The Anthropocene Institute is an organization founded by Carl Page in 2012 and is focused on making the Earth sustainable by knowing and investing in the right technology. They partner with entrepreneurs, investors, governments, nonprofits, and universities to foster science, influence policy, promote clean, sustainable energy, and more.

As climate change has become a more serious issue over time, it has become increasingly beneficial for companies and organizations to invest in lowering their carbon footprint. For example, one fourth of Fortune 500 companies have pledged to be carbon neutral by 2030. Investing in carbon removal technology is hard enough for the world’s biggest companies, but smaller organizations often don’t have the time or resources to effectively do so.

Our Machine Learning for Optimization of Carbon Removal tool is a website used by government agencies, private companies, entrepreneurs, investors, and the public to become informed and to help them make investment decisions.

Our website displays fully interactive and responsive heatmaps for three major carbon capture technologies on their own web pages: kelp farms, reforestation, and direct air capture.

On each page, users are greeted with a heatmap that displays how cost effective it is to implement the specific carbon removal technology for each state and county in the United States.

Users can select other relevant metrics to overlay onto the heatmap, such as the potential number of trees that could be planted in each county. These metrics assist users in selecting the most effective way to maximize carbon removal and minimize costs.

The website is developed as a web application which uses a React framework and utilizes Python machine learning libraries, publicly available data, and the Mapbox JavaScript API to generate the heatmaps.