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Sylvera’s Estimated Ratings provide a rating range a project would receive based on key, material data points and benchmarked against Sylvera’s proprietary dataset.

These data points capture the main drivers of project quality for that specific project type, serving as a distilled version of Sylvera’s full due diligence framework.

Estimated Ratings help streamline project triage. They enable you to quickly identify high-potential projects and focus full due diligence efforts on those most likely to receive higher Ratings.

Yes. Sylvera's Estimated Ratings are designed for quick project triage, offering a rating range (e.g., A-BB) that helps users rapidly identify high-quality projects for further investigation. Estimated Ratings enable efficient decision-making by streamlining the initial assessment process.

Sylvera's Ratings deliver a definitive score (e.g., A) following a thorough evaluation, rooted in a detailed framework reviewed by our external Framework Review Committee, with extensive data collection and project boundary-specific geospatial analysis. Ratings are designed to aid full due diligence per project.

Read more about Sylvera’s Ratings here.

To arrive at our Estimated Rating range, we evaluate each scoring pillar separately on the same scale as our Ratings using the key risk drivers. The estimated scores are mapped against the Ratings matrices for that project type, to determine the probable lower and upper bound that the Rating could therefore be.

This is leveraging our estimated scores as limiting factors on the Rating, and therefore the upper and lower bound set by those limiting factors are combined on the final Ratings matrix to triangulate the Estimated Rating range.

We are able to estimate the rating range with a 80% accuracy and an average range of two grades.

Data points are included in our Estimated Ratings when they are part of material risk drivers. We know what typically drives project quality or risk from our extensive Ratings and project type research.

Our Ratings frameworks are built such that there are identified main drivers of scoring, and then additional inputs that create nuance on the applicability of those drivers. Therefore, the Estimated Ratings framework is a distillation, focusing only on those main drivers.

Examples of key data points:

• REDD: Baseline deforestation rate, carbon stocks, community engagement
• ARR: Sequestration rates, tree mortality, accounting assumptions, financial additionality
• CDR: operational lifetime, life cycle analysis (LCA)

We will not be updating our Estimated Ratings unless specifically requested by a customer. They are generated based on the publicly available information at the date of publication.

This is because we aim to convert all of our Estimated Ratings into Ratings. Upon conversion the projects will be continually monitored in accordance with our policy.

We had an independent team re-evaluate projects, using the selected data points and distilled deterministic framework to create the Estimated Ratings. We then compared these Estimated Ratings with the Ratings already generated for those projects. We found that for 80% of projects, we were able to predict the right range with an average range width of two grades.

We have also found that we correctly estimated 87% of a peer’s Ratings for overlapping projects, so proving high accuracy on the basis of two Ratings agencies.

We acknowledge that the full nuance of a project could never be captured without a full research process. That’s why we have full due diligence in our Ratings.

Our analysis also proved that generally in the 80% of cases that we weren't able to estimate correctly, we usually have estimated too low. This demonstrates conservatism in our Estimated Ratings, so you’ll be unlikely to be spending time looking at a project with an Estimated Rating that's too high.