International carbon markets struggle with low prices for nature-based climate solutions, driven by two persistent problems: uncertainty about whether funded conservation actually prevents deforestation that would have occurred otherwise (known as additionality), and poor measurement of how much carbon forests actually store.
Yale Planetary Solutions funding enabled the launch of the Meghalaya Payments for Ecosystem Services (MPES) project in 2025 to tackle the first problem, testing whether payments targeted to higher-risk areas reduce deforestation more cost-effectively than flat, uniform payments across a landscape.
The present project addresses the second problem: measurement. MPES currently tracks deforestation using satellite-derived forest-cover data, but forest cover alone is an unreliable proxy for carbon storage in ecologically complex regions like Meghalaya, India, where the same area of canopy can represent vastly different amounts of stored carbon depending on species composition, forest age, and soil type.
To close this gap, the team will conduct field-based measurements of forest biomass and soil carbon — the two primary reservoirs through which forests capture and hold carbon — and use these to translate MPES’s forest-cover outcomes into credible carbon estimates. This will sharpen evaluation of MPES’s climate impact and allow direct comparison with established carbon accounting methodologies.
Together, the two projects will generate evidence to guide how conservation programs are priced, verified, and scaled in biodiverse tropical settings.
