Carbon data is getting more precise, but its value depends on how it is used, says KarbonMap’s Thanh Hien Mai

For KarbonMap chief executive and co-founder Thanh Hien Mai, the goal was never a better report. It was a better outcome, one that farming and forestry communities across the Global South can actually see and act on. 

Thanh Hien Mai will be the first to admit she didn’t see it coming. When she first looked at the carbon market, the math seemed straightforward. She couldn’t understand why people found the requirements so burdensome.

Mai is the co-founder and chief executive of KarbonMap, a climate-technology start-up that helps farming and forestry communities across the Global South measure their environmental data and access carbon markets.

Data collection was hard, perhaps, but that was a problem technology could help solve. Companies pay for a consultant’s report to act as a layer of assurance, she came to realise. If the numbers are later questioned, they can say they relied on expert advice.

“It’s a sophisticated way to outsource risk rather than actually finding the truth,” she says. “The system stops being about the environment and starts being about defensive accounting.”

Mai calls this Insurance-as-a-Service. The emission factors companies use are real; the arithmetic checks out. But the exercise is designed to complete a process, not change behaviour. “High-fidelity noise,” she describes it: data that is technically sound but does not improve the world we live in.

Mai believes that when reporting standards grow too complex to execute well, the industry tends to retreat: remote sensing and automation replace human presence, and systems that police from a distance crowd out those that work alongside communities on the ground. What actually moves people, she has found, has little to do with the numbers.

In a village in Ghana, Mai once attended a meeting where local farmers had to decide whether to join a carbon project. It was the culmination of many prior sessions that the KarbonMap team had held with them. With a translator relaying her words, she said nothing about data.

“I used to work to earn money,” she said, “but now I think God has called me to work to serve other people, and when I see you, I understand why the work I have done is meaningful.” The locals decided to join. Not because of a report or a set of numbers, but because of trust.

The complexity is in the mindset

The seed for KarbonMap came when she encountered a non-governmental organisation raising £600,000 ($1.03 million) to build a monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) app for fishers near a mangrove restoration area. She left Google to build it herself.

KarbonMap followed in 2022, starting with MRV for forestry operators in Vietnam before expanding to link that work to certification and market access, completing the financing circle.

What she discovered in the field was that the difficulty of carbon reporting had little to do with data science. “The complexity isn’t in the math,” she says. “It’s in the mindset.”

Early on, KarbonMap worked on a REDD forestry conservation project in a protected forest. Their analysis returned a very low deforestation rate, which, from a business standpoint, was a problem. No measurable threat meant no “additionality” to claim, and therefore no basis for carbon credits.

“I realised that our business has to go beyond reporting numbers,” Mai says, “but really dive into how to design activities and bridge any technical gap to assist the customer to build a business case.”

She also ran into a more structural problem. “Data is only as credible as the expert name standing behind it,” she says, “which to some extent monopolises truth.” KarbonMap’s response was to make the methodology visible rather than the conclusion.

“Simpler and simpler”

That meant building what she calls an exploratory interface: a tool that lets users trace how any number was derived, see how field decisions affect outcomes over time, and engage with data as a live model rather than a closed report. “When a number is explainable, it becomes fun to engage with,” she says.

The aim is to make data something that informs day-to-day decisions, rather than something produced at the end of a process, especially since many end users are not familiar with digital tools or complex interfaces.

KarbonMap currently operates across Southeast Asia, in Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and in Africa, in Ghana and Ethiopia. Partners include the World Bank and Wild Asia. The software supports perennial crops like cocoa, seasonal crops such as rice, livestock, and carbon credit projects covering forests and mangroves.

Designing for a farmer with a 2G connection requires a different engineering ambition than building for a corporate client. The constraints are real: patchy connectivity, users unfamiliar with digital interfaces, and data that cannot be uploaded in the field. Most existing tools, she notes, were built for auditors, not operators.

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“Other companies are like, ‘How do I make my software more fancy and look cool?’” Mai says. “For me, it’s like, ‘How do I make it simpler and simpler and simpler?’” She adds, “Building for a very sophisticated user is easy. But the less sophisticated the customer is, the more advanced your technology needs to be.”

The same principle applies more broadly: more data does not necessarily lead to better understanding. “We often mistake knowledge for power,” she notes. “If data is not converted into actionable insights to improve the field conditions, then that data was not useful.”

The argument, then, is not for less reporting, but for a more meaningful use of it — numbers that can actually be seen for what they are and acted on by those closest to the ground. “When people actually understand the ‘why’ behind the data, they feel empowered to make better choices not just for their business, but for the world we all share.”

Photography: Lawrence Teo
Art direction: Fazlie Hashim
Hair & makeup: Benedict Choo using Nars