Edinburgh AI tool aims to unlock UK woodland carbon investment
TL;DR:
- Edinburgh-based consultancy New Gradient has launched an AI verification platform for woodland carbon projects, backed by the UK Space Agency.
- The system uses Earth-observation data and machine learning to replace manual surveys with continuous digital monitoring, reporting and verification (dMRV).
- UK woodlands currently sequester around 17.4 million tonnes of CO2 a year; closing the planting target requires an estimated £1.8bn in private investment that has been held back by slow, expensive verification.
The pitch from founder Ewan McMillan is operational: shifting verification under the Woodland Carbon Code from decade-long cycles to near-real-time annual reporting. The technology analyses individual trees at scale, expanding the metrics that can be tracked — including biodiversity alongside carbon — and giving investors verifier-quality data rather than periodic snapshots.
Context
Verification has been the choke point in UK woodland carbon markets for years. Investors buying Woodland Carbon Units want confidence that the trees actually deliver the sequestered carbon claimed; manual ground surveys are expensive, slow and limited in scope, particularly across the kind of large-scale planting the UK’s net-zero plan requires. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has acknowledged the gap; the UK Space Agency’s involvement reflects its growing role in funding Earth-observation applications with concrete UK industry value.
The piece sits alongside today’s other Edinburgh-anchored AI story — Edinburgh, Strathclyde and Cambridge researchers’ study of cybercriminal AI adoption — to underline a UK regional signal: Scotland’s universities and consultancies are producing AI applied research and commercial tooling at a scale that competes with the Cambridge-London corridor. The MoneySuperMarket SMB survey published today separately found Scotland leads UK regions in AI adoption interest at 50%.
For UK SaaS vendors and ESG analytics teams, the New Gradient launch is a useful proof point. Earth-observation plus machine learning has been a perennial pitch in the climate tech space; UK Space Agency backing and integration into the formal Woodland Carbon Code verification flow gives it a procurement-grade route to revenue.
Looking forward
If New Gradient’s tooling is adopted as a default verification path under the Woodland Carbon Code, the £1.8bn investment gap McMillan cites starts to look bridgeable. The wider UK pattern — Earth-observation AI applied to net-zero MRV problems — is moving from research demonstrators toward the kind of repeatable commercial deployments that make UK carbon markets credible to institutional investors. UK Treasury’s green-finance work and the FCA’s emerging stance on voluntary carbon market quality are both downstream of this kind of evidence base.