Morning, Grove!
Reforestation has a bad reputation because of the carbon credit market. Lots of companies "bought" immense amounts of credits that were supposed to fund large foresting projects. Money was pocketed instead. Bad for the industry all around.
I pressed Jad Daley about this because, going into the conversation, this is the narrative I believed.
He just stepped down as CEO of American Forests on the organization's 150th birthday to lead Terraformation as president. I was pleasantly surprised by the level of rigor in their approach.
How Terraformation scopes, executes, and maintains their projects is great direction for any climatech needing to reverse a market narrative about their tech.
Let's dig in.
In this week's issue
- From seed to receipt
- Mapping the Ecosystem for Deployment
- Holistic Thinking is Good Business Strategy
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From seed to receipt
Jad calls himself a "wood wonk". Before Terraformation he ran American Forests for almost 9 years, grew it about tenfold, and helped secure $14 billion of federal investment in forest work.
For him, a reforestation project comes down to 4 decisions:
- how you prepare the site
- whether you plant or let nature take over
- which species and genetics you use, and
- how to keep it alive through its early years.
Take seed collected from the southern edge of a species' range. It grows into a tree that's more heat-and-drought-tolerant than the same species collected from the northern edge.
On paper, they’re the same tree. In the reality of a warming climate, you plant the more tolerant tree population. You’d never know the difference in a PR photo of someone holding a shovel.
Terraformation built an open-source platform called Terraware that follows a project all the way from beginning to stabalization.
It’s a tool for doing the work and effectively communicating that the work happened. That is crucial for informing narratives.
Verification is what supports the project finance and scale. Many of the industry has lacked here until now.
Mapping the Ecosystem for Deployment
Reforestation, apparently, is just as complicated to deploy as other deep climate technologies.
Governments handle permits, nonprofits run the work, outside companies bring the capital, and local communities do the planting. Terraformation's value is tying it all together.
Jad points to the carbon sector’s long history of treating local and Indigenous landowners dishonestly, so new projects have to earn their trust before they can ask them to come aboard.
Keta Blue, Terraformation’s 5,000-hectare mangrove restoration project in Ghana, is a good example of this.
Permits & and government partnerships are as necessary as moving dirt and throwing seeds.
Holistic Thinking is Good Business Strategy
Finally, Terraformation considers the holistic picture.
Jad has a simple standard: if the trees come back but the communities aren't better off, the project failed. This is true even if it hit every carbon target it was paid for.
In Ghana, the people who live in the project's area get work that lasts beyond the planting, along with nurseries and skills they can keep using. There's also new income from cacao agroforestry, aquaculture, and a fund they control themselves.
This kind of thinking is what makes deployments stick.
One community put its project's money toward repairing its sanitary facilities. From a strictly project durability standpoint - if the forest health is directly correlated to the ability to maintain basic crucial infrastructure for the community, that forest is not going anywhere.
For all the talk of forests and carbon, doing the work properly comes down to a long series of unglamorous deployment decisions.
The reason to sweat those details is the people who will be living with the outcome.
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With love, Blake
See you next week!
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