Responsibility & rigour. Building ratings to give buyers the confidence they need to harness the power of nature.

If we do not protect, restore and expand the world’s forests and other natural carbon-storing ecosystems, our battle with climate change will be lost. 
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However, not all nature-based solutions projects are created equal. While most hit the targets they promise, some don’t. And understanding the integrity of a projects’ design is extremely difficult for most buyers. These challenges can make it difficult for buyers to trust the market and choose the right nature-based offsets to invest in.
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This is where Sylvera steps in. We have built our market-leading ratings solution to solve these challenges, scale the carbon credit market, and catalyse investment into nature-based solutions all over the world. We do not and will not sell the offsets ourselves because we believe it is essential for the market to have a truly independent source of ratings data, free from any conflicts of interest.

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Our ratings system gives you clarity on project quality and performance‍

Assessing the quality of Nature-based solutions projects is extremely difficult, requiring advanced geospatial capabilities, combined with detailed analysis of hundreds of pages of free text, data, mapping, and charting, often incomprehensible to non-experts.

Executing this diligence to the level of detail and with the degree of frequency required to properly manage risk is unrealistic for the small carbon and sustainability teams working in most large corporations. These teams often have to rely on third parties who have claimed to assess projects in detail, but in reality their analysis has significant shortcomings, leaving corporations exposed to risk, yet with a false sense of security. These teams need help! And here at Sylvera we have built an independent, scalable, and highly accessible solution to support these teams and their many stakeholders.

Much like Moody’s or S&P ratings, our AAA-D ratings provide all market participants with a standardised measure of quality and a practical tool to compare projects from anywhere on earth. This rating system accelerates project diligence, simplifies and improves ongoing project monitoring, and provides confidence that the projects they invest in are delivering on their promises.

Our rating system offers a simple and powerful solution, underpinned by enormous amounts of highly complex analysis.

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The three principal components of Sylvera’s ratings‍

Our top-level rating runs from AAA-D and is made-up from three distinct elements:

1. Carbon: Is the project actually achieving the carbon impact it is claiming?
2. Additionality: Is the project genuinely responsible for the emissions reduction or carbon sequestration it claims? 
3. Permanence: Will the project have a lasting carbon impact? 

Each of these elements attracts a score from 1 to 5 (where 5 is best). Each of these scores is constructed from dozens of subsidiary tests, drawing on the deep expertise of the Sylvera team across multiple disciplines including machine learning and remote sensing, geospatial data analysis, developmental economics, economic policy, ecology and biology and climate science. 

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‍Co-benefits are also assessed

We also assess a project’s contribution to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals through our Co-benefits score, however we exclude this score from the top-level rating for two reasons. First, our customers tell us that co-benefits represent a preference criterion rather than a performance criterion - such that an educational publishing house might prefer projects that support SDG4 (Quality Education) whereas a bottled water brand might prefer SDG6 Clean Water & Sanitation. Second, ultimately these are carbon credits, not SDG credits and our customers tell us that this is where they need to focus.