Why Forest Cover Tells the Wrong Story: Measuring Carbon from Space — Marco Albani

In this episode of This Week in Carbon, hosts Edward Smith and Rene Velasquez sit down with Marco Albani, Co-founder and CEO of Chloris Geospatial. Marco has spent his career at the intersection of forestry, climate science, and carbon markets - from building the forestry portion of McKinsey's Marginal Abatement Cost Curve, to running the Tropical Forest Alliance, to co-founding Chloris with his former forestry classmate Alessandro Vaccari, the scientist whose spaceborne LIDAR research underpins what the company does today.This is a conversation about what it actually takes to measure forest carbon at scale, and why the tools the industry has relied on for decades aren't up to the job.Key topics covered:- Why measuring forest cover is the wrong metric, and why carbon stock is what actually matters for climate outcomes- The fundamental problem with the definition of "forest" and how it creates blind spots in policy and carbon accounting- How Chloris built a carbon time series going back to the year 2000 and the technical limitations that make historical data so hard to reconstruct- Why there is no such thing as "direct measurement" of biomass, and what that means for how we should think about field data vs. remote sensing- The cost reality of satellite data: a $17 million quote for imagery on a project worth $3 million in credits- The three types of customers Chloris serves: carbon market infrastructure (Verra, MSCI, Equitable Earth), project developers under VM47, and corporations tracking Scope 3 supply chain emissions- The Geo AI wave: what foundation models like Google's Alpha Earth get right, where they fall short, and why accuracy assessment is the missing piece- Who should be building the test beds needed to validate these new tools and why philanthropic capital is the right fit- How better measurement translates into more capital flowing to forests, and what consistent measurement across project, subnational, and national scales means for Article 6- Why humility matters as powerful algorithms replace human judgment in landscape decisionsA technically rich, intellectually honest conversation about the infrastructure the carbon market needs to actually work.🎧 Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and more.