Forest Carbon Diligence concept image by Planet

Earth observation data company Planet Labs released its new Forest Carbon Diligence dataset — a 10-year archive of global forest carbon, tree height, and cover readings at 30-meter resolution. The company described the archive as a “groundbreaking data product that aims to provide unprecedented insights into forest change and carbon stocks — a crucial tool for ensuring accurate carbon accounting.”

Planet also announced plans to launch a global 3-meter resolution Forest Carbon Monitoring product to enable even deeper analysis and reporting, next year.

Both the Forest Carbon Diligence and Forest Carbon Monitoring products are designed to make high-fidelity forest carbon estimates derived from field inventories or airborne lidar campaigns more affordable and accessible on a global scale, while delivering improvements in resolution, accuracy, frequency, and scalability. Planet’s Forest Carbon Diligence starts with an extensive library of airborne LiDAR data and draws on additional data sources from a range of public satellite missions to produce regionally relevant measurements across the globe.

“This dataset brings to market a 10-year archive of forest carbon globally that’s highly accurate, affordable, and scalable, helping to solve long-standing challenges associated with measuring forest carbon stocks,” Planet co-founder and CEO Will Marshall said in the announcement. “This is especially important as new regulations push companies and countries across the world to balance their carbon books. The first step in meeting this challenge will be obtaining objective measurements, and with this capability Planet believes we can underpin global carbon markets – and thus help accelerate the world’s transition to a sustainable economy.”