Projects

Phantom

Independent check on forest carbon credits

Environmental track

Published

3rd Place, Best Use of Base44, Ignition Hacks 2026

Waking the app, this can take a moment

Walking the Kariba case

Region switch, top right: pick Zimbabwe. The Amazon projects the app opens on are made up examples.
Open Kariba REDD+ Project. This one is real. It sold carbon credits for years on the promise that it was keeping that forest standing.
On the map, orange is the land the credits cover. Red is forest inside it that has already been cut down.
Drag the year slider under the map to watch the red spread, year by year.
Press Run independent verification. Phantom finds unprotected land nearby that looked the same before the project started, then checks whether that land was cleared any faster.
If both cleared at the same rate, the trees were coming down anyway and the credits paid for nothing. The headline is how much of what Kariba sold the satellite record cannot back up.
Case study, underneath, checks that against the real record: the registry that certified Kariba found much of it unsupported, and the project left the registry in 2024.
Kariba case, the switch beside it, is the same project from the buyer side.

Phantom, running liveThe demoOpen Phantom

Carbon credit projects claim they prevented deforestation that would otherwise have happened. Phantom checks that claim against free public satellite data by comparing the protected land to similar unprotected land nearby. If both cleared at the same rate, the credit is not buying anything.

It outputs a year-by-year clearing view inside the project boundary, the project's auditor and the buyers holding its credits, and a PDF export.

React
Vite
MapLibre GL JS
Turf.js
jsPDF
Python
scikit-learn
CVXPY
INPE PRODES
Hansen / Global Forest Watch
Render

ignitionhackv7.onrender.com

Why I built it

Carbon credits are sold on a claim that trees would have been cut down and weren’t, and almost nobody checks whether that’s true. The satellite data to check it has been free and public this whole time, which felt like the kind of gap worth closing.