SYDNEY, Nov. 28, 2023 – Wollemi, a world-first solution to measuring and reporting on financed agricultural and land emissions, launched today following successful pilot programs.
CEO and co-founder Sam Sneddon said Wollemi modelling calculated approximately AUD$2.4 billion will be spent every year trying to measure climate risks to agriculture, including emissions, in Australia, Brazil and the US alone.
“Companies with lending, investment or insurance exposure to land and agriculture have a huge problem – there is no scalable, automated, accurate way to measure the greenhouse gas emissions attributed to financing activity at asset level, even as regulation is requiring them to do so,” she said. “There are no national or international measurement methodologies that can deliver like-for-like comparable data; and there has never been an efficient, transparent way to measure them without onerous requirements from farmers – until now.”
Wollemi replaces a combination of Excel spreadsheets and expensive external consultants with a SaaS solution that allows real-time, verifiable, audit-grade analysis of any investment or loan exposure to land or agriculture. The system integrates private and public data sets and applies its proprietary emissions factors to deliver highly accurate and actionable emissions and physical risk metrics at a hyper local level. Only minimal customer data is required. Machine learning and AI are applied to ensure any gaps are filled with accurate predictive modelling, and results are updated automatically in real time as underlying data changes.
In FY23, Suncorp Bank (Suncorp-Metway Limited) conducted a successful pilot with Wollemi. Heidi Aspinall, Sustainability Strategy Manager, Suncorp Bank said the Wollemi pilot had provided a significant improvement in Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF) data quality score, reducing the Financed Emissions calculation at the farm level by 14-97%, with variance driven by data availability.
“The Banking industry – not just in Australia but around the world – has been searching for solutions to measure emissions from agriculture and land that enables the limitations of data availability to be navigated, and that can provide outputs that are transparent, verifiable and support effective risk management and decision making, as well as enable Banks to comply with the rapidly evolving disclosure landscape,” she said. “Our experience with Wollemi has been exceptional.”
Ms Sneddon said that regulatory pressure to accurately report on emissions from investments and loans has surged in the past two years, with requirements either recently implemented or about to come into effect in Australia; Brazil, Japan; Canada; the US; Europe and Singapore. “Sovereign wealth funds; governments; retail and investment banks; insurers; superannuation and pension funds, and asset managers all face mounting pressure to report accurately on agricultural and land investments, the value of which runs into trillions of dollars globally,” she said.
At the same time, institutions are faced with the problem of quantifying and managing climate risk from events such as storms, floods, fires, and drought.
“Wollemi can solve for both sides of this equation – on one hand we provide state of the art emissions reporting, on the other hand, we assess physical climate impact too, with our models that are also deployable to calculate climate risk across a huge universe of scenarios,” Ms Sneddon said. “With up to 25% of global emissions related to agriculture, and food security and climate risk at the top of investors’ list of concerns, Wollemi represents a meaningful contribution to the acceleration we need toward true decarbonisation.”
Sneddon is a long-time entrepreneur and sustainability leader, and the former Data Workstream Chair and current Sustainability Steering Committee Co-Chair of the IoT Alliance Australia. She is joined on the Wollemi founder team by:
Co-founder and CPO John Mottram, formerly Head of Food and Agriculture at Swiss Re and Head of Agricultural Commodities at ANZ Bank; andCo-founder and CTO Distinguished Professor Fang Chen, Executive Director of the UTS Data Science Institute; award-winning, international leader in (AI) and data science; and member of the NSW Government AI Advisory Committee.
Wollemi also enables climate-informed product and service development by incorporating emissions and climate-related risk into existing modelling and evaluation processes. This could allow for the delivery of innovative products such as drought-protected loans and natural capital lending, as well as accurate, standardised carbon credits.
“This is a fulcrum moment in the carbon economy,” Sneddon said. “We are very excited to be an enabler for one of the biggest transitions humanity has seen since the industrial revolution, and help to achieve a sustainable future for us all.”
