A Year-end Reflection on my 2021, Transitions and the Road Ahead

The last two years with Gorongosa National Park has been an unbelievable experience working with some of the most passionate and dedicated people on the planet. I could never have imagined that my first step into Mozambique on September 28th, 2012, fresh out of college and embarking on an adventure with the Peace Corps would lead to this experience with Gorongosa.

Conservation and sustainable development is HARD. Nature and community development NGO’s work tirelessly on limited budgets to catalyze green local economies and protect and restore some of the world’s greatest natural treasures. During the last five years Gorongosa has faced war, drought, cyclones, plagues and a global pandemic and yet I see hope on the faces of my colleagues and a determination to keep going, because there is no alternative, there is no Planet B and there is no reason for Mozambicans to live in abject poverty while so many live lives of lavish consumption.

In early 2020, we (Gorongosa Project) started exploring carbon finance because it had the potential to provide funds for our conservation, restoration and sustainable development efforts at scale never before seen. I was tasked with leading this effort. Carbon markets had (and still have) the potential to actually compensate land stewards for the vital value they are providing for all of us on the planet. Carbon markets are incredibly complicated and, while I’d had some exposure when working for the Natural Capital Project in graduate school, it took about six months before we had even somewhat of an understanding of the process and options ahead. From scoping, to understanding national policy and international frameworks, to feasibility studies and financial models, the last couple of years have been a whirlwind of learning and steady progress. Gorongosa is now in a strong position to move forward with a first phase of high quality nature-based projects and I’m incredibly excited to see the partnerships and projects we have been forming come to life in 2022.

Throughout this period of learning with Gorongosa in 2020 and 2021, the more and more that I researched and networked with other nonprofits and community-based organizations, the more I learned how drastically under-informed the vast majority of land stewards are and how many structural inequities were already being baked into carbon markets. Carbon markets and carbon finance have the potential to be one of the greatest opportunities to transfer wealth directly from the Global North to the Global South to pay indigenous communities and land stewards for their vital contributions in combating climate change through natural climate solutions. It has the potential to begin to reverse the centuries of inequities that have led us to the unbalanced and inequitable world that we have today. And it also has the potential to be Colonialism 2.0, with the Global North continuing to take advantage of those who lack power and resources, simply because we can.

The Carbon Cooperative, which began to take shape in March of this year, grew out of the many conversations that I had with other NGOs and community-based organizations who are stewarding some of the most impactful natural climate solutions around the globe. I am a believer in the power of community and the power of networks and the Carbon Cooperative was and continues to be a passion project to bring together land stewards of all shapes and sizes to support each other and begin to create a collective voice to advocate for structuring carbon markets, regulatory systems and finance that is equitable, that puts the power in the hands of land stewards (see a WEF article I recently wrote that goes into much more detail on this).

As we entered into the fall of this year, I found myself more and more drawn towards solving the system problems. I’ve always liked to have one foot on the ground and one foot in the systems-level, and I was beginning to sense that it was time to transition from my full-time focus with a specific project on the ground, Gorongosa, to the systems space. The more time I spent on building the Carbon Cooperative community, the more I learned how much support was needed to help land stewards get access to carbon markets and make sure they were well enough informed to not be taken advantage of. I wanted to create these systemic solutions. I wanted to go out and raise funds and make it all happen. I wanted to launch a non-profit, or a for-profit, but one with a clear mission to put power into the hands of the actors on the ground. But I didn’t.

To be perfectly honest, I’m still not entirely sure why. Part of it was that I don’t like and am not very good at raising funding and didn’t believe I could do it. And part of it was I didn’t want to take the risk. Back in 2018, after I finished grad school and before I started with Gorongosa, I spent a year trying to launch a mental health startup, entirely bootstrapped, and it took a terrible toll on my mental health having to decide whether to try to keep the startup going or pay my rent. And I didn’t want to be in that position again, especially not as I look to start a family in the near future. And, more importantly, while many advisors were telling us that the Carbon Cooperative should be a for-profit to really thrive, that wasn’t how it was conceived and we didn’t think that was the way for it to live. The idea of the Cooperative was groups coming together to share resources and learnings and support each other through a community network. To work together to advocate for shared agendas without us on the founding team having any agenda for the community. We wanted to see what emerged from an organic process of organizations collaborating and that is where we are today. So we decided not to launch, we decided to continue to see what emerges organically. I will continue to lead the Carbon Cooperative as a volunteer and have great hope and anticipation for what is to come out of that network of more than 40 organizations working across the global south on natural climate solutions to make the most of carbon markets.

After coming to a decision on the path forward for the Carbon Cooperative and still feeling the desire to build something to address so many of the systems-level issues I had experienced leading carbon project development for Gorongosa and I’d heard from many other members of the Carbon Cooperative, I came across Earthshot. I’d been a part of the Earthshot slack community for much of last year and was excited by the ideas that were being generated in the community and the potential of open-source science and technology to address many of the issues I’d come up against. And to be very clear, there are also many issues that science and technology cannot solve.

When I learned that the Earthshot team was forming a Public Benefit Corp, Earthshot Labs, alongside a non-profit open-source resource initiative, the Earthshot Institute, I had a few conversations with the founding team to learn more. Earthshot Labs had raised a seed round to attempt to unlock carbon markets for land stewards around the world working on ecosystem protection and restoration and ultimately to catalyze a new segment of the economy and markets based on valuing ecosystem services. Earthshot Labs isn’t the only group working on this problem but they were the group whose internal ethos and mission most resonated with me. And what I like most about Earthshot Labs is that they are not only building technology, they have an operations arm that is working on ecosystem restoration projects in multiple countries across the Global South so that we have one foot on the ground and learning alongside the broader land steward community. I could not be more excited to embark on this next adventure with the Earthshot team.

As we enter 2022, I’ll be wearing three hats. I will continue to work with Gorongosa to support their carbon project development but in an advisory role. I’ll continue to work on building and fostering the Carbon Cooperative community with the group of volunteers leading the initiative. And I’ll be working full-time at Earthshot Labs across partnerships, product development, strategy and operations.

And this is that time in the reflection where I want to recognize all of you. All of us, working to solve these problems. First and foremost, gratitude and deep respect for my colleagues in Mozambique who continue to do the hard work. Your work and the unbelievable challenges you have overcome and continue to overcome every day are my inspiration. For those of us not working on the ground, please let us not take their efforts for granted and we must do a better job to support them with better financial and institutional resources. Second, thank you to the volunteer leadership team for the Carbon Cooperative, brainstorming, ideating and building with you was a true delight. Last, thank you to everyone in the broader natural climate solutions community who have been so willing to share your insights, your knowledge and your wisdom over the last two years. There is an unbelievable community of practice out there and everything I know today, I learned from you.

One final note that I’d like to end on as I enter into the for-profit world for the first time in my career - Nature is not a zero-sum game and neither are natural climate solutions and carbon markets! Competition is healthy and collaborative competition is, I think, even better. We need all hands on deck and instead of trying to be the first to reach the finish line, what would the world look like if we each found our niche? If we collaborated, together as nonprofits and for-profits to create more value for everyone? What if we worked using a more open-source approach instead of multiple groups reinventing the wheel? Nature is complicated! Climate change is complicated! Carbon markets are complicated! Humans are complicated :). There is no one solution that will solve all of the problems that we face today. I want to look back in 30 years and say that we did everything we could to save our planet and make it equitable and my gut says collaboration has much more potential than competition in getting us there.

It’s impossible to know whether the decisions I’m making in this transition are the right ones, but they feel right today. And, more than anything, I’m grateful for the privilege to be able to choose. I’m just now realizing that, perhaps at the very core of everything I do, my motivation is to ensure that all humans and all living creatures have that privilege. A privilege that should be a right.

So here’s to us all working together to catalyze economic systems that center nature alongside humanity and redistribute wealth and power across all humans and nature itself.

We can do it.