Currently, in order to monitor carbon levels and carbon sequestration in agricultural lands, the industry relies on laborious, in-field physical sampling. The problem of quantifying soil organic carbon (SOC) at scale remains the core focus of the team, but in recent weeks, they have had a technical breakthrough that advances them more than a year in model development.Previously, Cloud’s soil carbon models relied on hyperspectral data, collected through a proprietary hardware and software package from manned aircraft. Their new approach includes a suite of satellite remote sensing data, environmental data, and physical samples which enable Cloud to decrease COGS and eliminate the operational risk of both collecting and analyzing data. This approach has been validated by peer-reviewed literature. This breakthrough enables Cloud to quantify soil carbon for every field in a country while still providing granularity of how soil carbon changes within individual fields.

If you are interested in joining the Cloud Agronomics team, please click here for more information on available positions.

Flume hosted its second webcast in July featuring water use data from Q2 2021. The Flume Household Water Use Index is the leading measure of U.S. household water use, measuring indoor and outdoor water use per capita at the national and local level. You can read more about Flume’s findings here.The company had an exceptional couple of months with utility programs. With the drought in the West increasing awareness and concern over water usage, Flume has kicked off a number of new utility programs with over 30 programs currently active and 5 coming in the rest of Q3. One of its most popular programs, in Marin, CA, has sold over 2,000 devices and the utility is using Flume’s data to actively manage and track water use in order to meet a proposed 40% reduction in use. Overall, 92% of utility customers believe having a Flume has made them more aware of where they use water and 80% believe that the information provided through the Flume app has changed their water use behavior.

Through the consumption of water using their self-cleaning water bottles, LARQ has made a significant environmental impact. The company estimates that over 3 million pounds of plastic waste and over 8 million pounds of carbon dioxide has been reduced by the use of their bottles.

Aperia’s Halo tire inflator makes driving large trucks safer and more efficient. The company estimates that through the use of its Halo inflator, they have offset 7.9 million gallons of oil which equates to over 3.1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization of 195 governments, issued a new report this month based on a three-year analysis of 14,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies. It is the first major international assessment of climate change research since 2013. The results paint a disturbing picture of the current state of climate issues across the globe, including droughts, flooding, fires, and other weather events. It highlights the human causes for such issues and the long term impacts of further climate change. The full report and summaries can be found here.Here are several other summaries of the IPCC report findings from The Economist, Yale, Axios, Bloomberg, and Quartz.

There has been a considerable increase in interest in climate technology companies. Over the last decade, there has been a 7x increase in global VC funding of climate tech businesses. And it’s not only VC – private equity funds are also keen to capitalize on the growing interest in climate technology. Read more on the trends and what is driving them at PitchBook, Axios, and Bloomberg.