UK's Mantle Labs wins Gold Standard rice methane tender
Quantum Commodity Intelligence – UK-based technology company Mantle Labs has won a tender published by Swiss registry the Gold Standard to assess the potential of artificial intelligence to facilitate rice methane projects.
In April, GS said it was looking for an implementing partner to develop a high-level assessment of the technology "beyond monitoring, reporting and verification" and demonstrate some concrete examples.
The project will consider rice farms in Vietnam, one of the major countries looking to cut methane emissions from the crop, under an existing partnership between GS, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the Australian Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Mantle Labs said the trial will consider "different stages of the development cycle" and that the results will be released publicly later this year.
"In recent years, there have been significant efforts by different actors in the carbon market value chain to apply new technologies to reduce transaction costs and improve market efficiency," said Mantle Labs.
"So far this has mainly been applied in the context of forestry activities."
Rice production is a major source of emissions in Vietnam, given the Southeast Asian country's status as the third-largest global exporter of the commodity, and Vietnam has pledged to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030.
In April, GS and IRRI released a 'first-of-its-kind' digital resource hub aimed at incentivising sustainable rice production and carbon credit generation in Vietnam.
GS, IRRI and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade started partnering in 2022 – through the Business Partnerships Platform – to scale carbon market access for sustainable rice producers in Vietnam.
Mantle Labs is one of the major companies active in rice methane analytics, having collaborated with Verra on their investigation of Chinese projects and now GS.
Flooded rice fields encourage bacteria and the progressive decay of plants, turning them into methane emissions.
Emissions can be reduced by approximately half by adopting alternate wetting and drying (AWD), a technique that consists of removing water at specific intervals during the growth period of the rice in the paddy field.
AWD was first documented by academics and IRRI in the early 2000s as a way to save water.
Until now, the technique has seen little take-up in the developing world because it requires additional labour and does not boost rice yields, but there is hope that carbon finance can help change that.
