DMRV vs MRV

What is digital MRV and how does it differ from traditional MRV of forestation projects?

Digital MRV is build upon the same structure as "traditional" MRV. It only tries to improve its processes by using the tools digitalisation and improved remote sensing provides. This creates many advantages when it come to accuracy, transparency as well as resource efficiency.

Measurement

Digital MRV relies heavily on remote sensing, whereas "traditional" MRV requires on-site visits physically measuring the hight and the circumference of trees as well as counting their number in a sample plot of the project.

Requiring an on-site visit to measure this, is of course not only resource inefficient, potentially emitting CO2e by travelling, but also very non-transparent.

Remote sensing solves this by making measurement possible without physically having to be at the project site. There are all kinds of remote sensing techniques including but not limited to satellite sensing, lidar flights or drone imagery. By combining different measurement techniques the accuracy level of the results can improve noticeably.

If deployed on a large scale this is so resource efficient, that it actually enables us to do much more regular measurements than traditional MRV.

Reporting

This is where a digital process really comes in handy. It speeds up the entire workflow and gives us the opportunity to create a new level of transparence. We plan on making all of the measurements as well as the corresponding carbon models 100% open source. This should in theory allow anyone to check them and point out possible weaknesses.

It's needless to say that most traditional MRV systems are similar to a blackbox. So this would be a big step in the right direction.

Verification

Digital MRV relies on the same structures here as regular MRV. It is still based on around third party verification but tries to improve the entire process in terms of efficiency.