Podcasts about ecosystem marketplace

Verifying Carbon Credits: Integrity in Every Acre What does it really take to turn climate-smart farming practices into verified carbon credits? In this episode, we pull back the curtain on the verification process behind agricultural carbon projects. Joined by three Agoro Carbon team members – Chris Daley from the Carbon team, John Pullis from the Data team, and Mark Worner from the Grower Success team – we break down the science, logistics, and integrity behind every carbon credit we generate. We start with the basics: what verification is and why it matters. Then we dive into the field with Mark, who shares the real-life practices that sequester carbon, like cover cropping and no-till farming. John walks us through the rigorous soil sampling methods and explains how data drives credibility. Chris provides insight into how third-party auditors validate that our project meets the highest global standards. You'll hear about the value verification brings – not just for carbon credit buyers -but for farmers, ranchers, and the planet. From improved soil health to greater transparency, this conversation uncovers the deeper benefits of getting it right. Whether you're in ag, carbon markets, or just curious how climate solutions are verified on the ground, this episode is a deep and accessible dive into the process that keeps our carbon program honest, credible, and impactful. About the our guests: Chris Daley has broad experience in the carbon markets, ranging from program and methodology development to providing analysis on current and future trends. Chris has worked as a program officer at Verra and a senior associate at Ecosystem Marketplace, a Forest Trends Initiative. Mark Worner is an and agronomist and first generation farmer with a background in seed and ag chemical sales he leads our Grower Success onboarding process. Mark's passion is to educate others about conservation agriculture Michigan's diverse agriculture influenced John Pullis' lifelong love for farming—from specialty crops to commodity crops. As a Senior Agronomist that focuses on soil sampling John thrives on the constant evolution and development of the agriculture industry.

On this episode, Sue Fernand, Sr. Director of Business Development and Alliances at 8x8, talks about building an ecosystem marketplace. Taking inspiration from the trailblazing success of Salesforce, Sue outlines the fundamental principles and best practices for developing a thriving ecosystem. By carefully selecting partners whose products complement and enhance the core offering, businesses can create a cohesive ecosystem that truly addresses customer needs. While navigating the intricacies of establishing an ecosystem, Sue advises starting with a lightweight and simple program. Avoiding complex integrations in the initial stages allows businesses to identify successful approaches and areas for improvement, paving the way for a more comprehensive ecosystem later on. Sue also emphasizes the importance of nurturing a culture of collaboration within the ecosystem community. Encouraging partners to work together, especially when their solutions complement one another, can lead to mutually beneficial collaborations and bolster customer satisfaction. There is immense potential for ecosystem marketplaces to drive innovation, enhance customer experiences and foster mutually beneficial partnerships. By implementing Sue's practical advice and strategic insights, businesses can successfully navigate the ecosystem landscape and thrive in today's interconnected business world. Resources mentioned: Sue Fernand - https://www.linkedin.com/in/suefernand/ ⁠8x8⁠ | LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/8x8/ 8x8 | Website - https://www.8x8.com/ Thank you to our amazing podcast team at Content Allies. Want to launch your own B2B revenue-generating podcasts? Contact them at https://ContentAllies.com. #saas #software #cloud

Hear from William McDonnell, COO of the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, as we discuss the role of carbon credits in the transition to net-zero, and what changes are needed to ensure that the voluntary market can function correctly. Sign up for GARP's 2022 Climate Risk Symposium here! Part I: Nov 22, 1:00 - 2:30 pm GMT Part II: Dec 1, 1:00 - 2:30 pm GMT As firms' climate ambitions steadily rise, many are looking towards carbon credits to help ease themselves into the transition to net-zero. According to the Ecosystem Marketplace, the global voluntary carbon market (VCM) has quadrupled in value since 2020. However, not all carbon credits are created equal, and this is causing significant harm to the VCM's integrity. Because the quality assurance of carbon credits relies on a patchwork of standards set by independent organizations, many are of poor quality and can even be net-carbon positive. This immaturity in the market has even allowed for such irrational practices as deliberately cutting down forests, only to sell their regrowth as offsets. In this episode of the GARP Climate Risk Podcast, we'll examine the voluntary carbon markets, exploring: The key differences between the mandatory and voluntary carbon markets; The challenge of scaling up the voluntary market whilst ensuring credit quality; and How the newly formed Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market plans to address it. Links from today's discussion: Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) homepage GARP's first Climate Risk webcast, featuring William – The Heat is On: A CRO's Perspective on Climate Change CRO Forum's Emerging Risk Initiative 2022 update Voluntary Carbon Market Integrity Initiative (VCMI) homepage Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) homepage Speaker's Bio(s) William McDonnell, COO, Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market William is COO for the ICVCM, the new global governance body to set and enforce threshold quality standards for the voluntary carbon market. Prior to that he had a 25-year career in financial services. Most recently he was Group Chief Risk Officer and member of the Group Executive Committee for RSA Insurance Group plc for 7 years, responsible for Risk, Assurance and Compliance groupwide. Prior to RSA he held roles at HSBC Investment Bank, Aviva, the UK Financial Services Authority and Deloitte. William is a leading voice on climate risk in the financial sector, having served as a member of the ClimateWise Council and of the UK's Climate Financial Risk Forum, and as chair of the Emerging Risks Initiative of leading global insurers, publishing a major climate study ‘The Heat is on – Insurability and Resilience in a Changing Climate'. 

News outlets are finally allocating resources to coverage of climate solutions, and most reporters are trying to get these complex issues right. Some, however, are repeating the same mistakes that derailed coverage of climate science itself for decades. Adapted from stories that first appeared on Ecosystem Marketplace, available here: https://medium.com/@stevenwilliamzwick/will-coverage-of-climate-solutions-suffer-the-same-fate-as-coverage-of-climate-science-b63877e090f1  

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The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), which is the United Nations specialized agency charged with promoting sustainable tourism, today unveiled the “Glasgow Declaration for Climate Action in Tourism” at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) here. The Declaration commits companies to cutting their emissions in half by 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, with all residual emissions being absorbed through ecological restoration by 2050 at the latest. More than 300 stakeholders have signed the declaration, including the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), which represents more than  300 companies responsible for more than 70 percent of global tourism. “The commitment is to not only reduce the footprint by changing business as usual operations, but also offsetting…through blue carbon, for example,” said UNWTO Executive Director Zoritsa Urosevic in an interview with Ecosystem Marketplace. “This is going to become, maybe, the new tourism attraction, because it's going to have a value that is more than just the beach.” She said that the UNWTO is in the process of launching a net- zero tourism fund, with contributions from tourists being matched by tour operators. UNWTO Secretary-General Zurab Pololikashvili conceded the gains that individual companies have made but stressed the need for a sector-wide effort involving government and international organizations as well.  “The Glasgow Declaration is a tool to help bridge the gap between good intentions and meaningful climate action,” he said. Urosevic described an ambitious strategy for using tourism to promote regeneration, especially of coral reefs, but stressed the need to hold the sector accountable. That's the ambition, but we're not there yet and we need your help,” she said. “We need everyone's help,” she added.

Stephen Donofrio, director of Forest Trends' Ecosystem Marketplace project, and co-author of the State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets 2021 report, explains to Ian Welsh why the carbon markets are set to exceed $1bn in 2021. He says why he thinks they will continue to grow as companies voluntarily take action to decarbonise their operations and broader impacts as far as they can, using credible offsets to account for what's left.

This week: Stephen Donofrio, co-author of the new State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets 2021 report, and director of Forest Trends' Ecosystem Marketplace project, talks about why the voluntary carbon markets are set to top $1bn in 2021, and the drivers for this. Primarily these are corporate awareness of emissions and desire to set in place how to achieve a net zero footprint. Donofrio also argues that it is a “myth” that businesses are engaging in offsetting without decarbonising operations and supply chains concurrently.   Plus: Mars, McDonald's and Marks & Spencer announce new and challenging decarbonising targets; why palm oil buyers may have inadvertent timber deforestation risks, says Aidenvironment; and, embedded sustainability management practices leads to better overall company performance, according to Accenture and the World Economic Forum, in the news digest. Host: Ian Welsh

This week: Alan Kroeger, head of supply chains and natural climate solutions at Satelligence, talks about eliminating emissions from forest commodity supply chains, the role of nature-based solutions in achieving this, and how companies can navigate their way through the challenges using the right data. And, RSPO's Victor Tamanjong discusses the state of play for sustainable palm oil in Africa. Plus: European Union pledges another €8bn for developing world climate action; new air carbon capture and storage plant opens in Iceland; and, the rapid growth of the voluntary carbon markets in new report from Ecosystem Marketplace, in the news digest. Host: Ian Welsh  

2019 is shaping up to be a pivotal summer in a pivotal year in the critical race to meet the climate challenge, with major media finally discovering the role that healthy forests can play in fixing the mess. In this episode, we examine the 40-year effort to slow climate change by saving forests. It's the first of three parts developed in accompaniment with the Ecosystem Marketplace series "Forests, Farms, and the Global Carbon Sink: It’s Happening" Guest: Kevin Conrad, Coalition for Rainforest Nations  

Wetlands cover 274 million acres of the United States, and they ultimately provide more than half the country's drinking water, which is one reason the federal government protects them -- or has, until now. Back in December, the US EPA and Army corps of engineers unveiled new rules for regulating water, and you'd be surprised what it leaves out. More half of the country's wetlands will no longer have federal protection, and neither will so-called "ephemeral streams", that only flow in certain conditions.  As of February 15, the public has 60 days to comment on the rule, so I'm running this piece I posted way back in August. If you're a paying patron, you will not be charged for this, and if you're not a patron, I invite you to become one at bionic-planet.com or at patreon.com/bionic planet. I planned this piece as a two-parter, but haven't delivered the second half yet because I couldn't afford to, and that's a fact. These packages, with multiple voices and tons of research take a lot of work, and I've got a full-time job that's really time and a half as Editor of Ecosystem Marketplace. I did write a five-part series that achieves what the second half of this podcast was supposed to do, and if enough people give me enough support, I'll also be able to finish that second half, which would be great! I hope you like the show, and I especially hope it moves you to action. You have nothing to lose but your clean water.

Ilson López is the President of Belgium. Not the European country, but the indigenous village in the district of Tahuamanu, in the Peruvian state of Madre de Dios, at the western edge of the Amazon forest. He’s part of the Yine people, who are scattered from here all the way to Cusco, the capital of the old Incan empire, about 500 kilometers to the southwest. The village gets its name from the alleged homeland of a rubber trader named Justo Bezada, who began working with the people of Belgium – or “Bélgica” in Spanish – in the early 1900s. Rubber tapping suited them, says López, because it provided a way to earn cash income for schools, food, and health care without destroying the forest. “Back in the day, we'd roll it into a big ball, which traders would take on a plane to Lima,” he says. “But that business started slowing down in the 1970s, and we've been struggling ever since.” As the rubber trade dried up, the people of Bélgica grudgingly turned to logging – sparingly at first, but more and more as roads came, bringing logging trucks and loggers seeking lucrative cedar and mahogany. Balancing Economy and Ecology In 2002, the people of Bélgica won demarcation of their territory, and with it the legal right to earn income from its products. They divided the territory into zones for commercial activities like rubber tapping and ecotourism, as well as pure conservation areas for traditional hunting and fishing. But logging was something they struggled with – morally and logistically. “We didn't have any capacity to do the extraction right,” says Lopez. “So at first we operated in the black market – basically just letting loggers into the territory and getting paid for it – but the local authorities came to us and said, ‘You're not doing this right.’ And that's when we learned about certification.” Specifically, certification under the Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC. You know those little labels you see on cabinets and tables and on boxes of paper? The Forest Stewardship Council Environmental NGOs like WWF created the Forest Stewardship Council in 1993, together with some forward-thinking timber companies, after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro failed to deliver a real global compact. The idea was to create some sort of standard for sustainably-harvested timber to at least give the good guys a boost. It’s based on ten principles that stakeholders agreed would make it possible to extract valuable trees without destroying the forest, as well as auditing procedures to make sure the practices were being followed, and then labeling, so consumers would know the difference – and, hopefully pay extra for the good stuff. Indigenous Constitutions At this was happening, indigenous people all across the Amazon were creating so-called Life Plans, or Planes de Vida, which are something like indigenous constitutions. “The Life Plan is a document, or an exercise, that sets out our vision of where we want to go and helps us understand how to get there,” says Lopez. “FSC certification became one of the pillars of our Life Plan, because it was a way that we could improve productivity while saving the forest. We also included rubber tapping and conservation.” The Sustainable District It helps that Bélgica is located in the district of Tahuamanu, which is something of a sustainability success story, thanks in part to the Cardozo family. Three brothers and a sister, their parents settled here in the 1950s and become major landowners and political leaders, as well as proponents of sustainable development. Alfonso Cardozo is the mayor of Iñapari, the district capital, and he lobbied to prioritize granting of concessions for groups that embrace FSC certification. It was he and his brother, Abraham, who persuaded the people of Bélgica to join FSC, and it was one of their companies that helped the Bélgicans create and execute the sustainable logging plan needed to earn FSC certification. That meant meeting the FSC’s ten principles – ranging from hiring comuneros, or members of the community, to meeting ever-evolving standards for good land management and equitable community relations. Lopez, however, says the Cardozos charged too much for their services, so the Bélgica ruling council switched to a second company, and then a third. Today, says Lopez, the people of Bélgica get 80 percent of the income on timber sold from the territory, and the current partner, a company called MADERYJA, has never missed a payment or been late. FSC Impacts Seventy percent of Peru’s certified concessions are located in Tahuamanu, and the neighboring concession of Maderacre, in which the Cardozos also held an interest, is also FSC-certified – and more accessible by jeep than Bélgica’s. It spreads out over 220,000 hectares, divided into 20 plots of 11,000 hectares each, and the company works just one plot per year, so there are 20 years between harvests. The concession was cobbled together by a businessman named Erasmo Wong, who made a fortune building up Peru's largest chain of supermarkets before selling the company and devoting his life to philanthropy and sustainable agriculture. Environmental NGO WWF has been working with Maderacre to monitor the impact of its operations on wildlife, and Josefina Braña, who runs WWF’s Forest and Climate Program, says the early indications are promising. “The jaguar population is thriving, and we’ve seen monkeys, tapirs, birds, agouti, ant-eaters, and sloths,” she says. “Biodiversity is thriving because of the reduced-impact logging they use.” Reduced Impact Logging The company uses drones to first identify valuable trees, then it sends out teams to survey the area from the ground.    “We use drones to identify the trees that are tall and thick enough to chop,” says Fermin Zapana Pilco, who oversees all extractive activities in the concession. “Then we map out routes to them, and finally we send out teams to see if the tree we want to chop will hurt other trees when it falls.” The trees and patches of forest are separated into different categories: some are classified as high-conservation value (HCV), which is an official designation developed by the Forest Stewardship Council in 1999, meaning they're not to be destroyed. “Some will also just be immature,” says Pilco. “That means they’re too small to harvest, so we leave these for when we return to this plot in 20 years.” If there are seedlings or high-conservation trees near a tree they’re targeting, they map out a way to cut the tree so it falls where no seedlings or high-conservation trees are, but if that's not possible, they make a note of that and move on to the next tree. “It costs us about 35 percent more to do FSC certification, as opposed to just doing what the law requires,” says Kroll. “But the market doesn't really pay a premium – or, if it does, it's 5 percent at most. Reduced Waste We come to a massive mahogany that's passed all the criteria: it's about 70 years old, two meters in diameter – six and a half meters around, but wider at the base, and 30 meters, or about 10 stories, high. It branches out about 18 meters up, so only the first six stories can be used for wood. Put another way, it's 40 tons of biomass, which means 20 tons of carbon, which will become 73 tons of carbon dioxide if the tree burns or decays and mixes with oxygen in the air. That's 14-times as much greenhouse gas as the average passenger car emits in a whole year of driving.  About 40 percent of the tree will end up in flooring and furniture, which locks up 30 tons of that carbon dioxide, but what about the other 44 tons? That's almost nine cars' worth. “Some of it will be used as biofuel for our ovens,” says Nelson Kroll, Madeacre's forestry manager. “We use those to dry out the trees, but we're also working on a deal with a local farm, which wants to use it for mulch and compost.” A Natural Climate Solution That's good for the climate, because healthy soils absorb carbon, as well as nitrogen and hydrogen, and they reduce levels of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane, three powerful greenhouse gasses. A landmark study published in 2016 showed that we can get 37 percent of the way to meeting the Paris Agreement's 2-degree target just by improving the way we manage forests, farms, and fields. That study, called "Natural Climate Solutions" identified 20 specific pathways do doing that – one of which is sustainable forest management, which is what FSC is all about, and another of which is improving soils. These natural climate solutions deliver more than one-third of the mitigation needed to meet the climate challenge, but they get just 3 percent of dedicated climate finance and 1 percent of climate-related media coverage. The tree spreads out at the base, like a duck's foot, and the worker injects his saw into the base vertically, straight up and down, building kind of a wall of wood on three sides of the foot, so these 40 tons will fall where he wants them to. After it lands, workers begin chopping in and marking it with alphanumeric codes to identify the tree according to the forest inventory, the section of the tree, the date it was chopped, and of course the concession. Traceability and Legality The concession began marking the trees to meet FSC traceability requirements, but traceability has become a legal requirement, too, because the European Union and the United States have both banned the import of illegally-harvested timber. As a result, exporters are supposed to trace their timber to legally-sanctioned concessions. That doesn’t, however, always happen. A 2014 analysis by Ecosystem Marketplace publisher Forest Trends, for example, dissected tropical deforestation from 2001 through 2012 and found that roughly 49 percent of all agriculture-related tropical deforestation in that period took place illegally, and roughly half of that illegally-harvested timber was exported. That same year, a global coalition of governments, corporations, NGOs, and Indigenous Peoples’ organizations endorsed the New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF), which is a pledge to end forest loss by 2030. The NYDF is broken into ten goals, with #10 being improved forest governance. Today, a coalition of environmental think tanks called NYDF Assessment Partners, of which Forest Trends is a member, published updated findings on progress towards Goal #10 and found that not much has changed. Specifically, the report, called “Improving Governance to Protect Forests”, finds that law enforcement has improved slightly since 2014, especially on the demand side, and that traceability has also improved, but that average deforestation rates increased 42 percent since the NYDF was signed. Countries like Peru, which has a sketchy history on this front, are trying to protect exports by improving enforcement – although the effectiveness of that is limited, too, because countries like China don't put much effort into verifying legality of imports. “There can be no effective global approach without the support and participation of China, the world’s largest importer of timber and exporter of forest products,” says Kerstin Canby, Director of the Forest Trends Forest Policy, Trade, and Finance Initiative. “We are, however, seeing some improvement in enforcement of the European Union Timber Regulation,” she added. “By mid-2018, for example, EU Member States have implemented 17,735 checks on domestic timber, and they implemented 2,704 checks on imported timber in 2017, while more than 992 penalties have been assessed, and 21 cases went to court.” If every forestry concession on the planet worked the way these two do, we'd have a fighting chance of meeting the climate challenge, but the district of Tahuamanu is an outlier, with a government willing to promote sustainable forestry and a citizenry willing to embrace it.  

Jos Cozijnsen shakes his tangled black mane and adjusts his leathery blue suit – fashioned, it turns out, from overalls discarded by German railroad workers and available through his sustainable clothing company, Goodfibrations. “[If you have] an office park, the Building Act says how much energy efficiency you need,” he explains. “But if you go to zero energy use, you do much more.” When it comes to fixing the climate mess, he wants everyone to do much more than the law requires, especially his fellow Dutchmen. Indeed, it seems to bother him immensely that here in the Netherlands – the birthplace of wind energy and the headquarters of Greenpeace – the average Dutchman contributes far more to climate change than does the average Swede, Swiss, or Frenchman. But the Dutch are also notorious penny-pinchers with fervent pride in their local communities and a deep love of games and puzzles – three traits that he thinks will help them drive emissions down dramatically under a nationwide voluntary carbon program called the Green Deal, which he’s spearheading along with the Ministry of Environment and several environmental NGOs. The program has been in the works since mid-2016, and it’s slated to go live later this year as a compliment to the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). EU ETS is a “compliance” program that legally caps greenhouse-gas emissions on some of Europe’s biggest industries – including electricity, paper, and steelmaking. It requires companies in those sectors to either reduce their emissions or buy offsets from projects that do, but it also leaves more than half of all emissions outside the regulatory apparatus. The Green Deal is a “voluntary” program, he says, and its goal is to dramatically drive down emissions in un-capped sectors like agriculture and automotive, and to do so by encouraging people to develop carbon projects under existing standards like the Verified Carbon Standard, CarbonFix, and the Gold Standard. The project will encourage un-capped companies and individuals to first reduce emissions by reducing energy use and becoming more efficient, but it will couple that by promoting home-grown projects that generate offsets by planting trees or helping farmers reduce their emissions from methane and other greenhouse gasses. It will include a hub so people can see which type of projects are located where, and it will encourage groups to aim for zero net emissions. “That’s the fun,” he says. “I can go to zero!” Like coupon-collectors? I ask. “Exactly!” he says. Transitioning to a Post-Paris World While Cozijnsen publicly emphasizes the “fun” aspect of getting to zero (and becoming, he says, a “carbon hero”), the Green Deal could drive millions into sustainable development projects, and it comes two years after a Dutch court ruled that the government is legally obligated to slash emissions 25 percent before the Paris Climate Agreement comes into effect in 2020. Cozijnsen, who long represented the Netherlands in global climate talks, sees the Green Deal as a way for the government to meet its pre-2020 obligation, and for companies to prepare for a post-2020 regime, when all sectors will presumably be capped. Domestic Buying Power Dutch companies and NGOs are already active in both the voluntary and compliance markets. They transact millions of carbon offsets per year, but that money usually goes abroad – to save and restore forests around the world, according to an analysis of European voluntary carbon markets that Ecosystem Marketplace and EcoStar Natual Talents published last year. Specifically, the report found, companies and NGOs based in the Netherlands transacted 4.4 million carbon offsets in 2015 alone, helping to build wind farms and save or restore forests across nine countries – from Indonesia and Brazil to Turkey and Uganda. One country missing from the list: the Netherlands itself, and it’s not alone. The report also found no active land-based projects in France, Spain, or Switzerland, and only a few in Germany, the UK, and Italy. The German Ministry of Environment has been supporting efforts to develop voluntary carbon programs domestically, and Cozijnsen says similar efforts are underway across the European Union.

 Towards the end of summer, climate negotiators learned of three trademark applications that were filed in May of this year. One was for the logo “REDDPLUSX”, which is described as a carbon credit brokerage. Another was for the logo “RRU”, which are proposed carbon credits generated by saving or supporting forests under the Paris Agreement. But it was the third, for the logo REDD+, that raised eyebrows across the climate community. It raised those eyebrows because scores of organizations already use the acronym “REDD+” to describe activities that reduce greenhouse gasses by saving or reviving endangered forests. The acronym is generally spelled out as “‘reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks”, and it describes as set of mechanisms that generate “reduction units”, which might one day be worth billions of dollars as the world implements the Paris Climate Agreement. The trademark applications were filed by the Coalition for Rainforest Nations (CfRN), which is a New-York-based entity that promotes forest-carbon initiatives in roughly two dozen countries, and the applications came to light just as one of those countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), proposed a new “Gateway” for handling REDD+ Reduction Units – which, not coincidentally, is what “RRU” stands for. CfRN executive director Kevin Conrad says he’s just trying to provide clarity in a process that often seems chaotic, but critics say the proposals replicate mechanisms that are already on the table, and some see an effort to control a process that’s designed to be open and inclusive. Whatever the motives for their creation, the proposals offer insight into the issues being negotiated here in Bonn, so let’s take a quick look. Who Uses the REDD+ Acronym? REDD+ began as an experiment in 1988, when US electric company Applied Energy Services (AES) wanted to see if it could reduce its carbon footprint by helping poor farmers in Guatemala manage their land more sustainably (for the full story, see “REDD Dawn: The Birth Of Forest Carbon”). The acronym then was “AD”, for “avoided deforestation”, and the concept evolved over the decades as NGOs continued to experiment with the science. Eventually, the phrase shifted to “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation”, then to “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation”, and finally to one that includes a broader range of land-use activities. At the same time, standard-setting bodies like the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) and the American Carbon Registry emerged to provide ways of generating carbon offsets by determining which forests were endangered and which procedures can be used to save them. Within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), however, REDD remained on ice until 2005, when Conrad, as lead negotiator for Papua New Guinea, wrangled it back onto the agenda at Climate Talks in Montreal (COP 11). At the 2013 climate talks in Warsaw, the UNFCCC agreed on the Warsaw Framework for REDD+, which is a cluster of agreements on how to develop REDD+ programs at a national or sub-national level and pay for results. That rulebook was enshrined in the Paris Agreement – which, by the way, rarely uses the acronym but instead spells it out in most cases. The acronym is, however, used by carbon standards like VCS and Plan Vivo, as well as by sub-national governments like those of the US state of California and the Mexican state of Chiapas – and that, says Conrad, is a problem. Shades of REDD In an interview for the Bionic Planet Podcast, scheduled to be posted today, Conrad said that REDD+ should only be used to describe programs that are embedded into national carbon accounting initiatives under the Paris Agreement. “The REDD+ description under the UNFCC is that you have to have a national plan, you have to have a national monitoring system, you have to have a reference level, you have to write a report of your safeguards, and then you submit your results, and those results have to be independently reviewed by the UNFCCC itself, and then once it goes through that process, emission reductions are issued and put on the REDD+ Hub,” he said. “None of these project have gone through that process, which means they shouldn’t be calling themselves REDD+ projects.” Currently, REDD+ offsets – meaning emission-reduction units that can be purchased by non-state actors to offset emissions – only exist in the voluntary and regional markets, although voluntary standards are increasingly being embedded in national accounting programs. Outside of the climate arena, people do often confuse voluntary markets, regional compliance markets, and the overarching UNCCC. It’s common to see voluntary REDD programs described in the media as having been developed under the UN process, when in fact they were developed in parallel, but with an eye on eventually converging. The Mexican state of Chiapas added to the confusion a few years back when it used the acronym to describe a program that funneled auto usage fees into conservation. All forest-carbon programs are built on scientific guidelines established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and voluntary programs are increasingly being used to fund conservation in Latin America, the Caribbean region, and Africa, according to a regional analysis of voluntary carbon markets that Ecosystem Marketplace published last month. A separate report focused on buyers of voluntary offsets. It found that companies purchase forest-carbon offsets as much for their knock-on social benefits as for their conservation values. As projects and national accounting systems evolve, most of these disparate programs hope to become “nested” within the national framework, and Conrad says buyers will need more clarity to know which are and are not nested. He bristles at accusations by some that the CfRN was trying to corner the term to earn licensing fees. “So, the idea is to have an official REDD+ logo or mark, that all REDD+ governments can use for free,” he wrote in an open e-mail to members of the REDD+ Working Group on October 24. “This is to help the market-place determine what is real REDD+ and to distinguish it from the ‘pretenders.’” Other negotiators cried “foul”, and pointed out that existing standards are working with governments to embed their offsets in national accounting systems, and that the UNFCCC, by design, only sets accounting guidelines, and is not meant to act as a standard. “REDD+ was developed through the UN’s negotiations, which included all the parties to the Convention, and it’s being used around the world by governments, by UN organizations, by civil society, by indigenous peoples,” said Peter Graham, a longtime negotiator for Canada who is now with a consultancy called Climate Advisors. “You have to ask yourself why a private entity based in Manhattan would try to create a trademark of what I would see as a global public good,” he said, adding: “That same group is proposing a mechanism through another process going on in other rooms, talking about creating a body or entity that would, in effect, control finance for REDD+.” That entity, officially called the “Gateway to Encourage, Measure, Report, Verify and Account for Non-Party Contributions” was submitted by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Dominican Republic, Kenya, Mozambique, Panama, Papua New Guinea, and Uganda. Most negotiators say it will probably not become an agenda item in formal talks, but could become a topic in ongoing informal talks happening on the fringes. What Does the Gateway do? The Paris agreement doesn’t explicitly mention carbon markets at all, but instead assumes that countries will develop them domestically. The Agreement’s contribution is to recognize this and to say that countries can trade “Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes” (ITMOs) among themselves to deepen the targets they’ve set in their Nationally-Determined Contributions (NDCs). (For a deep dive, see “Building On Paris, Countries Assemble The Carbon Markets Of Tomorrow”) Article 6 of the Paris Agreement lays out two paths that countries can use to trade their emission-reductions internationally, and the two paths are not mutually exclusive. The first is the “cooperative” approach, which lets countries coordinate trading among themselves, provided they follow accounting principles that pass muster with the UNFCCC. The second path, championed by Brazil, will be forged within the UNFCCC itself and offer a centralized mechanism for transferring emissions reductions. The Gateway seems to suggest a third way, which Tosi Mpanu Mpanu, DRC’s chief climate negotiator and chair of the CfRN, says will be a UN-sanctioned platform designed to ensure the integrity of emission-reduction units generated by “non-parties”, which are entities that don’t have a seat at the UNFCCC table. They can be cities or states within countries that do have a seat, or they can be companies looking to offset their greenhouse gas emissions. “We’ve realized that in our countries, we often have different private actors that come and implement projects whose quality isn’t clear, whose outcomes are sometimes unfairly distributed,” he said, in an interview that will appear on the Bionic Planet podcast. “For us, is important that we have a platform, a gateway where different nonparties actors can come and report what they do,” he said. “For us, if what they do comes with high level of environmental integrity, high level of rigor, there will be keen of showing what they are doing.” Few delegates believe the Gateway will become an official agenda item, but it can become a “political movement” kicking around “voluntary meetings” that were sanctioned in 2013 to make sure that outside voices were being heard.

Teaser NARRATOR Donuts, deodorant, buns and burgers. They're killing us -- and not just because of what they do to our bodies. No, it's because of what the soy, beef, and palm-oil that they're made of -- and they paper they're packaged in -- do to the environment. More specifically, it's because of the way way we get these commodities -- by chopping or degrading forests -- which is one reason that tropical forests now emit more greenhouse gasses than they absorb, according to a study published last month in the journal Science. But what if I told you we could end this by 2020 -- just two years from now? I'm not saying we can end all deforestation by 2020, but what if I told you we can purge deforestation from these four commodities -- the ones that drive most of the world's deforestation -- by ramping up ten activities that we're already engaged in -- and have been for decades: that these activities are time-tested, and they're lined up like dominoes, ready to be activated? It's like a giant, simmering pot ready to boil. Would you believe me? I hope so, because that's exactly what I'm saying, and it's not just me saying this. It's more than 250 economists, ecologists, and agronomists from around the world, and they're drawing on the experience of environmental NGOand small farming communities from Africa to Asia to Latin America -- as well as the big agribusinesses -- who are, quite frankly, the critical actors in all of this. Today we're looking at these ten activities, how they fit into 100 more that are getting a lot of attention these days -- as well as where they came from, why they work, and how you can learn more about them.   NARRATOR Earth. We broke it. We own it -- and nothing is as it was. Not the trees, not the seas - not the forests, farms, or fields -- and not the global economy that depends on all of these. But we can restore it. Make it better: greener, more resilient, more sustainable. But how? Technology? Geoengineering? Are we doomed to live on a... Bionic Planet? Or is Nature itself the answer? That's the question we address in every episode of Bionic Planet, a podcast of the Anthropocene -- the new epoch defined by man's impact on earth -- and nowhere is that impact more deeply felt than in the forests, farms, and fields that recycle our air and provide our food. Today we're looking at lists: two of them, to be specific. One involves 100 solutions that can not only slow climate change, but end it and even reverse it. The other involves ten activities that can accelerate a cluster of the big 100. In between our examination of these two lists, you're going to have to sit through a little history class -- because you won't understand where we're at or where we're going if you don't understand where we came from and how we got here. Act I NARRATOR I'm opening today's show with a book review of sorts -- a very short one like the ones that Sister Mary Ann used to ask us to deliver in her English class at Christ the King school in Chicago. It compares and contrasts two best-sellers related to Climate Change. One is called "Drawdown", and it's a recipe book of sorts... for saving the planet. I love this book. The other is called "This Changes Everything", and it's a mess. I hate it -- even though it's more entertaining than the first. What I love about Drawdown, which is edited by environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken, is that it focuses on concrete, doable ways of fixing the mess. Specifically, it summarizes 100 solutions that can not only slow climate change, but -- cumulatively -- end it and even reverse it. Of these 100, 80 already exist and are even being implemented, while 20 are listed as "coming attractions". He categorizes about a quarter of the solutions under either "food" or "land use", and they include things like green agriculture, forest protection, and indigenous peoples' land management -- all of which I cover in this podcast What I hate about "This Changes Everything" is that it's shrill, sloppy, and dismissive of workable solutions. Its basic story arc is this: "Gee, I just realized this climate stuff is serious, and so I spent a year or so investigating it, and I found that all of the so-called solutions out there only fix part of the problem... none of the fix the whole thing. We need something radical! A total reset of human nature! And I'm just the person to tell you how to do it, and it involves the post office." On the one hand, in writing the book, Naomi Klein sounded the alarm, which is great, and she even pointed out that we need to radically alter the way we run our economy... which is true... but then she dismisses anything that isn't a magic bullet like the ones that kills vampires... or is it warewolves? Anyway... and either way, she ends up floating a solution that's just as imaginary as those two creatures, while not just ignoring but actively dissing and dismissing solutions like the ones that Hawken highlights in his book  Now, I get the Daniel Burnham aspect of this -- he's the Chicago architect who said, and I quote, "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized." So, I can see why Klein -- and, in fact, most mainstream writers -- steer clear of wonky, tedious solutions. They're boring. But our job as reporters isn't just to entertain. It's to act as a kind of scout... going out into the wilderness, seeing what's happening there -- what the threats are, how to avoid them... and then reporting back in a way that clear and concise. I'm excited about Drawdown for two reasons: first, because it achieves this, and second, because it's become a best-seller -- and it should, because these wonky, tedious solutions aren't little. Each is massive in its own right, and Drawdown looks at 100 of them. What's more, the book's goal isn't just to slow climate change, but to actually end it and reverse it. If that doesn't stir your heart, I don't know what will -- and on that note, I'd to share with you the second half of that quote, which we almost never hear. "Make big plans," he says. "Aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty." Nothing there about being simple and pithy, and the emerging solutions to the climate challenge are not always simple, but they are noble, logical, orderly, and beautiful. The Paris Agreement, for example, is a masterwork of diplomacy -- a massive mosaic of thousands of smaller agreements that respect every country and culture on the planet. Likewise, the solutions I'll be examining today emerge from diverse sectors and societies, yet they all fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, and they're also integral to the success of the Paris Agreement. I'm focusing mostly on the corporate sector, because that's where we need to focus our attention if we're going to fix this mess. The ten solutions we'll be examining in the final segment come from Tropical Forest Alliance 2020. But what is Tropical Forest Alliance 2020, and how does it influence corporate activities?  Act 2 Marco Albani We're basically a platform for private-public collaboration NARRATOR That's Marco Albani who runs Tropical Forest Alliance 2020.  MARCO ALBANI Created by US government and CGF MUSIC: Zydeco NARRATOR We're going to be focusing on two organizations today, and the Consumer Goods Forum is one of them. It's a coalition of CEOs and top managers from more than 400 retailers, manufacturers, and service providers in 70 countries. It coalesced in 2009, but traces its origin to the aftermath of World War I, when French food merchants were beginning to engage in international commerce again, and needed to know that they were getting good stuff. But they soon learned that the "war to end all wars" achieved nothing of the kind, and it wasn't until 1953 that the International Committee of Food Chains was born. This was a commercial enterprise focused on making sure farmers in far-away places were delivering good food to merchants and shopkeepers closer to home, but the parameters of quality control gradually expanded to include labor conditions and environmental impact. By the 1990s, environmental pressure groups had forced the creation of certification standards for the sustainable production of palm oil and timber & pulp, while other industry groups emerged to promote general food safety. Then, in 2009, just as climate negotiators were gathering for year-end talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, three of these industry groups -- the Global Commerce Initiative, the Global CEO Forum, and the International Committee of Food Chains -- merged into the Consumer Goods Forum, which is dedicated to promoting fair labor and environmental practices among companies whose sales add up to $3.5 trillion per year. Now, I'm not so naive as to believe that these companies are all selfless and beneficent. In fact, I even think many of them are selfish and sociopathic, as legal scholar Joel Bakan maintains. But there are ways of changing that, and these multilateral organizations are one. In fact, research from the Forest Trends Supply Change initiative shows companies that belong to organizations like the Consumer Goods Forum not only make more environmental commitments than companies that don't, but they're also much better at reporting progress towards delivering on those commitments, which is why this matters: MARCO ALBANI 2010 GCF Resolution NARRATOR Beef, soy, palm oil, and pulp & paper. There they are again -- the big four commodities responsible for most of the world's deforestation, because farmers around the world are chopping forests to grow them. So it's a pretty big deal when 400 companies line up behind a specific pledge to end that.  But, of course, it doesn't end there. Just as the Kyoto Protocol showed us that government can't do this on its own, common sense tells us that the global, profit-driven corporate sector isn't going to fix our problems on its own, either, despite what free-market fundamentalists like to believe. We need government, we need NGOs, we need indigenous groups... we need them all working together. So, in 2012, the Consumer Goods Forum and the US government launched the group we're primarily focusing on today: Tropical Forest Alliance 2020 -- or TFA 2020 -- to get all these sectors working towards the goal of changing the way we produce the big four deforestation commodities, so that by the year 2020 we no longer chop forests to do so. MARCO ALBANI And since then grown... more than 400 partners... business, producers to consumers. MUSIC: zydeco? NARRATOR So, you've got the Consumer Goods Forum representing business, and you've got Tropical Forest Alliance 2020 -- or TFA 2020 -- representing all of these diverse interests. Then, in 2014, as climate negotiators were gearing up for the Lima talks, things get serious. UN General Secretary Ban Ki Moon holds a massive rally in New York designed to turbocharge TFA 2020's mission. The result is the New York Declaration on Forests, which is a pledge to cut the global rate of deforestation in half by 2020, and to end deforestation by 2030 while restoring hundreds of millions of acres of degraded land. The pledge is endorsed by 36 national governments,  20 sub-national governments -- meaning states and cities -- 15 indigenous organizations, 53 environmental NGOs, and 52 multinational corporations. The list of companies is interesting: it includes traditional good actors like Danone, Unilever, and Kellogg's -- but also companies with a reputation for doing the wrong thing, like Asia Pulp and Paper -- a longtime environmental pariah once known for grinding pristine forest into pulp. Dewi Bramono turn story around NARRATOR That's Dewi Bramono, Asia Pulp and Paper's Director of Sustainability and Stakeholder Engagement, who we'll hear from later in the show. Most of the audio in today's show comes from an event that Forest Trends hosted in September during New York Climate Week, and Dewi Bramono's presence in that room is proof that companies can change. The New York Declaration on Forests is a big deal, because you got all of these companies publicly committing to tackle deforestation, and the declaration isn't just a simple statement, but is actually 10 specific goals that -- like all of those 100 solutions in Drawdown -- feed on and reinforce each other. The challenge is holding these companies to their word. MUSIC: ends Now we come to 2015: you've got these two global networks and this very public commitment -- how do you turn this into action? In part by getting everyone on the same page, so the governments of the UK and Norway ramped up funding for TFA 2020, and the World Economic Forum essentially adopted it -- giving it a place to live in Switzerland. That same year, the organization I work for -- Forest Trends -- launched the Supply Change initiative -- that's Supply-Change.org -- to track not just corporate commitments, but the progress that companies report, and you may have noticed I use them as a resource quite a lot. Now we come to last year -- 2016. You've got all of these commitments and all of this transparency, and TFA 2020 needed to pull it all together so we could see how far we were from the goal. They asked a dozen leading NGOs to help out, and they put a research-oriented group called Climate Focus in charge. Then, at last year's climate talks in Marrakesh, they published two reports: one focused on progress towards all ten of the goals outlined in the New York Declaration on Forests, and one focused exclusively on Goal Number Two, which says that, by 2020, we will no longer be chopping forests to produce the big four deforestation commodities. MUSIC: End zydeco MARCO ALBANI Goal Two Assessment - 1 NARRATOR Specifically, it's a mixed bag. Using Supply Change data on almost 700 companies, they found less than half of the companies that had made commitments were actually disclosing progress -- although those that did report progress were usually on track to meet their goals. They also found huge variance from company to company -- meaning some great success stories, some shining examples, and a lot of lessons-learned.  MARCO ALBANI Goal Two Assessment - 2 NARRATOR It's crunch-time, and we need to very quickly harvest the lessons of the last eight years to see what works and what doesn't. Then we need to scale up what works, and do it fast. So Tropical Forest Alliance 2020 called in "Climate Focus". They're the research-oriented NGO that led the creation of the two earlier assessments. CHARLOTTE STRECK We started with the New York Declaration NARRATOR That's Charlotte Streck, who runs Climate Focus. CHARLOTTE STRECK Then we had a series of workshops... FADE OUT NARRATOR You get the picture. They didn't just pull this out of thin air, but instead they talked to more than 250 organizations, put their findings out for review, adjusted them, and finally presented them in New York. SOUND: fade charlotte back in MUSIC: pensive NARRATOR So, let's pause again to get our bearings. We started with 100 activities that can reverse climate change, and we dove into one of them: ending deforestation, which we realized is part of a cluster of activities related to land-use and agriculture. We in turn found that this cluster was broken into ten specific goals of its own, enshrined in the New York Declaration on Forests. Then we dove into one of those ten goals -- Goal Number Two, the most immediate one: purging deforestation from the big four commodities by the year 2020 -- and we found it's doable. And now, after diving down to this one goal... we're going to open things up again... to look at the ten priority areas that can help us achieve the goal of purging deforestation from these four key commodities in just two years, which will in turn help us achieve the other 9 goals in the New York Declaration on Forests, which will in turn help us achieve a few dozen of the 100 activities that will help us reverse climate change. MUSIC: END NARRATOR Before we move on, some key points. First: Charlotte Streck This is not a step-wise approach NARRATOR And also, if we do achieve the 2020 goal, the game isn't over.  , MARCO ALBANI Need to keep long-term MUSIC: ?? NARRATOR I'm about to unveil the ten priority areas, but first I have a question for you: do you like this show? If so, would you like more episodes -- maybe better produced to boot? With a second set of ears and more time for editing? You can make that possible by giving me a good rating on iTunes or wherever you access the show; you can tell friends about me. Or, best of all, you can become a patron at bionic-planet.com I've set the patronage page up so you can support me per episode, but with a monthly cap. So, if you think $5 per month is good for a five-episode month, you can pledge $1 per episode, but with a $5 monthly cap. That way, if I don't manage to generate five episodes in a month, you're not paying for something you didn't get, and if I go nuts and deliver 20 episodes one month, you won't get whacked, either. By the same token, you can offer $5 per episode... or 10 or 50 or whatever.  I'm sitting on a ton of material -- Interviews and audio I gathered as far back as June -- and I'm itching to share it with you in ways that make sense. But I've got a day job, and I've got to pay the bills, too, and I'm not even close to breaking even on the podcast. I like the idea of being listener supported, but am also open to big sponsors, advertisers, or investors to cover my costs, hire some help, and scale this up. The web site, again, is bionic-planet.com, or you can e-mail me at steve@bionic-planet.com MUSIC: end music Act 3 SOUND: drumroll NARRATOR And now, the moment you've all been waiting for. The ten priority areas for purging deforestation from the supply chains of the big four deforestation commodities by the year 2020. Beginning with  SOUND: gong CHARLOTTE STRECK point 1 NARRATOR So, what does this mean? I'll let Michael Jenkins explain it. He runs Forest Trends, which means he signs my checks... but I think the group does good work, too, which is why I work for them. Michael Jenkins Forest Trends Illegality Report 1 NARRATOR He means illegal conversion of forests to farms or fields. MICHAEL JENKINS Forest Trends Illegality Report 2 NARRATOR Let that sink in for a moment. In fact, let's hear it again. MICHAEL JENKINS Forest Trends Illegality Report echo NARRATOR So, while we do need better legal frameworks, we also need to enforce the laws already on the books -- as Brazil showed when it slashed deforestation 70 percent between 2004 and 2014. If you listened to Episode 20, you heard how good-acting companies can also support enforcement -- something Charlotte also alluded to. CHARLOTTE STRECK companies can help NARRATOR Companies that are good with the law can also boost their bottom line by building up trust with importers abroad -- as Asia Pulp and Paper is doing in Indonesia. DEWI BRAMONO legality NARRATOR It's the right thing to do -- and it certainly can't hurt their status with global buyers. SOUND: drumroll NARRATOR And that brings us to... SOUND: Gong CHARLOTTE STRECK 2- palm certificatin NARRATOR Palm oil is in everything from donuts to soap to after-shave. You probably use it but don't even know it. CHARLOTTE STRECK Palm Oil is one of the main drivers NARRATOR Remember we talked about certification on the start? Supply Change data shows that of the big four commodities, companies are making the most progress in reducing deforestation around two of them: palm oil and timber and pulp -- mostly because we started seeing certification of these back in the 1980s. Today, about 21 percent of palm oil is certified by the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil, or RSPO. The challenge is twofold: getting consumers to pay a premium for this, and extending certification to more forests. CHARLOTTE STRECK We don't have sufficient demand SOUND: drumroll NARRATOR Then comes the next priority SOUND: gong CHARLOTTE STRECK 3 beef intensification NARRATOR "Sustainable intensification of cattle grazing"... that basically means raising more cows on the same piece of land, so that you don't have to keep chopping forests to graze them.  CHARLOTTE STRECK Beef is responsible for more... NARRATOR In episode 7 of Bionic Planet, we saw how Kenyan farmers are using agroforestry to increase milk production -- they plant trees in among their crops to pull nitrogen from the air and infuse it into the soil, and they turn the leaves into silage for their cows. That's just one solution, and there are dozens of them. Ideally, we should all eat less beef, but for now we can reduce the amount of land used to raise the ones we do have. CHARLOTTE STRECK we know that we can SOUND: drumroll SOUND: gong NARRATOR Which brings us to... CHARLOTTE STRECK 4 palm and cocoa intensification NARRATOR Cocoa is not one of the big four, but it's a huge contributor -- and it's mostly produced by small farmers working in cooperatives. CHARLOTTE STRECK More than 30 percent of palm oil and 90 percent of cocoa NARRATOR The report shows that small palm-oil producers can increase their productivity 85 percent without chopping more trees. CHARLOTTE STRECK  These smallholders NARRATOR So, that gets us through three of the big four, plus cocoa -- or cacao, as the threes themselves are called. Ignacio Gavilan what about soy - 1 NARRATOR Yes -- what about soy? That, by the way, is Ignacio Gavilan, Director of Sustainability, for the Consumer Goods Forum. IGNACIO GAVILAN what about soy - 2 SOUND: drumroll NARRATOR And that brings us to... SOUND: gong   CHARLOTTE STRECK 5 sustainable soy NARRATOR Up until 2006, farmers across the Brazilian Amazon were chopping forest like mad to grow soy, but then something changed: Companies like McDonalds -- responding to pressure from groups like Greenpeace -- voluntarily stopped buying soy from Amazon farmers who chop trees to grow the stuff. The soy moratorium is just one example of a successful multilateral effort to fix the climate mess.  CHARLOTTE STRECK it is important NARRATOR Certification programs are ridiculously expensive and notoriously difficult to manage -- I mean, this is really complex stuff. A company like McDonalds buys beef from slaughterhouses like Marfrig or JBM, and those slaughterhouses buy from thousands of small farmers. To really do this right, we have to scale up  SOUND: drumroll NARRATOR And that's where the next priority area comes in SOUND: gong CHARLOTTE STRECK 6 - accelerating implementation of jurisdictional NARRATOR "jurisdictional" means governmental -- it can be federal, it can be state, it can be county, or even city. If you get an entire state like Sabah in Malaysia or California in the United States to make sure it's farmers are producing fruits and veggies in a sustainable way, companies can buy there without spending a fortune to certify each producer individually. CHARLOTTE STRECK we have screened 34 NARRATOR The state of Sabah, in Malaysia, for example, is working with several NGOs that have coalesced into an alliance called "Forever Sabah" Cynthia Ong jurisdictional 1 NARRATOR That's Cynthia Ong, who runs a group called "Land, Empowerment Animals, People" or LEAP. She's also one of Forever Sabah's co-executive directors. CYNTHIA ONG jurisdictional 2 NARRATOR Even big companies like Asia Pulp and Paper have realized they can't access certified material on a large scale one plantation at a time. DEWI BRAMONO landscape jurisdiction NARRATOR There are scores of efforts underway -- the Rainforest Alliance is also doing great work, which you can learn about if you listen to episode 23 -- that episode will have the raw audio from this event without me interjecting every few minutes. It's kind of long, but if this episode sparked your interest, I think you'll find the full event worth listen to. SOUND: drumroll NARRATOR But for now, we move on to... SOUND: Gong CHARLOTTE STRECK 7 - land security and land rights NARRATOR This is another one we've addressed here before: indigenous and traditional communities tend to have a strong connection to their land. Studies have shown they usually -- not always, of course, but usually -- maintain their forest and want to keep it, but their legal rights to the forests are often in limbo. That leaves them vulnerable to speculators, and also less willing to invest too much in the forest CHARLOTTE STRECK Uncertainty of land. NARRATOR Another thing to remember: people in developing countries buy stuff, too SOUND: drumroll NARRATOR Which brings us to: SOUND: gong CHARLOTTE STRECK Goal: Mobilizing demand in emerging markets NARRATOR Remember earlier, when we talked about certification? We learned that 21 percent of all palm oil is certified by the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil, or the RSPO. One reason it's not higher is that people still, for the most part, buy whatever is cheapest, so it's not worthwhile for producers to spend all that money getting certified -- and that's even more so in developing countries. Kavita Prakash-Mani of WWF is working to change that. Kavita Prakash-Mani 21 percent CHARLOTTE STRECK In addition to this: domestic demand NARRATOR We're getting near the end here, folks -- so far, we've talked a lot about producers and consumers, but what about investors? SOUND: drumroll NARRATOR That brings up our next priority area: SOUND: Gong CHARLOTTE STRECK Redirecting Finance NARRATOR This is something we cover a lot on bionic planet, and it's the core of what we cover at Ecosystem Marketplace. Investors are still backing the bad actors, and they'll continue to do so until they realize that environmental bad actors are also financial bad risks -- but they'll only realize that if we all hold the bad actors accountable and support the good ones. We've seen some progress on this front over the past year, with HSBC manning up to some investments that led to deforestation and pulling the plug. You can learn more about that in an article I wrote for Ecosystem Marketplace called "Why HSBC's Recent Response To Greenpeace Really Is A Very Big Deal", and I link to that in show notes for this episode, which is episode 22 at bionic-planet.com. We're also seeing governments like Norway's stepping up with finance for sustainable forest management. Stina Reksten private-sector-capital 1 NARRATOR That's Stina Reksten of Norway's International Climate and Forest Initiative. She's helping to launch a new fund, together with the Global Environment Facility, Unilever, and IDH -- which is a Dutch sustainable trade initiative. STINA REKSTEN private-sector-capital 2 NARRATOR But that's just a sneeze in a hurricane compared to the $55 trillion global economy CHARLOTTE STRECK we have the finance NARRATOR But finance doesn't flow with guidance SOUND: drumroll NARRATOR And that brings us to... SOUND: gong CHARLOTTE STRECK data NARRATOR This is where we come in. I already mentioned Supply Change -- that's supply-change.org -- and we did another episode -- episode 11 -- focused on a platform called TRASE, which lets you trace soybeans from specific municipalities in Brazil to ports around the world. There are plenty of other efforts, and Nicole Pasricha of Rainforest Alliance outlined one that they're participating in. Nicole Pasricha point 10 NARRATOR That might sound boring and wonky, but the whole issue of comparability is critical -- because if you can't compare what different countries, companies, and counties are doing, you can't reject -- or reform -- the bad guys and reward the good Remember Ignacio Gavilan of the Consumer Goods Forum? He pointed out that member firms didn't know how much soy they used. So his group created a solution IGNACIO GAVILAN soy ladder NARRATOR Ignacio Gavilan wrapping up this edition of Bionic Planet -- which is a bit different than most episodes. I usually like to dive deep into an issue, but this time, we kept it pretty high-level. I hope to revisit all of these activities in more detail, and if you think that would be of value, be sure to help me out by sharing Bionic Planet with friends and giving me a good rating on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you access podcasts. You can also help by becoming a patron at bionic-planet.com -- where you can show your appreciation for as little as $1 per month. If today's show sparked your curiosity, be sure to download episode 23 as well. That one will contain the full audio from the Climate Week session that I harvested for this. If you're a paid patron, I will not be charging for episode 23, but rather just uploading that as a public service. Until next time, I'm Steve Zwick in Rotterdam. Thanks for listening!

If you know anything about IKEA Group, the giant Scandinavian furniture company, you know that most of their products are made of wood, and you may even know that they're one of the "good" companies that tries to buy only products that are sustainably harvested. They've pledged that, by 2020, 100 percent of their wood, pulp, and paper will either be recycled or certified by the Forest Stewardship Council as sustainably produced. So far, they're on track to achieve that, according to the Forest Trends Supply Change initiative -- which tracks the progress companies report towards achieving environmental commitments. The Supply Change entry for IKEA shows the company was 61 percent of the way towards achieving its 2020 goal as of March of this year. Two months earlier, my colleague Kelley Hamrick at Ecosystem Marketplace published a report called "State of Private Investment in Conservation 2016", which I was flipping through this morning while researching today's show. In so doing, learned that IKEA has also started investing in forests all across Europe -- explicitly to make sure those forests are managed in ways that serve a larger public good, and in so doing help the company meet its sustainability commitments. As of January, when the report came out, IKEA had purchased about 100,000 hectares of forest in Romania, Bulgaria, and the Baltics, and it had earmarked more than 1 billion more dollars for investing in sustainable forestry. Make no mistake: they're doing this to make money, but do do so in a sustainable way, and that means this qualifies as "impact investing", which is any investment that's designed to generate both a profit and a larger public good. The Global Impact Investing Network has identified more than $30 billion of impact investments in the last three years, and Kelley's report, which I alluded to above, identified about $8 billion earmarked for impact investments specifically involving forests, farms, and fields -- all of which need to be better managed if our civilization is to survive the climate challenge. Now, $8 billion is nothing to sneeze at, but it really is just a sneeze in a hurricane compared to the $55 trillion global economy. What's more, on top of that $8 billion, another $5 billion was allocated, but went uninvested. Today we speak with Noelle-Claire LeCann and Richard Fronapfel, who run impact investment group AlphaSource Advisors and see big opportunities for people who want to make money by helping the world better manage its forests, farms, and fields in the Anthropocene

Our show today starts with two French communes -- namely, Contrexéville and Vittel -- because these two have some of the cleanest, purest water in all of Europe, but they also almost didn't. Up until 1992, the farms here -- like those across Europe and around the world -- had been dribbling pesticide and cow poop into the water, while home-owners and businessmen had been doing the same for crude oil and other pollutants. But then the communes undertook a massive environmental overhaul. Farmers started getting rid of their cows and weaning themselves off of pesticides by rotating their crops in ways that didn't give bugs a chance. Home-owners and businesses started digging up their oil tanks and replacing them with natural gas installations. Today, more than 90 percent of the land in both communes is under some sort of environmental protection. But this overhaul wasn't led by environmental regulators. It was led by a private company with a very clear incentive. The company was Swiss food giant -- and perpetual water bad boy -- Nestlé, and its incentive was the fact that its lucrative Vittel, Contrex and épar mineral waters were only lucrative because they're certified as "natural". To keep that certification, they had to clean up the rivers that feed the aquifer that in turn feeds the springs that the waters gurgle up from. The stakes were high enough – and the incentive strong enough – that Nestlé created a separate consultancy called Agrivair and spent more than €24.5 million throughout the 1990s “to design a system to either compensate farmers for their change in practice, or acquire the land and lease it for free under conditions targeting groundwater protection,” according to a new report called “State of European Markets 2017: Watershed Investments”. The report is one of three market outlooks that the Forest Trends initiative Ecosystem Marketplace created to support a cluster of new online university courses launched by green businesses accelerator ECOSTAR to help organic farmers, watershed managers and other “green entrepreneurs” better understand the business elements of their respective missions. The ecosystem services e-learning course will run from October to December, and the application deadline is September, 30th. You can learn more at ecostarhub.com/e-learning-course. The Agrivair project still pays farmers an average of €200 per hectare to keep things green, and it’s one of more than a dozen “payments for ecosystem services” (PES) programs highlighted in the three reports. Lead author Genevieve Bennett, a Senior Associate at Ecosystem Marketplace, says the project illustrates the ability of companies to provide resources when properly incentivized. She adds, however, that private and public interests rarely line up so neatly, and that such projects work best within a well-structured regulatory environment. “You don’t really want a private company taking a lead on decisions about water resources management in your basin,” she says in an extensive, 45-minute interview that will run on episode 19 of the Bionic Planet podcast, which is set to be posted on Monday, 17 July. “That’s a public issue…but where there is a seat for the private sector at the table is contributing resources: if you’re a beverage company and you’re concerned about clean water and you want to kick in some funding to help pay for that…that’s a positive thing.”

It's been almost a year since a Swiss engineer/businessman named André Borschberg and a Swiss psychiatrist/balloonist named Bertrand Piccard completed the first-ever around the world flight in a solar-powered airplane -- the Solar Impulse 2, a machine that could, theoretically, fly forever without every pausing to refuel. But this wasn't just an adventure. It was a mission to show that we can meet the climate challenge, and it's a mission that Bertrand Piccard is still continuing.  I ran into him in late May at the Innovate4Climate Summit in Barcelona, where he launched something called the World Alliance for Efficient Solutions, which aims to identify and fund 1000 profitable climate-change solutions by the end of 2018. I'll be adding a complete article from Ecosystem Marketplace to the show notes for Episode 16 at Bionic-Planet.com, so be sure to check back next week. Also, if you want to visit the Alliance's site directly, go to alliance.solarimpulse.com.

With the United Kingdom on the brink of leaving the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS), the United States locked in the inertia of a Donald Trump presidency, and populism stoking fears of slackening commitment to meeting the climate challenge, support for carbon markets is coming from two once-unlikely sources: namely, risk-adverse corporate boards and China, according to the International Emission Trading Association’s (IETA) annual Greenhouse-Gas Market Sentiment survey, which was released last week at the Innovate4Climate conference in Barcelona one day after Ecosystem Marketplace’s latest survey of voluntary carbon market practitioners, Unlocking Potential: State of Voluntary Carbon Markets 2017. The Ecosystem Marketplace report identified transactions for roughly 63 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) last year, including the 1 billionth metric ton transacted since the first State of Voluntary Carbon Markets Report in 2006. That represents a 24 percent drop from 2015, in part because two large participants failed to respond to the survey. The total value was $191.3 million, and the report comes as governments around the world begin scaling up mandatory cap-and-trade programs to accelerate emission-reductions under the Paris Climate Agreement. In the past, governments have used voluntary carbon programs to incubate mandatory trading systems like the one currently underway in California. There are currently no plans for such incubation efforts, but the Dutch government recently became the latest government to formally endorse voluntary markets as a way to test new strategies and promote emission-reductions at home. At the same time, some voluntary offset types could be recognized under the aviation industry’s global cap-and-trade program, which kicks in after 2020. The Need for a PR Offensive The IETA report, which is built on a survey of 135 IETA members from across the globe and conducted by PwC, led to calls for a major “PR offensive” to counter populist rhetoric and anti-science propaganda, which reporter Jane Meyer ties to Koch Brothers, Richard Mellon Scaife, John M. Olin, and the DeVos and Coors families in her book “Dark Money“. “The high of seeing the Paris Agreement enter into force last year was tempered by an increase in populist political movements that have pushed climate change down the agenda,” says IETA President and CEO Dirk Forrister. “While the changing political headwinds are cause for concern, we are encouraged by those that are stepping up to lead on climate action. Nationalism and isolationism won’t solve this global problem.” Still, 77% of respondents said that climate change is a board-level priority, and 90% said board-level engagement has either increased or stayed the same in the past year. On the voluntary carbon front, the majority of offsets sold came from programs that save endangered forests using mechanisms collectively known as REDD+ (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, plus other land-use initiatives) and wind projects. Landfill methane projects followed as another top project type. A disturbing 54.4 MtCO2e of offsets went unsold. In addition to the above podcast, Hamrick will appear in two webinars we’re hosting on June 6th and 7th. For more resources and to download the free report, visit this page.

Companion article at ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/voluntary2016/ Hello, and greetings from Cologne, Germany, where we’re wrapping up two intense weeks that began a few dozen kilometers north of us, in the former German capitol of Bonn, where climate negotiators have begun the process of activating the Paris Agreement. Unfortunately, that meant I got swamped, which led to an unplanned two-week hiatus on this podcast, and I do apologize for that – but if you’ve been following Ecosystem Marketplace, you know we haven’t been idle. Yesterday, we released our annual survey of the voluntary carbon markets, which takes stock of what individuals, corporations, and governments have been doing to offset their greenhouse-gas emissions until the Paris Agreement takes effect – which could happen as early as next year.   Earth. We broke it. We own it – and nothing is as it was: not the trees, not the seas, not the forests farms or fields, and not the global economy that depends on all of these. But we can restore it – make it better than it is – more resilient – more sustainable. But how? Technology? Geoengineering? Are we doomed to live on a bionic planet, or is nature itself the answer? That’s the question we explore each week on Bionic Planet, a podcast of the Anthropocene – the new epoch defined by man’s impact on Earth. Today, our focus is voluntary carbon markets. Green-minded companies use them to reduce their carbon footprints by offsetting those greenhouse-gas emissions that they aren’t able to eliminate by, say, re-tooling their factories or switching to renewable energy. Individuals use them as well – often to offset their travel emissions – as do governments. New research from Ecosystem Marketplace shows that these three groups used voluntary carbon markets to reduce emissions by about 84 million tons of carbon dioxide last year alone, but the real story isn’t the volume – which is still too small to change the world – but rather, how those offsets are used in ever-more complex and effective emission-reduction strategies. CLIP: Hamrick That’s my Ecosystem Marketplace colleague Kelley Hamrick, who spent a good chunk of the last six months on the phone with thousands of carbon market participants cobbling together the latest “State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets” report, which is entitled “Raising Ambition” to reflect the ever-increasing emission-reduction targets embedded in the Paris Agreement. You can download the report at ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/voluntary2016/ (repeat) Voluntary carbon markets provide a way for companies to reduce their overall emissions by, say, saving endangered forests, or planting trees, or financing the construction of wind farms. They’re not to be confused with “compliance markets”, which are imposed under a cap-and-trade regime like the one in California. If you heard our two earlier episodes focused on the need to create a price on carbon, you know the goal of such a price is to force companies to reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses they pump into the atmosphere. Voluntary markets are different – they’re not so much an “incentive” as they are an “enabling mechanism” – because companies and individuals that use them aren’t doing so to comply with the law, but to do the right thing. In fact, our research shows that companies that buy offsets are usually also the ones that have already done the most to reduce their emissions internally – and they’re using offsets to get to zero net emissions – or at least try to. Offsetting, in other words, is almost never a stand-alone strategy, but rather one component in a larger, more involved emission-reduction approach. I had a brief chat with Kelley right after she posted the report, and asked her how voluntary offsets usually fit into a company’s emission-reduction program. CLIP: Hamrick   So, who are the buyers? Ultimately, they’re companies that want to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions, but sometimes they’re brokers as well, and they can also be a new breed of consultancy that helps manage emission-reductions. Let’s meet some now. CLIP: Intros Did you hear what he said about price? If you heard our cost of episodes on the need for a price on carbon, you know that 3.3 dollars is nowhere near the “social cost of carbon” –or the  damages that carbon dioxide causes once it’s in the atmosphere. Now, I know what I said before – about voluntary carbon offsets being an enabling mechanism more than an incentive, and that’s true, but one way they enable companies to reduce is to create an “internal price” on carbon – a price companies can use to push greenhouse-gas emissions into the corporate consciousness. That just doesn’t happen at $3.3 per ton, so lots of companies buy low externally and then sell high internally – but that leaves another problem: most emission-reduction projects simply aren’t viable at $3.3 per ton. Now, there are plenty of reasons the price is so low: it’s mostly because prices reflect political will, and political will has been pretty pathetic until last year, but it’s also because the offsets sold last year were created earlier, so there was an oversupply, and it’s because larger transactions can get away with a lower price. Ultimately, however, a price this low just isn’t sustainable – but there’s a sense that will be changing after Paris, in part because there are so many other initiatives underway outside of and tangential to the Paris Agreement. CLIP: William Theisen EcoAct – 1 So – sustainable development goals, science-based targets, and carbon pricing – we’ve covered carbon pricing a bit in our previous editions of Bionic Planet, and we’re far from finished with that rabbit hole, while we’ll be covering the sustainable development goals in the coming week, so if you’re not familiar with them, be sure to subscribe to Bionic Planet or check back soon. CLIP: William Theisen EcoAct – 2 The gist is that more and more companies are responding to demands for carbon neutrality, and while many start out by just offsetting, they soon weave offsetting into a broader emission-reduction strategy. CLIP: William Theisen EcoAct – 3 CLIP: Zubair Music It’s a theme that emerged over and over again at Carbon Expo, but one often lost on most observers and the media: carbon offsetting isn’t a “distraction” as some like to say, and it isn’t a way for companies to “buy their way out” of their obligations. Instead, it’s a tool that helps get companies and customers and suppliers all pointing in the same direction, as Danielle Spiesmann of DHL makes clear. CLIP: Daniele Start DHL’s GoGreen initiative is worthy of an entire program, and if I have the bandwidth to deliver, I will, because it involves a complete restructuring of the company’s transport system, but one that uses carbon offsetting to drive awareness – and it’s hardly an exception. Companies like Unilever, Marks&Spencer, Microsoft, and General Motors have all used voluntary carbon markets to drive down emissions and raise awareness at the same time. CLIP: Daniela 2 Promo That about wraps up today’s show – but we’ll close with a segment we call: Paris We’ll always have Paris, as in the Paris Accord – which was woven throughout today’s program, so rather than do my usual breakdown of some obscure element, I’d like to introduce you to Laurence Tubiana, the French Climate Ambassador who may be the next head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Here is her summary of the two weeks of talks that just wrapped up in Bonn. It’s fairly dense, and if you don’t understand all of it, don’t worry – just keep listening to us, and soon it will all be quite clear. We covered the Bonn talks in a bit more detail at ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/bonn2016/ And, to download your copy of the State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets, visit ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/voluntary2016/

As part of Innovation Forum's global series of events in combating deforestation, we hosted a webinar with Vincent Crasnier, nature director at Danone and Stephen Donofrio, senior advisor – supply change project at Ecosystem Marketplace where they discussed Danone's work on eliminating deforestation.   Danone has committed to eliminate deforestation from its supply chain by 2020, which will require effective cooperation from all along the company's supply chain. Vincent will share his experiences, discuss the company's progress so far, and outline the key challenges – and plans to overcome them – that the company is working on with its partners. This will include work on HCS, HVC, peatlands avoidance and mapping of supplier impacts, FPIC and reporting.

Genevieve Joyce Bennet, Research Analyst at Ecosystem Marketplace, and Katherine Hamilton, Strategic Advisor at Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace discuss the second installment of the ‘State of Watershed Payments’ series, an effort to globally track the size scope and directions of Investments in Watershed Services (IWS) as well as the ecological infrastructure from which they flow.

Kate Hamilton, Carbon Project Manager at Ecosystem Marketplace, and Edwin Aalders, Director of the International Emissions Trading Association, discuss the development of forest carbon credit standards and their role in emerging compliance markets. The speakers detail the specific methods by which forest carbon credits are demonstrated and measured.

Kate Hamilton, Carbon Project Manager at Ecosystem Marketplace, and Edwin Aalders, Director of the International Emissions Trading Association, discuss the development of forest carbon credit standards and their role in emerging compliance markets. The speakers detail the specific methods by which forest carbon credits are demonstrated and measured.

Ecosystem Services. Ricardo Bayon, Managing Editor of Ecosystem Marketplace, and Gretchen C. Daily, author of Nature's Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems. The post Terra Verde – June 25, 2004 appeared first on KPFA.