Introducing Biomass at Risk

Forest carbon projects are built on a promise of permanence. But the threats to permanence can materialize in days, and the tools most project teams rely on to detect them were never designed to answer the question that matters most: how much carbon is actually at risk?

This week, we introduced Biomass at Risk: a new feature within the Chloris platform that connects near-real-time deforestation alerts directly to site-specific above-ground biomass figures, giving project teams the earliest possible warning of threats translated immediately into the numbers that determine project outcomes.

The gap we set out to close

When an alert fires inside a project boundary, a project manager faces a cascade of questions. Is this a significant disturbance or noise? How much area is affected? And critically: what does this mean for the carbon stock committed to protect?

Answering those questions today requires pulling data from multiple platforms and assembling a picture that was never designed to be assembled. By the time it's clear, the window for rapid response may already be closing. Under most registry frameworks, undetected loss can trigger draws on permanence buffers, and persistent monitoring gaps raise credibility questions with buyers and ratings agencies whose confidence underpins project value.

What Biomass at Risk enables

Built directly into the Chloris platform, Biomass at Risk surfaces monthly deforestation risk estimates within each project boundary, giving teams a live read on both the area and carbon consequence of emerging threats.

Key capabilities include:

• A map layer overlaying GFW deforestation alerts on satellite imagery, bounded to each project site
• Confidence-weighted risk tiers: High, Medium, and Low, color-coded for fast prioritization, so teams can distinguish multi-system confirmed events from lower-certainty signals
• Area and biomass statistics: total hectares at risk, percentage of site, and tonnes of biomass at risk, broken down by confidence tier
• Monthly trend charts, stacked bar charts showing area and biomass at risk across the year, with a trend line overlay to distinguish isolated events from sustained patterns. Updates run monthly, with clear source attribution to Global Forest Watch and a methodology tooltip within the stats panel.

Why it's built this way

Two design principles shaped Biomass at Risk.

The first is that an alert's location is only half the picture. Public deforestation alerts can carry confidence tiers, but what they don't carry is any sense of what that alert means for the carbon stock in that specific project. Biomass at Risk crosses each alert against site-specific above-ground biomass figures, so the confidence tier becomes a carbon figure: not just "a high-confidence event occurred here," but "a high-confidence event is putting X tonnes at risk in this project." That translation is what gives project teams something they can actually act on.

The second is that the best monitoring tool is the one that gets used. Platforms that require context-switching, separate logins, or custom analysis to answer a basic question about project risk will be consulted periodically at best. Biomass at Risk is integrated into the same interface project teams already use, so the information is there when it's needed, without the assembly work.