Stuart Nissenbaum

Stuart Nissenbaum is a climate and environmental policy professional based in Denver, Colorado. He is the solo founder of Canopy Risk Analytics, an AI-powered SaaS platform that quantifies reversal risk in forest carbon credits for insurers and reinsurers. He served at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 2021 through 2025 in the Science Policy Division, where his work covered Power Plant Rules, oil and gas methane standards, the American Innovation and Manufacturing (AIM) Act HFC phasedown, vehicle emissions standards, Subpart W greenhouse gas reporting, National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) reconsiderations, and transportation conformity. From October 2021 to August 2023 he was EPA’s Head of Delegation to the Arctic Contaminants Action Program, a working group of the Arctic Council. He teaches climate adaptation policy at the University of Denver and Northern Illinois University, serves on the board of Groundwork Denver, and is a member of the Protect Our Winters Science Alliance with policy development responsibilities. His earlier career spans federal regulatory development and municipal environmental management, with environmental justice as a consistent lens across the work. He holds an MS in Environmental Science and an MPA, both from Indiana University.

Canopy Risk Analytics is an underwriting intelligence platform for carbon credit reversal risk. Carbon credits can fail after they are issued. Fire, drought, pest outbreak, storage failure, and governance breakdown all undo sequestration that a buyer has already paid for, and insurers pricing that exposure need numbers they can underwrite against rather than letter grades. Canopy models reversal risk using the same methods applied to catastrophe risk elsewhere in insurance. The platform produces exceedance probability curves, portfolio PML curves, treaty worksheets, buffer pool stress tests, and premium build-ups, each traceable back to the underlying peril assumptions. Every rating carries a confidence interval and a breakdown of which perils drive the result, so an underwriter can interrogate the output instead of accepting a score. The framework covers credits across the voluntary carbon market, including forest carbon and improved forest management, geological sequestration, direct air capture, BECCS, enhanced rock weathering, biochar, blue carbon, soil carbon, cookstoves, and sustainable aviation fuel. Projects are evaluated on multi-peril physical risk, climate-adjusted return intervals drawn from CMIP6 projections, leakage, and a governance score built across fifteen dimensions. The methodology is documented in a technical specification with 87 academic citations. Canopy is built for reinsurers, specialty MGAs, parametric carriers, ILS fund managers, and compliance market participants who need to price or transfer carbon permanence risk.