Bionic Planet: Your Guide To The New Reality

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. 

Marco Cerezo of Guatemalan NGO FUNDAECO explains how he's using carbon finance to help Guatemalan farmers demarcate their land and save surrounding forests. Related Links: https://www.worldlandtrust.org/news/2021/10/marco-cerezo/  https://registry.verra.org/mymodule/ProjectDoc/Project_ViewFile.asp?FileID=43006&IDKEY=2iquwesdfmnk0iei23nnm435oiojnc909dsflk9809adlkmlkfd59305274

The science-denial movement delayed action on climate change for decades, and now the tropes they used are creeping into coverage of emerging climate solutions. Here’s one way of differentiating between honest inquiry and something more nefarious. Third of a three-part series. All links available at: https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/opinionwhere-does-healthy-critique-end-and-cynical-denial-begin/ https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/opinionwhere-does-healthy-critique-end-and-cynical-denial-begin/

When popular media get natural climate solutions wrong, it’s usually because they’re struggling to understand complex mechanisms that have evolved over more than 45 years. Here is a brief look back on that evolution. Second of a three-part series adapted from Ecosystem Marketplace Click here for the original story and all related links: https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/opinionsix-lessons-from-the-history-of-natural-climate-solutions/ 

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  

We kick off Season Seven with a look at the  Voluntary Carbon Market Global Dialogue and the six keys to making sure voluntary carbon markets work for the Global South. Guests: Adriaan Korthuis, Paul Butarbutar, Kuki Soejachmoen, and Annie Groth. Related Links: https://vcm-gd.org/ https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/shades-of-redd-corresponding-adjustments-for-voluntary-markets-seriously/  

A conversation with WRI Senior Fellow Frances Seymour, who says there's plenty of reason to believe the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use could deliver on its high ambition of ending and reversing deforestation -- not so much because of the declaration itself, but because of the constellation of world events that birthed it. Frances is also co-author of the book "Why Forests? Why Now? The Science, Economics, and Politics of Tropical Forests and Climate Change."