1. INTRODUCTION

Moss Forest is a digital system that accelerates the development and certification of projects and measures, reports and verifies (MRV) forest carbon conservation projects, with its first application in the Brazilian Amazon Forest. It was developed by the Moss.Earth team, comprising REDD+ project developers (biologists, geologists, anthropologists, lawyers, environmental and forestry engineers, among others) and experts in remote sensing and computer science. Its purpose is to optimize and expedite the development of AFOLU projects, beginning by the application to REDD+ projects. The system leads to acceleration and greater accuracy and efficiency of the development process, that are achieved through 1) centralization of several databases (both public and private), satellite images and scientific studies in a single repository; and 2) automation and digitization of the necessary steps to develop an avoided deforestation project, such as the land tenure of the territory, data collection by Brazilian established initiatives such as MapBiomas¹ in the field to estimate the carbon density in the biomass and the estimation of the generation of carbon credits, whether in the legal or illegal deforestation modalities. Given the urgency of addressing climate change and considering the advancement of carbon markets, Moss Forest was developed as an innovative, fast and reliable tool, which efficiently sources the most attractive areas for receiving investment and reduces the time and cost required for the design and development of REDD+ projects, increasing the reach of the conservation of Brazilian tropical forests to smaller properties (micro, small and medium) and efforts to mitigate climate change. There are studies that indicate that small properties (lower than 100 hectares) are responsible for as much as 23% of total Brazilian Amazon forest deforestation (Jodar and Prokny 2012). Unfortunately, currently (due to high costs of traditional, analogue methods) there are no commercially feasible solutions in the market for areas below 3,000 hectares (96% of the more than 6 million Brazilian rural areas).

With more than 716 million hectares analyzed in Brazil, the entire ecosystem involved with forest carbon projects stands to gain with the Moss Forest system, which comprises developers, proponents, investors, auditors, local communities and, of course, the climate. This document describes the “Moss Forest” system and its methodology, the Decentralized Carbon Standard, identifying the main adopted and automated processes regarding the access, acquisition and processing of satellite images, use of official databases and scientific literature related to the subject, as well as features that are still under development, providing transparency and technical-scientific robustness to the system.

¹ MapBiomas: Project for the Annual Mapping of Land Cover and Land Use in Brazil; https://brasil.mapbiomas.org/en/