Ed Mitchard has spent nearly 20 years developing new ways to map the carbon storage and changes in the world’s forests and peatlands using satellite data. As professor of Global Change Mapping at the University of Edinburgh he has published over 100 scientific papers on the subject, raised $8 million in research funding, and personally measured over 15,000 trees across 13 countries. He has advised a number of governments, including the UK, Cameroon, Gabon, Colombia, Tanzania, Indonesia and Peru, on how to monitor their forests and their changing carbon storage. Further, he has been deeply involved in the development and evolution of carbon standards, including providing formal advice to Verra’s Verified Carbon Standard and the Plan Vivo Standard.
In 2017 he co-founded Space Intelligence with colleague Dr Murray Collins, with the aim of bringing high-accuracy satellite-derived maps to nature-based carbon offset projects. This was urgent because he could see that carbon offset finance was essential to halt forest destruction and start restoration, but that the latest methods and best satellite datasets were not being used to set up and monitor projects. Without high quality data integrity was not guaranteed, and Ed realised that such integrity was essential for the carbon markets to grow. Ed has grown Space Intelligence to a team of 45 people, including 10 with PhDs, who have over the past year produced maps of forest carbon storage and landcover change over 17 countries to support avoided deforestation and forest restoration projects. In all cases these maps are derived using Ed’s expertise as Space Intelligence’s Chief Scientist, meaning AI models combine information from looking at each 20m x 20m patch of ground at least 200 times over a year with different types of satellite technology.