuances.

The second thing to do is to make all information and data hyper-transparent to ensure buyers don’t have to decipher the accounting decisions made behind closed doors—they can directly see the calculations and evidence.

Finally, it's about ensuring that we as a registry are intentional about our business model, removing conflicts of interest wherever possible to ensure we're always incentivised to do the right thing. It's not about a philosophical approach, things you say, or fancy marketing. It comes down to the fact that (1) we only get paid by buyers and not by suppliers, and (2) we get paid by buyers on a one-off flat fee basis to help them determine whether their purchase is genuine. So we have zero incentive to over-credit. We have zero incentive to make carbon removed when it isn’t because it doesn't make us more money. So, we've been deliberate about building a unique business model in carbon markets. No one else charges in the way that we do. 

Ultimately, suppose you're a buyer trying to decide who you can trust to act as your independent, incentive-aligned third-party registry to help you build confidence and limit reputational risk. In that case, there's only one option for many of them. 

So, to answer your question about how we educate buyers. All of that speaks for itself. It's about making some of our scientists available to educate them on the technical aspects of how we do calculations or why we set things up the way we do.

Although only a handful of people are buying credits today, most large corporations are at least considering it and are reviewing the options available. Hopefully, 2024 is the year when it goes from a group of early innovators to mass adoption. By the end of the year, I hope purchasing departments and CFOs are asking these questions: “What is everyone else doing?” “What's the market benchmark, and how can we bring ourselves in line?” 

Not everyone can be an early mover or another innovator. Naturally, a small group does that, and we've seen them emerge already. Now, it's a case of the mass market following suit.

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Challenges to Science Based Solutions

What's the biggest challenge facing CDR’s science-based solutions, and what is required to scale and solve them?

Eamon Jubbawy - The starting point is good science, but good science is, in practice, more complex than it sounds because many opinions exist at the frontier of CDR, and science is constantly evolving. So, we aim to couple a foundation of “best available science” with work on community convening and consensus building. In our short history, Isometric already has a track record of bringing different groups together, workshopping ideas, and trying to define a clear plan for moving forward. As a player in the centre of the ecosystem, our job is to ensure that the academic community gets their chance to voice how they think things should work in industry, what they consider the best available science to be, and what should and shouldn't be credited. 

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Risks for the CDR Industry

What are the risks for the industry in 2024?

@Eamon Jubbawy - Now that the CDR industry is scaling up and getting attention, the unfortunate consequence is that we will see a new wave of suppliers coming into the market looking to join the gold rush. And it's tough for new or less technical buyers to differentiate between the various suppliers. CDR is a product you buy, and then you don’t receive a physical product at the end of the process. At best, you might get an email confirming that the CDR happened.

The natural corollary of this is that there is a possibility of “carbon scams” in the coming years, where fraudulent suppliers emerge and sell tonnes that are not real. In a world where the suppliers pay the registries and the verification bodies - you can see how those scams will be more common.

This hasn’t been a real problem until now in CDR because the industry is so small, and everyone knows everyone. But as the market grows, we go from dozens of buyers and suppliers to thousands. The more players in a system, the higher the likelihood of fraud and crime. That's why good science, coupled with transparent information and an incentive-aligned business model, is critical to ensure we can help prevent that. We would hate to see some buyers make a significant commitment to CDR, putting millions of dollars into a project to catalyse the market and winding up with fake credits because the fraudulent supplier was working with a registry/verifier whose incentives were not aligned with the buyer.

Isometric exists to protect buyers in an incentive-aligned way. 

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