Anchor pilot
One Woodland Carbon Code project (≥250 ha) and one Peatland Code project (≥100 ha) wired with Pen9 telemetry within ninety days of letter signature.
Illustrative — PEN9 is not yet WCC-validated.
Britain's carbon credits don't add up.
The UK Woodland Carbon Code and Peatland Code issue several million tonnes of CO₂-equivalent every year — yet verification still depends on developer self-attestation, periodic audit and manual baseline assessment. There is no continuous remote-sensing telemetry, no fraud-detection AI, no single auditable record. Pennine Pixels (Pen9) is the UK-sovereign carbon-credit verification platform — satellite, LiDAR, soil-carbon and forester field data fused into one record per project.
01 · Problem
The forest you can't see isn't there.
Five separate parties hold five separate records of every UK carbon project. None of them sees the trees in real time. The buyer pays — and trusts.
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a
Project developers
Self-attest baseline carbon, planting density, peat depth and management. PDFs and spreadsheets. No live telemetry obligation.
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b
WCC + Peatland Code registries
Hold project metadata and credit issuance ledgers. Two separate registries; neither ingests satellite, LiDAR or soil-carbon flux.
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c
Verification bodies
Periodic, paper-driven, mostly five-yearly. Auditors visit a sample of compartments and sign a certificate.
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d
DEFRA · Forestry Commission · NatureScot · NRW
Hold woodland inventory, remote-sensing imagery and grant data — but not joined to credit issuance, not delivered to verifiers.
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e
Corporate buyers
Receive a serial number and a certificate. Pay £25–£40 per credit. Cannot independently see the carbon they have just bought.
Five silos. One spreadsheet per project. The fraud-detection layer that should sit between them has never been built.
02 · Asset
One record per project. Continuously verified.
Pen9 fuses six independent telemetry streams into a single auditable carbon ledger. Each project's record is regulator-defensible, buyer-defensible, and tamper-evident.
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i
Sentinel-2 multispectral
10-m optical, NDVI & canopy cover, 5-day revisit. Catches felling and storm damage within a fortnight.
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ii
Sentinel-1 SAR
All-weather radar backscatter for biomass change — the cloud-cover answer for a country that has weather.
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iii
Airborne LiDAR (DEFRA / NRW / NatureScot)
Sub-metre canopy height and DEM; the stand-volume truth-set behind the satellite layer.
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iv
Soil-carbon flux
Eddy-covariance stations (UKCEH) plus core sampling translated into per-hectare flux at sub-monthly cadence.
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v
Forester field data
App-driven plot measurements, photographs and signed inspection records pinned to the same auditable record.
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vi
Registry & grant feed
WCC + Peatland Code registry, BNG, Countryside Stewardship — joined so a credit cannot be double-claimed.
03 · Cases
Five lenses on the same record.
The same telemetry, audited differently for each user. One project record, five regulator-defensible views.
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A
Project developers
Bundle satellite, LiDAR, soil-flux and forester field data into the WCC and Peatland Code submission templates. Submit once; verifier audits in days, not months.
Submission · Audit-ready -
B
WCC and Peatland Code registries
Continuous telemetry feed against every issuance. Anomaly flagging as a public-interest service. Issuer-grade ledger replaces issuer-grade trust.
Telemetry · Anomalies -
C
Corporate buyers
Buyer dashboard per credit serial. See the canopy you bought, the flux it is delivering, and the verification history. Pay £25–£40 per tCO₂e with eyes open.
Buyer · Disclosure -
D
DEFRA & the Forestry Commission
Single national view of WCC project performance. Grant outcomes and credit issuance reconciled against the same canopy, the same peat.
Policy · Outcomes -
E
Environment Agency & FCA
Fraud-detection AI at the registry edge. Regulator-defensible audit trail for the FCA's incoming voluntary-carbon-market regime.
Enforcement · Regulation
04 · Consortium
Target consortium — letters of support in solicitation.
The four institutions below are the consortium PEN9 is convening. None has yet committed; letters of support are being sought as part of the DSIT Route 2 submission. Each owns a piece of the verification problem we want to fund into a working consortium.
Status: No memorandum or letter of support is on file from any of the four bodies named below. Listings are aspirational and reflect the target convening only.
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Forest Research target
The UK's principal forestry research body. Custodian of the Woodland Carbon Code's underlying carbon model and inventory methodology — the natural author of any continuous-telemetry update to the WCC.
Woodland Carbon Code · Carbon Look-up Tables -
IUCN UK Peatland Programme target
Steward of the UK Peatland Code. Convenes the national peatland-restoration evidence base across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — we want to fund their evidence layer into the consortium.
Peatland Code · Restoration Evidence -
James Hutton Institute target
Soil-carbon flux measurement, peat-depth survey, eddy-covariance instrumentation. The empirical truth-set we propose the consortium standardises against.
Soil Science · Peat Survey -
National Physical Laboratory (NPL) target
UK measurement-standards authority. We propose NPL underwrites the metrology of the carbon-flux pipeline so credits are traceable to SI units.
Measurement Standards · Traceability
05 · Window
The eighteen-month window.
UK Net Zero, voluntary-carbon-market scrutiny, and the FCA's incoming regulation all converge between mid-2026 and end-2027. The verification layer either gets built sovereignly, or it gets imported.
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2026 · Q3
FCA voluntary-carbon-market regime opens
Regulator-defensible verification stops being a virtue and starts being a compliance requirement. The first registries to plug in win.
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2026 · Q4
WCC + PC v3 update consultations
Forest Research and IUCN UK PP refresh the codes. Continuous remote-sensing telemetry is on the table for the first time.
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2027 · Q2
UK Net Zero milestone reporting
HMG must report per-sector progress. Nature-based removal is a headline number; verification quality is the headline question.
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2027 · Q4
Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive equivalence
UK-listed corporates publish credit-by-credit disclosures. Buyers without a Pen9-grade record discover their exposure.
06 · Ask
What we are seeking.
Registry MoU
Data-sharing memorandum with WCC and Peatland Code registries to receive issuance metadata and write back anomaly flags.
Letters of support
From Forest Research, IUCN UK PP, James Hutton Institute, NPL, plus one corporate buyer with disclosed Scope-3 nature-based removals on the books.
DSIT Sovereign AI Fund
Route 2 procurement bid against the £80m sovereign-AI tranche, closing 5 June 2026. Pen9 is a natural fit: a UK-sovereign, audit-by-design AI of strategic-asset class.
One auditable record per project.
For consortium discussions, anchor-pilot enquiries, or DSIT Route 2 letters of support.