Oct 2, 2019   SOURCE: BusinessWire

Carbon Removal Now Easily Available to All as Nori Launches Online Path to Support Farmers and Reverse Climate Change

Just reducing carbon is so yesterday. The age of removing carbon emissions from the atmosphere begins today.

Anyone who wants to help reverse the changing climate can now simply pay a few dollars to support CO2 removal through regenerative farming practices that pull excess carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it into the soil.

Through Nori’s new online “Lightning Sale” pathway, individuals and businesses alike can pay about $16 to have a metric ton of CO2 verifiably removed from the atmosphere. Nori Lightning Sale participants can estimate their carbon footprints and pick their own cash-for-carbon purchase amounts at nori.com/remove-carbon.

Participants in Nori’s new Lightning Sale will be underwriting the removal of thousands of metric tons of CO2 from the air. The sale is the first stage of Nori’s digital marketplace that will soon facilitate large-scale carbon removal through multiple methods including sustainable farming, forestry, direct air capture, and other natural and industrial methods.

“Reducing emissions is important, but the world is sadly past the point where reductions alone can reverse the trend in global climate,” said Paul Gambill, Nori CEO. “By making carbon removal more accessible, anyone who wants to help turn climate around can now do so.”

Nori is collaborating first with farmers to remove carbon. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently reported that soil carbon sequestration is the lowest-cost way to remove and store excess atmospheric CO2. Nori also is developing a larger-scale digital marketplace to support all forms of carbon removal.

By adopting certain soil management and crop production practices, farmers have the potential to draw CO2 from the atmosphere and retain the recovered carbon in cropland soils. While there are some upfront costs to transition to this type of farming, there are added benefits to the farmer too, including reduced use of chemical fertilizers, and improved soil health. Now farmers have another incentive to apply regenerative practices.

Nori’s Lightning Sale is the beginning step in connecting buyers of carbon with farmers that are increasing their soil carbon with verified carbon-additive farming practices. Trey Hill of Harborview Farms in Rock Hall, Maryland, is the first to leverage Nori’s digital marketplace to sell the additional metric tons of carbon his farm has added to the soil. Hill relies on careful data collection and detailed record management of his day-to-day farming practices to participate in this program and uses agricultural software solutions from Granular, a subsidiary of Corteva Agriscience, to verify to the dollar and to the acre that he has truly captured the carbon.

“Making it easy for individual consumers and investors alike to support carbon removal is a huge first step that will help transform the way our country farms,” Hill said. “Carbon sequestration is not only becoming an integral part of how we grow our crops, it is becoming the philosophy behind how we plan our business.”

“Granular is committed to helping farmers steward their land - and grow their businesses,” said Chris Seifert, Vice President of Data Science at Granular. “Nori’s Lightning Sale is a first step in creating an easily accessible market for carbon sequestration. Granular software enables verifiable farming practices and evidenced-based data collection and management, supporting farmers, a new revenue stream, and the environment.”

To further ensure Lightning Sale and marketplace buyers get their “carbon’s worth,” Nori also relies on the COMET-Farm carbon and greenhouse gas accounting system supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service and developed by the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University. Nori’s work also is mentored and guided by The Nature Conservancy.

Online Lightning Sale purchases are available today. Nori’s full-line carbon-removal marketplace for investors, corporations and other large-scale buyers and sellers is set to launch in early 2020.

ABOUT NORI:

Nori is a member of the Techstars Sustainability Accelerator, driving innovation toward global environmental issues in partnership with The Nature Conservancy. The Nori marketplace ensures easy and more reliable carbon accounting, reduces transaction costs by connecting suppliers directly with buyers in the CO2 market, and enables a secure payment process for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The Seattle-based firm won the ConsenSys-backed Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition Hackathon in the energy and environment category in 2017. For more information, visit www.nori.com, follow the company on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter or check the Nori blog and Nori’s Reversing Climate Change and Carbon Removal Newsroom podcasts.