Project Nimbus uses dynamic, real-time baselines that reflect current economic realities for each landowner, preventing over-crediting and strengthening additionality by ensuring only genuinely at-risk forests qualify.

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Unlike typical forest projects, Project Nimbus uses conservative carbon accounting that automatically deducts for reversals before credit issuance, preventing over-issuance and over-reliance on buffer pools.

The U.S. Forest Service executed a cooperative agreement with Project Nimbus after selecting it through a competitive process to serve “underserved” and “small-acreage” landowners while providing ecological and climate benefits.

Project Nimbus passed a robust six-step additionality test, anchored on a negative NPV test, when compared to a dynamic baseline.

The six-step additionality test includes:

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1. All landowners must participate voluntarily.

2. All landowners must demonstrate (i) proof of ownership, (ii) proof of timbering rights, and (iii) proof of historical timber harvesting

3. All landowners must sign a contract with numerous legal attestations to the additionality of the project.

4. All landowner contracts must include a financial penalty to the landowner for failure to remove carbon.

5. The project satisfies the minimum activity period.

6. Each individual timber stand satisfies the negative NPV test.

Step 6 is the anchor of additionality. It tests that the landowner without carbon financing faces a negative net present value (NPV) for each timber stand, when compared to a dynamic baseline. This showcases that without carbon finance, landowners would lose money by participating in the project, demonstrating that climate outcomes are additional—not business-as-usual.

Sky Harvests dynamic baseline uses real-time data—timber prices, tree maturity, market access, and dozens of other variables—to model each landowners economic interest for each and every timber stand. Because the dynamic baseline reflects current economic realities, the project focuses on areas that are genuinely at-risk of harvesting, improving upon static baselines prone to “gaming” with outdated data and selection bias.

Project Nimbus dynamic baseline combines ground-sourced plot data with a wealth of remotely sensed data from LiDAR, aerial imagery, satellite, and other sources. We measure every hectare of the project and generate more than 37,000 data points per hectare. Higher accuracy and reduced uncertainty limit the reputational risk of over-crediting, giving a buyer confidence in the purchase and retirement of Project Nimbus credits.

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Independent third parties collected all plot data and remotely sensed data. An independent third-party verifier audited all data, calculations, and outcomes—including an on-site reconciliation of plot data. The verifier also validated the project against a methodology that was both approved by an ICROA-endorsed registry and a separate third-party auditor. The carbon quantification team is comprised of experts in biostatistics, geomatics, silviculture, and data science, where more than 50% of the team holds PhDs.

The conservative issuance approach accounts and deducts for the durability of each removal, ensuring that credits offset the impact of emissions measured over a +100-year time horizon.

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The likelihood of a widespread reversal is minimized because the project area is a geographically diverse mosaic of properties. However, the project goes further to eliminate reversal risk by proactively assuming reversals will occur.

Unlike typical forestry projects, the projects conservative accounting automatically deducts for reversals before issuance. This eliminates the need for buffer pools which are rife with incentives to underreport. It also eliminates the risk that a buyers specific credits are reversed, protecting them from accusations of purchasing impermanent credits.

Project Nimbus's comprehensive approach protects buyers from leakage scandals that have beleaguered other forestry projects. The project protects against market-based leakage and activity-shifting leakage, in accordance with VCS VM0003 Methodology. To prevent market-based leakage, the project deducts credits in accordance with the methodology. The project prevents activity-shifting leakage by requiring landowners to enroll all properties owned or managed by the landowner in the project. We work directly with landowners on a “trust but verify” principle: trusting their legal affidavits while simultaneously verifying the comprehensive enrollment of property rights and ownership.

To highlight a few examples of the projects co-benefits:

• The project preserves ~20,000 acres of watershed annually (Supporting SDG 6.6 “protect water-related ecosystems”).

• The project protects 74 distinct species of native trees, comprising more than 3.4 million trees (Supporting SDG 5.8: “Conservation of freshwater ecosystems and their species, in particular, forests” and biodiversity).

• The project works exclusively with underserved and small-acreage landowners who receive from the project, on average, tens of thousands of dollars per landowner per year (Supporting SDG 8.3: “Decent work and economic growth for small enterprises”).

Broadly, the project tracks KPIs for 12 distinct targets across six of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

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Beyond the SDGs, the Project Nimbus provides new income streams to underserved and small-acreage landowners, supporting rural economic development. The project creates jobs, reinforces ecosystem resilience, preserves habitat, and protects biodiversity.

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