Public Funding for Quanterra Systems Ltd

**Quanterra Systems ('Quanterra')** is a UK-SME focused on increasing confidence in Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) with the power of analytics for tackling climate change, by providing robust, affordable, and timely measurements of ecosystem carbon flows. They provide environmental monitoring services to measure carbon flows for projects where carbon is accrued below the surface and, therefore, typically hard to measure. NBS is the sustainable management and use of natural features and processes to tackle socio-environmental issues and has the potential to capture carbon in plants and soils via improved land management. While tree plantation and other NBS measures are well-known for climate mitigation, soil restoration has the potential to store considerable amounts of carbon, but is less well-established as an approach. NBS offer more environmental benefits and are less expensive to adopt than man-made carbon capture solutions. However, a lack of confidence and trust in data collection and metrics measurements nullifies the offsetting, insetting, improved land management, and other initiatives. Quanterra, in collaboration with the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH), will deliver and test an innovative solution, **"QFlux"**, to measure carbon flows at landscape scale. Combining hardware (towers and complex sensors) and Quanterra's data processing expertise, QFlux will help better monitor carbon flows and gather rich information that can be used for the optimisation of farming and land management practices.

Reducing our carbon emissions is essential if we are to achieve Net Zero, address climate change and protect our futures. However, mitigation of unavoidable carbon-emissions will also require offsetting through large scale carbon sequestration. Nature Based Solutions (NBS) are emissions offsetting methods which capture atmospheric carbon in vegetation and soils through improved land management. NBS approaches such as tree planting are well known climate mitigation solutions, but restoration of soils also has potential to sequester significant volumes of carbon and are less well established. NBS also bring wider environmental benefit and are less expesive to implement than man-made carbon capture technologies. However, there is currently no efficient and robust way of monitoring and verifying NBS carbon storage, particularly within carbon stored below the ground. This lack of a robust measurement solution is inhibiting the generation of carbon credits and is preventing the financing of large scale NBS implementation. Existing carbon monitoring solutions use expensive sampling with delayed results (e.g. soil coring), or high uncertainty (e.g. remote sensing and modelling). Eddy covariance monitoring can provide continuous, accurate measurements of carbon sequestration, but is prohibitively expensive for these types of project and requires significant expertise to operate and interpret. We have developed a low-cost implementation of eddy covariance to allow timely and accurate carbon-credit verification. Using lower-cost instrumentation supported by novel software algorithms we will provide affordable and robust carbon credit verification for NBS. Unlocking the potential for carbon-credits to incentivise better land management will have substantial societal benefits of improved ecosystem and soil quality, food security, and more resilient water systems in addition to contributing to UK climate mitigation targets. Our commercial approach will also bring wider benefits, including new knowledge-intensive jobs and generation of economic benefit through inward investment and global export of our services.