Mitti Labs Enters Deal With Google For 1 Mn Carbon Credits

Mitti Labs, a climate tech startup, has entered into a significant four-year agreement with Google to supply 1 million carbon credits until 2030. This nature-based offtake is considered one of the largest to date. While the financial details remain undisclosed, the deal ensures a fixed contractual offtake of 1 million credits, delivered between 2027 and 2030. Payments will be made upon delivery of verified carbon credits, with no upfront financing involved.

The credits will primarily be generated from Mitti Labs' rice farming projects in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Karnataka. Currently, the startup operates programs covering over 1 lakh hectares in India and plans to expand its operations across India and Southeast Asia. This partnership with Google not only validates the quality of their projects but also aids in scaling their India-based initiatives.

Kate Brandt, Google's chief sustainability officer, highlighted the benefits of Mitti Labs' approach in reducing methane emissions, conserving water, and empowering smallholder farmers to adopt advanced irrigation practices. The company's technique, alternate wetting and drying (AWD), involves periodically drying rice fields to minimize oxygen-poor conditions that promote methane-producing microbes. This method reduces methane production while using less water and maintaining crop yields.

Mitti Labs works closely with farmers to train them in the AWD technique and shares revenue from the resulting carbon credits with participating farming communities. The startup leverages an AI platform that utilizes high-resolution synthetic aperture radar, remote sensing, and biogeochemical models, supported by NASA's grant, to estimate changes in greenhouse gas emissions and water usage. The GeoAI platform has also been developed using NASA's support.

Additionally, Mitti Labs is expanding its operations beyond India, initiating a pilot market in the Philippines and exploring other major rice-producing regions in Southeast Asia.