Why Sky Harvest Exists

To provide sensible, cost-effective solutions to those truly committed to mitigating climate impact with precision and integrity.

Sensible, cost-effective solutions are essential for companies and organizations to meet often ambitious sustainability targets. A question we grappled with—and one that ultimately led to the founding of Sky Harvest—was: Why hasn’t the marketplace evolved to offer these sensible, cost-effective solutions to a market eager for them?

Consider, for instance, a buyer for whom a carbon credit is valuable only if it completely and irreversibly offsets emissions. Today’s credits fall short for this buyer, as many fail to meet key criteria of completeness and irreversibility. Even Direct Air Capture (DAC) credits, widely thought of as the best in today’s market, often don’t deliver what was promised. Other credits are often far worse.

To illustrate, a typical DAC project, which will often promise 10,000 years of sequestration, may take five to ten years (sometimes more!) to come online. Credits sold today from such projects will not offer complete offset, because of the mismatch between when carbon is actually removed (in the future) vs. the full lifecycle impact of carbon emitted (as at emission up until removal). Credits from such projects will also fall short on irreversibility, as recent instances of injection well leaks and CO2 encroachments into ground water have shown promises of guaranteed multi-millennial sequestration to be unreliable.

And that is why Sky Harvest was founded—to reimagine today’s marketplace and address the needs of that buyer seeking complete and irreversible climate impact. Our mission is to provide sensible, cost-effective solutions to those truly committed to mitigating climate impact with precision and integrity. This mission is why we exist and guides everything we do.

To advance our mission, we developed the True Credit, a first-of-its-kind carbon credit that precisely, completely, and irreversibly offsets carbon emissions. True Credits set a new standard in today’s marketplace—bundling as many tons of CO2 removed as needed to offset 100% of each ton emitted (ensuring completeness) and issuing credits after the climate benefit has been fully delivered and verified (guaranteeing irreversibility). True Credits are also backed by an unprecedented level of precision and rigor, with over 15,000 pieces of data collected per acre of forest, giving buyers confidence in the quality and integrity of each credit. The early traction we’re seeing, we believe, is proof positive that True Credits is a solution whose time has come.

We develop True Credits by partnering with small and underserved forest landowners to defer harvesting of their timber. Incentivizing these landowners to not cut trees they’d otherwise cut directly contributes to climate impact by keeping in service one of the planet’s most reliable, time-tested, cost-effective, and scalable CO2 removal machines—trees. With less than 7% of small forest landowners familiar with carbon markets and even less than 1% participating in these markets [1], focusing on small and underserved forest landowners unlocks a currently untapped pool of supply that allows us to deliver competitive prices to buyers.

Ultimately, our vision is a marketplace in which True Credit, with its 100% emission offset, complete irreversibility, and data-driven precision evolves from a market innovation into the norm. We envision a marketplace where each carbon credit is underpinned by math, not promises, and where each buyer’s dollar is guaranteed the full climate impact for which it was spent. It’s a big vision, but if quality and integrity are to become mainstays in the VCM, we believe there is no other path forward.

We don’t just want to win in today’s market; we want tomorrow’s market to win for everyone.

Would you join us?

Footnotes

[1] Report to Congress: A General Assessment of the Role of Agriculture and Forestry in U.S. Carbon Markets, October 2023