Orbae works with any level of traceability
If we’re to end land conversion by 2030, we don’t have time to get perfect traceability in every supply chain. Our view is that a lack of traceability shouldn’t get in the way of getting started.
We work bottom-up using high-resolution cropping masks to reliably meet any level of traceability until you have more.
While the EU Deforestation Regulation and other regulations under consideration will make traceability a requirement for market access, it currently only applies to some of the highest risk commodities and neglects other types of land conversion beyond deforestation. We need a complete solution, and one that lets us take action with the traceability knowledge we have today while continuously incentivizing learning more.
With this in mind, Orbae pioneers a new way to do land conversion accounting. We call it “jurisdictional direct land use change,” or jdLUC. Whereas traditional accounting methods rely on statistical extrapolation to assign greenhouse gas emissions to commodities (sLUC) or farm-level calculations for every producer they source from (dLUC), jdLUC is dLUC at the landscape level, aggregating emissions calculated at high resolution to any area of interest — a supply shed, a country or anywhere in between.
This means that no matter how much or how little traceability you have, your emissions data is a composite of potentially billions of data points at 30-meter resolution. In addition, we can provide dLUC emission factors for your specific sourcing locations, farm polygons or GPS coordinates. As you learn more about the origins of your commodities, your data can seamlessly keep pace.
Read more about our jdLUC method.
Orbae covers a wide range of commodities and countries
When your commodities are coming from all over the world, disentangling individual supply chains and doing the land conversion carbon accounting for each becomes an enormous task. Many tools on the market focus on only the highest risk commodities or particular geographies, leaving much of your portfolio void of insights or requiring you to come up with piecemeal solutions.
Orbae does this work for you. The algorithm that powers it is applicable to any agricultural commodity anywhere in the world. It automates the carbon accounting, drawing on best-available data sources for a given commodity in a given place so that you have a comprehensive picture of how to prioritize your work to become conversion free.
We’re continuously expanding the breadth of data in Orbae. Check the pipeline for datasets available now and those coming soon.
Orbae accounts for all types of land conversion
A key difference compared to deforestation risk assessment and monitoring tools, Orbae accounts for all types of land conversion — deforestation and also conversion of grassland and wetlands, including peatland. It does this in compliance with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and SBTi FLAG Guidance, looking back at the history of the land over the past 20 years.
In addition, Orbae does the carbon accounting for you, expressing land conversion impacts in terms of carbon dioxide equivalents rather than hectares converted or at risk. We can do this for any assessment year after 2015, allowing for complete and consistent rebaselining.
Orbae is designed to assess land conversion on an annual basis so you can track the effectiveness of your interventions. It is not a real-time monitoring tool designed to alert on sudden land conversion events.
