Christopher Philipson

Founder & Director - belian.earth

Christopher Philipson is Founder and Director of belian.earth, a forest science company that builds independent baselines for forest carbon and nature projects. The baseline decides how much a project can claim, and it is where most questions about additionality and integrity begin.

belian.earth combines statistical matching methods with AI models trained on satellite data to select comparison areas automatically and at country scale, free from the potential bias of a developer choosing its own baseline. It is supported by the European Space Agency and Innosuisse, and works with the University of Aberdeen, the University of Exeter and ETH Zurich.

Chris is a forest ecologist with twenty years experience in tropical forest science. He did his doctoral and postdoctoral research at the University of Zurich and lectured at ETH Zurich, with long-running field work in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, and led the study showing that active restoration accelerates carbon recovery in logged tropical forests, published in Science in 2020. He then spent five years inside the carbon market with a leading forest carbon project developer, taking a conservation project from its first field measurements through to credit issuance. He founded belian.earth to bring that experience to the methods the whole market relies on.