In climate technology, you’ll read the word “scale” a lot — maybe so often that it starts to lose meaning. But scale is one of the most important concepts when it comes to rebalancing the planet. We need to dramatically scale up a multitude of climate solutions quickly in order to avoid worst-case projections.
That’s what Carbon Streaming is aiming to do: accelerate a net-zero future by directing climate finance to scale diversified and high-integrity emissions reductions and removals projects through stream financing. The streaming model works like this: Carbon Streaming provides up-front deposits to project developers to stimulate the creation of carbon projects that often entail significant startup costs. In return, Carbon Streaming markets and matches credits from their diversified portfolio to corporate buyers committed to voluntary climate action. Additional ongoing delivery payments flow to the projects as credits are sold. This enables the projects to have a constant and predictable stream of funds without having to manage sales and marketing so they can focus on delivering impact for people and the planet.
Carbon Streaming’s project partners develop high-integrity projects ranging from blue carbon and biochar carbon removals to sustainable agriculture and nature-based solutions. Each of these has additional co-benefits beyond carbon, such as biodiversity, ecosystem conservation, and sustainable development impacts advancing multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals.
But for these solutions to scale in time to adequately address the threat of climate change, it is essential to increase efficiency and reduce the operational costs of existing systems. That’s where Patch comes in.
Problem: Manual workflows are time-intensive and break down at high volumes
In the early days the team tracked credit inventory, sales and deliveries manually. But as the business matured and higher inventory volumes were expected to come online year-over-year across more than 20 projects, they recognized this could start to break down — fast.
On top of that, these outmoded approaches posed other challenges. Spreadsheets made it difficult to ensure tracking was fully comprehensive and up-to-date, leaving teammates uncertain what was reserved and what was available. This made handoffs unnecessarily time-consuming.
Carbon Streaming knew that a home-built system was just as likely to run into reliability issues, and usability could likewise be painful. Not to mention that building and maintaining a system in-house would take valuable resources better spent growing the business and creating impact.
Saving time, avoiding errors, and increasing visibility into their growing carbon credit inventory were critical to the next level of scale. Carbon Streaming turned to Patch for an operating system to deliver on each of those three needs.
Solution: CarbonOS solves inventory management so Carbon Streaming can focus on scale
Patch worked closely with Carbon Streaming when designing and building CarbonOS to ensure it would meet their inventory management needs. In our collaboration, Carbon Streaming shared insights into their workflows and pain points, and Patch created features for the platform based on their feedback.
“Patch puts its customers at the center of its design and development process,” Forster said. This drives better outcomes for Carbon Streaming, our clients, and Patch.
CarbonOS is now CSC’s inventory management system, integral to the everyday operations of the company.
“CarbonOS is built for purpose and is an instrumental part of our day-to-day. By enabling us to focus on relationships while the platform does the heavy lifting, CarbonOS helps us best support our partners in achieving their voluntary climate action plans.”
Oliver Forster, VP Sales at Carbon Streaming Corporation
Inventory management once lost precious time, but now it’s a snap. Multiple team members can see an up-to-date view of available inventory simultaneously, so they know what others have reserved and what’s available to sell. This drastically streamlines their internal processes for ensuring a seamless experience for the team and their clients.
Visualizations in the platform make it easier to see what inventory is available in a way that would be painstakingly laborious and slow in spreadsheets or legacy systems. The team gets time and energy back in their day, and reporting business results is seamless.
