Living Carbon

Does the core business genuinely avoid or reduce emissions, or build climate resilience? Share of revenue that is actually 'green'. Fossil-dependent models score low.

The core activity — reforesting degraded land with potentially faster-growing trees — is a genuine mitigation approach, but the headline 53% biomass gain was measured in controlled growth-room conditions from a preprint, not replicated in peer-reviewed field trials; early commercial plantings were predominantly conventional trees with only a small fraction of enhanced stock, materially diluting the advertised carbon benefit.

Credible, science-based targets (SBTi), a real net-zero plan with progress to date, and CDP disclosure — not just a dated press release.

No SBTi-validated targets, no CDP disclosure, and no publicly available net-zero roadmap with quantified interim milestones were found; the company has not published verifiable corporate-level emissions reduction commitments beyond project-level carbon credit claims.

Operational footprint, labour and social practices, and governance quality across the company's own operations and supply chain.

Living Carbon is structured as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), which provides a governance floor for stakeholder accountability, and it has raised over $36M from institutional investors, but no independent ESG audit, labor-practice disclosure, or biodiversity-impact assessment for its tree-planting sites has been publicly identified.

Quality of disclosure, independent third-party verification, and how much hard data backs the company's claims.

Key performance claims (biomass growth, carbon capture rate) derive from a company-released whitepaper and an unreviewed bioRxiv preprint rather than peer-reviewed publications; ACR registration provides some third-party process oversight, but field-scale MRV data and annual project-level monitoring reports have not been made publicly accessible in a readily auditable form.

Controversies, litigation, pollution, fossil-fuel lobbying, conflict-zone involvement and governance scandals. Higher means cleaner.

No litigation, pollution incidents, fossil-fuel lobbying, or governance scandals were identified; however, MIT Technology Review reported that early carbon-credit plantings contained only a small percentage of the enhanced trees that were marketed as the product's differentiator, raising a material concern about the gap between marketing claims and actual deployment.