Dive Brief:
- Climate finance company Catona Climate is partnering with carbon project developer Compassionate Carbon to scale high-integrity carbon sequestration projects focused on agriculture, forestry and other land use, the two companies announced Thursday.
- The collaboration aims to restore vast areas across the Global South and remove millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, supporting both local communities and regional biodiversity, according to a Dec. 5 press release.
- The partnership will rely on Catona’s financing model, which provides an initial capital investment for early-stage nature-based projects, enhanced monitoring technologies, in addition to flexible payment schedules and fixed pricing on future carbon credits to incentivize buyers within its network to sign long-term offtake agreements for future carbon removals. These offtake deals, according to the Catona, help companies work toward their net-zero goals, de-risk projects, and unlock capital from other investors looking to back nature-based solutions.
Dive Insight:
Compassionate Carbon, which is a subsidiary of Eden: People+Planet — a global nonprofit that helps corporations, investors and governments reduce their carbon footprint — will tap into Eden’s nearly two decades of experience in designing and implementing large-scale climate solutions.
Eden helps develop projects dedicated to producing high quality carbon credits that entities can then use to meet emissions reduction or carbon removal goals, investment targets and work toward achieving their enhanced reduction plans, or Nationally Determined Contributions, as outlined in the Paris Agreement, per the nonprofit’s website.
The nonprofit has historically taken on projects that “go beyond carbon” and support local communities by generating long-term social, economic, ecological and biodiversity benefits.
Catona’s CEO Tate Mill said in the release this collaboration will provide its enterprise partners “access to a massive new supply of up to 50 million tonnes of high-quality nature-based credits over the lifetime of these new projects,” while providing its financing partners “new attractive investment opportunities.” On the people side, keeping in line with Eden’s ethos, Mill said the partnership will provide “more economic opportunity, more biodiversity, and a lot less carbon in the air.”
The news comes a few months after Catona signed a six-year carbon removal deal with Microsoft. According to the February deal, the tech giant said it would purchase 350,000 tons of carbon removal credits generated through an agro-forestry project based in Kenya, working toward its 2030 goal to become carbon negative.
