Earth Day & Six Months in Nature Tech
It seems fitting that my six-month anniversary at Pachama would fall on Earth Day 2024. In the past six months, I’ve followed an intense learning curve on the state of nature markets, their potential impact on climate change, and what it takes to make a high-integrity restoration project successful. All this mixed with the ups and downs of working at a young startup. Above all, I’ve been grateful and inspired to work alongside talented, passionate people committed to protecting and rebuilding global forest ecosystems.
A few key takeaways from the last six months:
1. The future of nature depends on nature markets.
This fact is often frustrating to those of us (myself included) who believe in and appreciate the intrinsic value of nature beyond its connection to human systems and economics. Unfortunately, though, the lack of tangible financial value in nature means many industries are using it for free, and destroying it in the process.
This practice is so widespread and so pervasive that it will take dozens, if not hundreds, of approaches and tactics to claw back our wild places in time. In some cases, intrinsic value can be the driver; indigenous communities continue to manage and protect 80% of global biodiversity with few market-based mechanisms for support. However, other areas will require us to flip the opportunity cost of land use by funding forests and natural spaces to stay standing. And even more capital is needed to bring back degraded areas that have already been lost. However imperfect they may be at representing and compensating for nature’s value, nature markets are increasingly critical to bridging this funding gap.
2. We need more than just carbon.
Carbon markets are by far the most developed and sophisticated nature markets available today. And while not every carbon project out there genuinely is integral and additional, these markets are improving and already channeling billions of dollars toward conservation, restoration, and sustainable use, which would otherwise not be available. We cannot simply rely on donations and altruism as the only solution at this point.
That being said, carbon is only one piece of nature’s economic value (often known as ecosystem services), and many incredible ecosystems are relatively carbon-poor. A nature market based solely on carbon might overlook critical systems like deserts, coastlines, and even grasslands, in favor of carbon-rich forests. Forests are incredible, important, and threatened ecosystems that require conservation and restoration, which carbon is beginning to provide. But carbon funding alone is often insufficient to overcome opportunity costs of productive uses for agriculture or livestock, and won’t cover these complementary ecosystems at all. Furthermore, carbon-focused market mechanisms can sometimes incentivize activities detrimental to the provision of other ecosystem services in the name of rapid carbon accumulation, such as planting low-diversity (or even monoculture) forests, rather than ecosystem restoration.
Complementary funding mechanisms based on other ecosystem services, such as water, air, biodiversity, or even aesthetic beauty, are still much needed to support the theoretical underpinnings of nature markets for valuing the many services that nature provides.
3. Project success starts and ends with local stakeholders.
The central importance of local stakeholders in project success was something I already knew from my previous work in community-led tourism, biodiversity conservation, and carbon development in Latin America, but it has been further emphasized through my work at Pacham. At the end of the day, these are the people who will care for the trees while they are young, and walk among them when they are grown. People whose kids and grandkids will inherit these projects and hopefully, benefit from these forests long beyond our lifetimes. Forest carbon projects are indelibly intertwined with those that live around them, manage them, and protect them.
Yet there is still enormous variability among carbon standards, and developers, around what stakeholder engagement means and what is required. In particular, the new Verra requirements around this, including dozens of specific details about local stakeholders, can seem complex and opaque, or even contentious to apply in certain contexts, such as identifying and speaking with non-landowner stakeholders who have been using land to be reforested, but someone else holds the tenure rights. These agreements are common among families, or sometimes neighbors who make informal arrangements that must then be documented and understood.
Yet taking the time to map and deeply understand the local context helps avoid preventable conflicts or resolve the inevitable ones when they do arise in these 40+ year projects. There are too many stories today (often trying to disavow carbon/nature markets!) of projects imploding because they were built on conflictual land or because they failed to compensate a key stakeholder that was not identified early on. Forest carbon projects in particular are so long and complex that it should be taking developers some time to truly understand local circumstances and design projects accordingly to ensure their long-term success (and real, permanent carbon sequestration).
4. Technology can’t fix everything, but it can speed things up.
I wanted to work at Pachama because I am convinced that technology can be a huge force for good for protecting and restoring our environment at the pace required to avoid environmental calamity. Just like the note about nature markets above, I feel the Earth needs every bit of support we can give, and from every possible angle, from long-term field research to deep-tech moonshot. There is significant opportunity to both accelerate and streamline traditional conservation efforts using existing technology, as well as leapfrogging over these systems to dramatically improve the speed and accuracy of environmental management and restoration using cutting-edge tech like AI and LiDAR.
Furthermore, producing and validating carbon credits, particularly from reforestation, is extremely complicated and requires deep technical skills, including community engagement work, forest science, project management, finance, sales, and legal compliance. Digital tools can help lower these barriers by creating broader access to the skills and knowledge needed to build successful and integral projects, as well as improving the precision of the science used to calculate forest credits. They can also help accelerate and more effectively channel funding toward projects, removing middlemen and generating more trust and transparency in a process that can often be opaque. The exponential increase and improvement in accessible geospatial data and remote sensing tools are also making it easier to monitor projects and ecosystems in real-time and rapidly course-correct if needed.
I’ve probably only scratched the surface here, and I am constantly amazed and inspired by the technological developments I see at Pachama and in the broader nature tech market. Beyond this optimism, my work with Pachama has also reminded me of the importance of staying rooted (pun intended) in what forest carbon projects truly entail: deep changes to lifestyles and traditional, productive land uses made by real people. We cannot replace the human element of forest restoration with technology and I’ve been glad to see that this is not the intention. I’ve been lucky to share stories with landowners as we tour what were once farms and watch the sunrise alongside passionate community members while monitoring our seedlings. There is still a lot of work ahead of us, trying to blend the speed and agility of the tech world with the intricacies and nuance of human and natural ecosystems, but I’m honored to be along for the ride.
