Upstream Carbon has been awarded a $200K MassCEC AmplifyMass grant to expand statewide access to Walden, our land-use decision-support platform. The funding will support a UI redesign and two new access tiers — free and subsidized — giving Massachusetts municipalities and land trusts parcel-level development and conservation insights already in use by the Town of Plymouth and North County Land Trust.
Plan with usOn August 25th, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts awarded Upstream Carbon a $200,000 grant through MassCEC's AmplifyMass program to expand the capabilities of its land use intelligence platform, Walden. This award is part of the Healey-Driscoll Administration's $8.5M climate tech funding round announced Aug 25, 2026, which supports 33 projects total across the Commonwealth.
Walden is a web application serving parcel-level intelligence about land use, conservation value, and development potential. Under the hood, proprietary machine learning models trained on millions of real-world property records to assess each site for development potential and conservation importance. This AI system acts like a land acquisition analyst or property investor, reviewing factors that make a site suitable for future developed purposes. The system accounts for all ranges of developed and undeveloped land uses, including working forests, conservation land, single-family homes on large forested tracts; roads and strip malls; utility-scale solar arrays; manufacturing and other industrial buildings; mining; residential subdivision communities; working family farms; ski resorts; golf courses; and more. Rigorous spatial validation approaches are embedded in model training to ensure the system makes accurate inferences on unseen data - including in states, watersheds, and counties beyond Massachusetts. This system has been powering our carbon program's baselines and risk adjustment mechanisms that underpin the quality of Upstream Carbon's credits and conservation projects.
A pilot with the Town of Plymouth has been a pivotal source of early feedback on the platform for municipal use cases, while Massachusetts conservation groups like North County Land Trust and Sudbury Valley Trustees use the data in Walden to discover and assess at-risk forests eligible for carbon-funded conservation.
Upstream Carbon has become an integral part of our land use and net-zero planning strategy - to develop protection plans that bolster the climate resilience benefits of trees on public and private land. The upgrades and statewide rollout funded by AmplifyMass can help communities across the state address urgent housing, energy, and climate needs.
- Mike Cahill, Town of Plymouth Department of Energy and Environment
The AmplifyMass award funds user interface upgrades that support faster and smarter decisions regarding land conservation, municipal comprehensive planning, updates to zoning and use codes, vacant land assessments, and project siting justifications. In addition, funding enables development of a free basic version of the platform and secures pre-negotiated licensing prices of the full application for Massachusetts municipalities. Further enhancements planned under this work include conservation prioritization tools, actionable data visualizations, and custom site assessments.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has a goal to protect 30% of land and water by 2030, and 40% of land and water by 2050. The intelligence served through Walden offers a path for municipalities and local conservation groups to achieve those targets. Meanwhile, enabling climate-smart land use planning at scale offers an opportunity to maximize how land is used across the Commonwealth to achieve statewide Net Zero targets by 2050. At the same time, property prices are rising faster than wages statewide and affordable housing supply is under pressure. Hitting climate and conservation targets while enabling sustainable development is critical to future society. Existing GIS tools can provide immense value to municipal planners and analysts crunching map layers, yet dynamic, site-level forecasts and analysis are only available to the most advanced enterprise and corporate geospatial data science teams. Whether carbon-funded conservation projects or zoning for community development, Upstream Carbon's approach with Walden is to provide a simple platform to triage and take action at the parcel level.
As part of this award, Upstream Carbon is seeking feedback and design partners from municipal planning departments, land trusts, and conservation commissions across Massachusetts to inform how upgrades and new features will be used.
