We were thrilled to start off 2023 speaking with Ariella Charny, COO and Co-Founder of Albo Climate. Albo is an Israeli startup tackling climate change by making carbon removal scalable.
How and why was Albo Climate created? Albo was co-founded by Jacques Amselem, Marco Calderón-Loor and me in 2020 out of a critical need to accelerate and scale up nature based climate solutions using AI technology and remote sensing data. We began this journey by identifying a major bottleneck related to carbon sequestration (removal) in nature-based solutions in diverse natural and agricultural ecosystems around the world. The monitoring of CO2 removal is one the biggest challenges in the nature-based (NBS) solutions market, currently largely lacking the technological capabilities to accurately quantify CO2 sequestration at scale. In most cases, measurements are conducted on the ground using hardware and inefficient tools such as manual soil samples. As a result, nature-based projects often face high costs and poor transparency with buyers. The lack of scalable and reliable solutions for assessing nature based projects results in a lack of confidence and slog in new projects, especially those in agriculture, peatland restoration and blue carbon systems. To solve this obstacle, Albo Climate has developed next-generation technology that automatically measures, monitors, and maps carbon sequestration, offering a cost-effective solution with an unprecedented degree of transparency and accuracy. Today, Albo is a team of 13 dedicated individuals, providing carbon monitoring solutions for 9 customers in 5 continents in the forestry and agricultural sectors.
Tell us about your technology. Combining geospatial monitoring and AI expertise, Albo Climate's innovative solution provides customers with high resolution maps displaying carbon data on a per-pixel level. Regardless of the location of the project, we can quantify carbon dynamics without physically needing to be on the ground. Our monitoring solutions help customers to seamlessly quantify carbon stocks in soil and biomass and translate them to carbon credits. Our remote sensing system will help scale nature-based projects, which are proven to play a critical role in mitigating climate change, to the next level. Current uses of Albo Climate’s carbon mapping technology can be seen in monitoring carbon changes within the USA, Canada, Ecuador, Peru, Zambia, and other regions. Our aim is to provide carbon and biodiversity data and insights, and thus support long-term projects that aid the global fight against climate change. With our partners and clients, we aim to help remove or avoid the emission of over 500 tons of CO2 by 2025. Why is Albo interested in working in Sub Saharan Africa? There are several reasons why we’ve identified SSA as one of our target markets. The first is the obvious yet unfortunate truth that too few players are focusing on the carbon potential of emerging markets, which consists of lands that are huge carbon sinks - meaning they absorb more carbon than they emit. With our remote-sensing technology, we can measure this data from afar, allowing land owners to participate in the carbon market, be incentivized to be good stewards of their land, and be compensated as such. We are thrilled to share that we’ve recently signed a contract with a major corporation to develop remote sensing models that predict carbon stocks in nut tree planting projects run by small-holder farmers in Zambia. More generally, we work with companies aggregating farmers (in a B2B or B2B2C model), and hope to enable further democratization of and access to the carbon market. What is Albo’s long term goal and vision? In alignment with the work we’ve been doing over the past three years, our goal is to enable billions of smallholder farmers and landowners to participate and have trust in the carbon market. We aim to scale up our product and make it accessible to good stewards around the world, in diverse ecosystems and bio-climatic zones. We look forward to building strong partnerships with agri- and forestry businesses, as well as with data and cloud companies, to continue growing and developing our product.
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