We are a show about nature’s role in tackling climate change.
Why Listen?
This show is for anyone looking to make a dent in the climate crisis.
A new industry is taking shape, and our goal is to host a cross-disciplinary nerd-out on nature and its role in addressing climate change. Together, we’ll unpack this growing field and connect the dots across the people and ideas shaping its future. Whether you bring decades of experience or are hearing the term “nature-based solution” for the first time, this show is for you.
Join the conversation with industry juggernauts, environmental thought leaders, and entrepreneurs around the world who are operating at the frontier of nature-based solutions.
Why us, why now?
We are three friends with diverse backgrounds and a common interest in demystifying natural climate solutions. Hailing from across the U.S.—East Coast, West Coast, and Midwest—and with professional backgrounds spanning conservation, investments, entrepreneurship, and international development, our paths converged in business school at Stanford.
We started this podcast because we saw the need to expand conversations about nature-based solutions, particularly in the private sector. We hope to learn together and build knowledge at the frontier of an emerging industry.
The past several years have seen dramatically increased interest in climate solutions from the private sector. Climate tech venture investments are growing 3x faster than even AI investments, and the voluntary carbon offset market increasingly booms as corporates make carbon-neutral and carbon-zero pledges. Renewable energy is commercially competitive, emerging technologies like direct air capture are making headlines, and a new carbon removal industry is in its infancy—all of which is great news for climate.
In this context, nature-based solutions to climate change like replanting forests, protecting mangroves, and transitioning to regenerative agriculture practices raise important questions. Which carbon offsets are effective? How should we value co-benefits? And why does only 2% of all climate finance go to nature-based solutions?
We’re here to dive into these and other tricky questions—not as unabashed evangelists, but as passionate individuals on a journey to understand and unlock nature-based solutions as part of the climate crisis toolkit.
Why nature-based solutions?
Direct, cost-effective climate impact
About a quarter of all global emissions come from agriculture, forestry, and other land use. At the same time, nature can provide almost 40% of our climate solution - and cost-effectively! While most engineered solutions still cost hundreds of dollars per tonne of CO2 removed, nature-based tech (plants, soils, etc.) can remove carbon for mere dollars on the ton. Bottom line: we can’t meet the Paris targets without nature-based solutions, and so we need to do them well.
Valuable co-benefits
In addition to sequestering carbon, nature-based solutions provide essential ecosystem services such as improving water filtration and protecting coastlines from hurricanes. They also help address the dramatic loss of biodiversity that poses an existential risk to all of us. As just one measure of the severity and speed of change, we’ve lost 68% of all vertebrates in 50 years, or less than two generations. While climate change does contribute to biodiversity loss, land use change is a key driver of both climate change and biodiversity loss—and so nature-based solutions addressing land use change can help address a root cause of both crises.
Avoidance of irreversible damage
Not all carbon storage is equal. Some, if lost, takes more than 30 years to recover—too long to regain the lost carbon and meet 2030 or even 2050 targets. Globally, high-risk ecosystems contain at least 260 Gt (i.e. 260 billion tons) of irrecoverable carbon, compared to the ~9 GtC human-caused emissions from fossil fuels each year. Most at-risk are peatlands, mangroves, and marshes. For example, the world’s largest tropical peatland was only discovered in 2017 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It contains 30 billion tons of carbon, equivalent to more than 3x annual global fossil fuel emissions. If the Congo peatland was to catch fire—for example, to clear the land for timber as is happening in Indonesia’s peatlands—it would very quickly go from a massive carbon sink to a massive carbon source. Protecting high-risk ecosystems is critical to avoiding new emissions.
Inextricably linked to sustainable development
Nature-based solutions have the potential to directly improve the lives of vulnerable communities. More than 5.8 billion people rely on nature for their livelihoods—1.6 billion from forests, 1.7 billion from oceans, and 2.5 billion from agriculture—and most of these are the 70% of humanity living on less than $10 a day. Many of the greatest natural stores of carbon like tropical forests and peatlands are located in countries also grappling with extreme poverty, conflict, and fragility. In these geographies, implementing high-impact nature-based solutions may by necessity go hand-in-hand with addressing poverty, governance, education, and other social issues. How we go about “solving” climate matters, especially if we are leveraging the economic infrastructure of capitalism to do so. Nature-based solutions, if done right, are especially well-suited to helping advance the principle of climate justice: ensuring that climate solutions do not exacerbate or replicate historical injustices.
Nature is the most under-rated technology - and it’s scalable
Imagine inventing a biology-based technology that uses sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide from the air into oxygen (breathing!) and carbohydrates (food!)? A technology that is rapidly scalable, that is ready to be deployed in any geography around the world? We’ve got it, backed by millions of years of R&D: photosynthesis!
Inherent value
Each of us finds a sense of wonder in nature, and in the simple fact that life exists in such diversity. Surely that’s worth protecting.