Introducing Project Fundamentals - the building blocks of carbon projects
Key takeaways
Project fundamentals - technical data on the critical parameters underpinning carbon projects and their performance - form the backbone of effective project analysis.
Extracting fundamental project information is often manual, time-consuming, and inconsistent. BeZero's Project Fundamentals provides technical carbon project data that's standardised, digitised, and decision-ready.
Anyone in the carbon value chain exposed to project risk benefits from fundamentals because they remove friction, accelerate analysis, and better inform carbon credit decision making.
Suppose you are on the hunt for the perfect burger.
Your ideal burger is located within 20 minutes of your office, from a diner with at least five years’ track record. You want locally sourced meat, from a farm with a lower climate impact than its peers. Your preferences include a specific brand of ketchup, a patty-to-bread ratio within a defined range, and a high rating from a food critic you trust.
Now imagine having all these parameters at your fingertips so you can quickly shortlist, analyse, and compare burgers near you before committing to a purchase. It would likely save a lot of time and effort and help avoid a disappointing meal!
Replace ‘burger’ with ‘carbon project’, and that’s what BeZero’s Project Fundamentals offer: analysis-ready datasets to help you effectively find, assess, and compare projects, and make evidence-based decisions.
Why project fundamentals are essential for decision making
Fundamentals are the building blocks of carbon projects, and form the backbone of effective project analysis. Access to transparent, reliable, and technical information that underpins project characteristics and carbon accounting over time is essential to helping analysts and risk managers understand what makes a project tick.
These data points can be used in many ways, for example to enhance project-level design or due diligence, or to compare shortlisted projects with peer groups. Project fundamentals also uncover valuable market intelligence, and can help benchmark projects against wider market segments.
Anyone involved in carbon project design, due diligence, transactions, or carbon market research - in other words, anyone exposed to risk or looking to deepen their understanding of carbon sectors - benefits from project fundamentals, because the insights they reveal help explain and evidence decision making.
Investors can use fundamentals for project feasibility studies, developers can design impactful projects, traders and brokers can screen and recommend opportunities more effectively, and buyers can make purchasing decisions with confidence.
For this to happen, however, fundamental datasets need to be reliable and readily available.
From patchy PDFs to digitised datasets
Anyone who has worked in carbon markets will tell you the same thing - specific project parameters are cumbersome to find and extract. Furthermore, project information is often presented differently from one standards body’s registry to another. This lack of standardisation makes data collection and interpretation a slow and manual process, and impedes decision making.
What carbon credit analysts and risk managers really need are transparent, decision-ready datasets that plug seamlessly into in-house models and workflows.
That is exactly what BeZero’s Project Fundamentals provide.
Our global team of 100+ climate and data scientists has collaborated to define the sector-specific parameters that underpin and drive different project types. After painstakingly collecting this fundamental data from thousands of registry documents (e.g. project design documents, monitoring reports, non-permanence risk reports, etc.), they have cleaned, structured, and exported the data into consistent templates. The output: unprecedented digitised data, in standardised formats, ready for immediate consumption.
For the first time, we are making these robust datasets available to our platform subscribers, who now have access to an extensive subset of the same type of information used by BeZero’s own ratings analysts to quantify and assess carbon risks. Users can download, manipulate and interpret this data to their heart’s content, whether to support their own quantitative analysis, inform in-house risk models, or conduct market research and benchmarking.
| Forestry | Cookstoves | Renewable Energy |
|---|---|---|
| Commitment period duration | fNRB (fraction of non- renewable biomass) | Project installed capacity |
| Baseline deforestation model | Baseline fuel consumption | Project combined margin emission factor |
| Area impacted in qualified loss event(s) | Project thermal efficiency | Feed-in tariff rate |
| Discount for market leakage | Stove distribution | Project-reported benchmark IRR |
Table 1. Example parameters available from BeZero’s Project Fundamentals in the Forestry, Cookstoves, and Renewable Energy sectors. Not an exhaustive list.
Less friction, more action
Having ready-to-consume data on project fundamentals is a game changer for anyone in the carbon value chain. By accelerating technical data extraction, enhancing due diligence, and building in-house knowledge, project fundamentals can remove friction from project analysis and decision making, helping market actors make a bigger impact with fewer resources.
1. Save time and effort
Early feedback from our customers has been universal - the time saved by not having to manually collect and standardise essential project information will be invaluable. What used to take hours can now be done in seconds, freeing up valuable internal resources.
With critical parameters defined by BeZero’s sector experts, and over 100,000 individual values collected and transformed into analysis-ready templates by our data team, users can feed the data straight into in-house workflows, and immediately dig into the information. This ‘plug-and-play’ flexibility also means they can easily build charts and other data visualisation.
2. Enhance your due diligence
Project fundamentals equip carbon market participants with the crucial technical information they need to accelerate and enhance their due diligence, and substantiate their recommendations to financial gatekeepers and other stakeholders.
Our customers can extract, manipulate and interpret data to fit their needs, whether for quantitative analysis at a single project level, across peer groups of similar projects, or as part of wider benchmarking against specific pockets of the market.
They can rapidly screen, compare, and dig deep into projects based on specific parameters to unveil risks and opportunities. As well as looking at individual parameters in isolation, analysts can unpack how they interact with one another to unlock particularly useful insights, beyond headline figures. Fundamentals can also help them better understand BeZero’s ratings analysis, and formulate their own opinions on carbon efficacy.
3. Gain an edge with deeper market knowledge
Taking the time to understand the most relevant parameters across project types, and how they impact carbon efficacy or credit delivery risk, pays dividends in a complex and evolving market.
Technical fundamentals come with definitions and guidance penned by BeZero’s analysts. By learning about a project’s inner workings, and the critical sector-specific parameters underlying its performance, market actors can build in-house sector knowledge to quickly hone in on what really matters. This can give users a unique edge, helping them make defensible recommendations to colleagues, investors, and end customers.
Knowledge-building also helps reduce dependence on costly external sector specialists. Instead, fundamentals empower users to learn the mechanics of different project types for themselves.
A necessary breakthrough for a maturing carbon market
Whether you or your stakeholders are in the market to design, improve, assess, or invest in carbon projects, having decision-ready data on demand presents an exciting opportunity. The time and money saved from seamlessly plugging robust, digitised fundamentals into your in-house workflows means you can focus your efforts on effective project analysis, and make informed decisions as a result.
Accessible project fundamentals are essential for carbon market integrity. They lift the veil on project performance, and help uncover intrinsic value. It’s about removing friction, enhancing assessments, accelerating decision making, and bringing confidence to carbon transactions.
We believe this market-first innovation is a necessary breakthrough for a maturing carbon market. By making fundamental datasets available, we aim to encourage evidence-based decision making and catalyse transparent climate action. A $100 billion carbon market is still in reach.
If you have any questions or feedback, or would like to request a demo, please get in touch at commercial@bezerocarbon.com.