Bionic Planet: Your Guide To The New Reality

Today we’re going to try and help you understand one of the most vexing components of the climate challenge — namely, the overlapping, interlinking, and contradictory land titles that determine control of so many tropical forests — in this case, the Amazon, the lungs of the planet.  With no clarity over control and no realistic way of enforcing it, there’s no way to sustainably manage and protect this massive bulwark against climate change. Today’s episode centers around a few individuals, most notably a Japan-born physician named Jonas Morioka, who migrated to Brazil in the 1980s, purchased timberland in the 1990s, pivoted to conservation in the 2000s, and is now embroiled in a title fight over a transaction that may or may not have taken place a century ago. His story is far from unique, and it shows how easy it is to chop the forest, how difficult it is to save it, and how tenure disputes make it even more difficult to leverage carbon finance for the common good. My guests are Vinny Maffei and Olivier LeJu

If you seeing these show notes, you're seeing the temporary version. The most relevant link that I mentioned in the show is this one: Will Coverage of Climate Solutions Suffer the Same Fate as Coverage of Climate Science I'll drop more complete notes in on Monday, April 8, early afternoon Chicago time

Tim Mohin wrote “Changing Business from the Inside Out: A Tree-Hugger’s Guide to Working in Corporations” back in 2012, after three decades in sustainability — first in government, with the US Environmental Protection Agency, and then at companies like Intel, where he served as director of sustainable development. He went on to head the Global Reporting Initiative, which administers the GRI standards for sustainability. He recently helped launmch ESG data provider Persefoni and hosts his own podcast, “Sustainability Decoded with Tim and Caitlin.” We look back on 40 years of sustaiability finance and ahead to the future of Environmental, Social, and corporate Governance (ESG) reporting — its potential for driving real change, its prospects for employment, and its inherent limitations.

Remembering the Surui Forest Carbon Project, which was the first indigenous-led REDD project, plus: A conversation with Geoffry Mwangi Wambungu, Chief Research Scientist at the Kasigau REDD Project in Kenya. He explains what social scientists mean by “theory of change,” and tells us why he believes the term “co-benefits” is a misnomer in natural climate solutions. Further reading on the Surui Carbon Project here: https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/story-surui-forest-carbon-project/ Full Transcript (non-scripted portions translated by AI)   CO-BENEFITS VS CORE BENEFITS, WITH GEOFFREY MWANGI Bionic Planet, Season 9, Episode 95 OPENING HOOK STEVE ZWICK Almir Surui was ten years old when the first logging truck came to his tiny village deep in the Amazon Forest. It came to chop a single stand of centuries-old mahoganies, and it came with the grudging approval of the chiefs. After all, they reasoned, it was just one truck, one stand, one time, and for a good cause. The chiefs weren’t the grizzled old me

Dr. Zorodzai Maroveke -- AKA "Dr. Zoey" -- heads the Zimbabwe Industrial Hemp Trust, which is promoting the uptake of industrial hemp as a climate smart alternative to wood, cotton, and plastic. Hemp, she explains, replenishes faster than wood, uses far less water than cotton, and has almost no waste. Its ecological benefits are clear, and she hopes carbon finance can be used to overcome the financial challenges to scaling up. Supplemental Reading: "Commodities at a Glance: Special Issue on Industrial Hemp" https://www.mycannabis.com/cannabis-in-zimbabwe-conversation-with-dr-maroveke/

Zimbabwean entrepreneur Chiyedza Heri runs the Ubuntu Alliance, a company that's helping farmers leverage carbon finance to shift to more sustainable forms of agriculture. She's one of more than a dozen young Africans I met at year-end climate talks in Dubai (COP 28) -- a new breed of entrepreneur that the late Ghanian economist George Ayittey calls "cheetahs" because they're nimble, quick, and hungry. Green Cheetahs pursue activities that are pro-nature as well as pro-growth, and today's guest certainly fits that bill.

With just one full day of negotiations remaining, Pedro Venzon and Andrea Bonzanni of the International Emissions Trading Association summarize the remaining issues under Article 6

Article 6 negotiations, which focus on international carbon markets, remain stalled in Dubai. Kelley Hamrick Malvar of The Nature Conservancy offers a look into the current state of play and the road ahead.

Kenyan agronomist George Thumbi is helping farmers in the region between Tsavo East and Tsavo West improve their yields and their soil by shifting to agroforestry and other forms of sustainable agriculture. 

This piece, adapted from a piece that first ran in 2016, serves as the fourth installment in our continuing series on carbon finance in Kenya. Today, we look at how carbon finance supports Sustainable Agriculture Land Management (SALM), which has doubled the average income of more than 30,000 Kenyan family farmers while pulling more than 1 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by increasing the carbon content of soils. 

In part three of our continuing series from Kenya, we hear how the Chyulu Hills REDD+ Project helped people switch from burning trees for charcoal to conserving forests -- the their benefit and the benefit of us all. 

Evans Maneno is Makueni County Ecosystem Conservator for the Kenya Forestry Service. He walks us through a tree nursery in the Chyulu Hills and explains how the Chyulu Hills REDD+ Project has reversed deforestation by helping people develop sustainable livelihoods -- reviving in the process a threatened river that provides water for people hundreds of miles away.  Second in a series

A decade ago,  the cloud forests of Kenya's Chyulu Hills were on the brink of collapse, threatening water supplies for the Tsavo and Amboseli Plains — and for the coastal City of Mombasa, 250 kilometers away. Then the Kenya Forestry and Wildlife Services teamed up with the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust, the Big Life Foundation, the Sheldrake Wildlife Trust, Conservation International, and, most importantly, grazing collectives, called “community group ranches” to launch the Chyulu Hills REDD+ Project — a thirty-year private-public partnership designed to save the hills by overhauling the rural economy.  The first of two parts

Ghana's cocoa economy is second only to Côte d'Ivoire's, but climate change threatens to decimate it. Today's guest, Roselyn Fosuah Adjei of the Ghana Forestry Commission, is charged with leveraging carbon finance -- and specifically REDD+ -- to avert that disaster. 

A 2021 study of trees in America showed that poor neighborhoods had far fewer trees than wealthier ones, and that translates into higher temperatures, poorer air, and more deaths. Jad Daley of American Forests explains the Tree Equity Score, what it means, and his organization's effort to plant -- and, more importantly, grow -- 522 million trees across American cities.

Jos Cozijnsen has been working the climate puzzle for decades -- first by helping to negotiate the Kyoto Protocol and then by helping NGOs like the Environmental Defense Fund craft legal policies with teeth. Today, he offers his take on the year-end climate talks (COP27), which took place last month in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. We discuss the Bridgetown Initiative, the African Carbon Markets Initiative, and the new Loss and Damage Fund -- as well as the bad-faith arguments of those seeking to undermine carbon markets by pretending to make them perfect.

Under the Paris Climate Agreement, countries must document all of their greenhouse gas emissions and sinks, and that means measuring changes in tree cover. NASA Senior Scientist Sassan Saatchi has spent 30 years helping the world’s space agencies and foresters do just that by blending the newest science of the space age with centuries-old practices from ship-building and forestry. Thanks, to him, countries will soon be able track the growth and decay of every tree within their borders. 

Just over four years ago, Max DuBuisson took on one of the most difficult challenges you can imagine: namely, spearheading the creation of a new carbon methodoilogy undr both the Verified Carbon Standard and the Climate Action Reserve. Dubbed the "Methodology for Improved Agricultural Land Management," it aims to expand the practice of climate-smart agriculture by paying farmers who adopt the practices before their neighbors do. This is the story of the creation of that methodology. Further reading: https://verra.org/methodologies/methodology-for-improved-agricultural-land-management/

Tim Mohin wrote "Changing Business from the Inside Out: A Tree-Hugger's Guide to Working in Corporations" back in 2012, after three decades in sustainability -- first in government, with the US Environmental Protection Agency, and then at companies like Intel, where he served as director of sustainable development. He went on to head the Global Reporting Initiative, which administers the GRI standards for sustainability. He recently helped launmch ESG data provider Persefoni and hosts his own podcast, "Sustainability Decoded with Tim and Caitlin." We look back on 40 years of sustaiability finance and ahead to the future of Environmental, Social, and corporate Governance (ESG) reporting -- its potential for driving real change, its prospects for employment, and its inherent limitations.

On October 2, 2022, the US Supreme court heard a case that could impact the quality of water across the United States. Sackett v EPA dates back to 2004, but the forces impacting the case date back to the 1960s and, arguably, centuries earlier.  Today we revisit a 2019 episode, where we dove deep into the history of the US Clean Water Act and the stealth effort to undermine it.