AI-Enabled Traceability and Climate Governance for Deforestation-Free Agriculture and Carbon Markets in the Global South

Across Southeast Asia, fragmented smallholder supply chains face growing pressure from global buyers and regulatory frameworks that demand traceability, deforestation monitoring, and verified sustainability compliance. Traditional paper-based documentation systems cannot reliably track origin, land use, or environmental risk at scale, creating barriers to market access for farmers and exporters. As international regulations tighten and environmental scrutiny increases, agricultural supply chains require digital infrastructure capable of integrating geospatial intelligence, farmer registries, and automated compliance workflows.

TRST01 deployed an adaptable AI-powered traceability platform across Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos for rubber and coffee supply chains. Discriminative AI models screen for deforestation, analyse land use, and validate yield plausibility using satellite imagery and geospatial data. Integrated cross-border compliance tools align local production data with evolving EU regulations and global buyer requirements. Generative AI automates compliance documentation, buyer disclosures, and localised farmer communications, reducing manual reporting workloads and improving data reliability.

Deployment followed country-specific strategies, integrating government datasets where available and working directly with exporters, processors, and cooperatives. Farmer onboarding combined mobile self-registration with assisted mapping and GPS boundary capture to enable accurate land digitisation. The platform currently covers more than 250,000 hectares and engages over 150,000 farmers across Southeast Asia.

In Cote d'Ivoire, TRST01 implemented a customised AI-driven platform for rubber traceability and deforestation risk management. Satellite-based AI differentiates forest and plantation land, identifies encroachment risks, and establishes deforestation baselines aligned with EUDR requirements. The system operates across 84,000 hectares in partnership with more than 35 cooperatives, benefiting over 60,000 smallholder rubber farmers.

TRST01 is also deploying sovereign digital climate infrastructure in Africa. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an AI-powered national registry is being established for forest governance and carbon market transparency, with blockchain-based registries tracking carbon assets in alignment with Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. In Malawi, the Paris Agreement Integrated Platform is under active deployment to digitise national emissions data and support automated climate reporting aligned with UNFCCC standards. Together, these deployments demonstrate how AI-driven traceability, geospatial intelligence, and automated compliance systems can unite farmers, cooperatives, exporters, regulators, and buyers in interoperable digital ecosystems supporting responsible sourcing and climate governance.
For additional context and detailed documentation of this use case, please refer to pages 39-40 in the attached Casebook.