1. After a round table of introductions, Hannah updated the adhocracy of stakeholders on the external environment, noting the TFND launch and interest in Trustable Credit’s pilot sites, and their recommendations about the characteristics for decision grade data – see page 33.
2. Hannah has applied for Trustable Credit to join the technical group of the Align project which is developing biodiversity metrics for business and accounting principles for natural capital, funded by the European Commission, and led by WCMC Europe, the Capitals Coalition, Arcadis, ICF and UNEP-WCMC (Sebastian Mynott of Applied Genomics is already on the technical group).
3. Scoping work with stakeholders prior to the first working group has clarified that the trustable credit open standard for digital devices and their data measuring carbon sequestration, biodiversity and nature improvements,
is not –
- Standards of measurement (specialist working groups have standardized satellite generated measurements and metadata for GIS systems – ISO)
- ISO14060 family has defined the process of carbon credit creation
- What the measurements are (codes like woodland carbon and peatland carbon and verifiers of them have solved this – soil carbon and biodiversity codes to emerge).
is an open standard, defining a grading system –
- of evidence of sensor calibration, authentication, and accuracy
- of regularity and verification of actual measurement data collected
- of quality of scientific measurement process implemented
- of transparency and governance of the data registry across the whole data journey from farm to finance, via verification.
4. Brainstorm: issues in data journeys
a. Farm to Finance
- Concern on the diversity of sensors and missing data that could be collected in different setups.
- Most of setups have both static and mobile monitoring points that need to be aggregated securely.
- There was a discussion on how vendor-specific APIs influence the collection from data either from the first monitoring points or on any cloud-based repositories.
- How traditional and non-digital measurement processes and results be integrated to current digital data processing solutions?
b. Finance to Farm
- There were concerns how fine grained data should be – this should be dependent on location and context.
- Cost/benefit of regularity/frequency of monitoring is likely to be an issue. How regularly are measurements actually needed?
- The quality of the data needs to be matched with the purpose it is for – very fine high resolution data will be needed for some measurement processes.
- The finance sector needs absolute confidence in amounts (e.g. of C-seq or biodiversity improvement), in data provenance, and in the comparability and traceability of the registry and its data governance.
6. Group discussion
- What can the public sector do to support, and where are the gaps in data journeys currently?
- UK measurement processes must provably be recommended by the existing and emerging codes (e.g. woodland carbon, peatland carbon, etc.).
7. Next steps
– Research a wiki platform so the group can write and edit the open standards together: action Hannah
– Further funding applications: action Hannah (to submit full application to Palladium’s Challenge Fund following invitation)
– Set up Working Group 2 on Farm/Land digital devices and data collection for end of August: action Hannah
– Continue recruiting co-creators: action Hannah
Co-creators: Hannah Rudman, SRUC; Ben Bartlett, NMR; Darran Gardner, The DataLab; Richard Tiffin, Agrimetrics; Davy McCracken, SRUC; Andrew Baker; Erin Gianferrara, AECOM; Elisa Fuentes-Montemayor, SRUC; Andrew Fournet, Astrosat; Hugh Martineau, Map of Ag; Angelos Marnerides, University of Glasgow School of Computing; Annie Leeson, Agricarbon; Leonie Alexander ,Lauriston Farm; Olivia Crowe, Earthly; Ben Hart, Bunloit; Sebastian Mynott, Applied Genomics; Harry Grocott, Treeconomy; Andrew Grundy, Soil Association; Pat Snowdon, Scottish Forestry & Woodland Carbon Code.
Observers: Ross Johnston & Hilary Grant of Scottish Government.
Apologies: Thomas Gent Gentle Farming; Robert Hall Federated Hermes International; Tom Gegg, The Palladium Group.