Bionic Planet: Your Guide To The New Reality

This is the fifth in a five-part series. You can find the first installment here. US Environmental Protection Agency boss Scott Pruitt is gone – not because of his environmental malfeasance, but because his $43,000 phone booth, his $100,000 trip to Disneyland, and his attempts to get his wife a lucrative job were too tacky even for an administration built on bling. His replacement, Andrew Wheeler, is less embarrassing but more dangerous. A coal lobbyist until last year, Wheeler is also a long-time adviser to climate-science denier James Inhofe and a sure bet to continue Pruitt’s policies – albeit with more stealth and fewer attention-grabbing abuses of power. Pruitt’s departure comes just one week after Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his own retirement from the US Supreme Court, and those two departures have overshadowed the publication of a document that Pruitt and Army Public Works boss Ricky James dropped on us last Friday – a document that mentions Kennedy 64 times and illustrates as well as anything

Today I speak with Bronson Griscom, Director of Forest Carbon Science for the Nature Conservancy.   Last year, he headed up a team of three dozen researchers from almost two dozen institutions tasked with identifying once and for all the realistic potential of using nature as a bulwark against climate change.   The result is a report called "Natural Climate Solutions", which identifies 20 low-cost, natural "pathways" that can get us 37 percent of the way to meeting the Paris Climate Agreement targets -- sometimes at no cost, sometimes at just $10 per ton, and often while increasing food yields and reducing the cost of farming.

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 cal

Hundreds of consumer-facing companies have pledged to purge deforestation from their supply chains -- often by only buying products that are certified as being sustainably grown. But what happens when a certified company gets caught cheating? In this case, quite a lot.

I've produced 19 episodes of Bionic Planet since the election of Donald Trump, mostly focused on the work of people trying to fix the climate mess -- and in today's episode I look back on some of the ones that seemed to resonate most with listeners. Today's guests include: Mike Korchinsky, who runs the private conservation group Wildlife Works Former UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer Anthony Hobley of the Carbon Tracker Initiative Christian Christian de Valle of Althelia Ecosphere Toby Gardner of the Stockholm Environment Institute Michael Mathres of Zaluvida Bertrand Piccard of Solar Impulse Andrew Mitchell of the Global Canopy Programme Noelle-Claire LeCann and Richard Fronapfel of AlphaSource Advisors Genevieve Bennett and Brian Schaap of Forest Trends Marco Albani of Tropical Forest Alliance 2020 Charlotte Streck of Climate Focus Mark Buckley of Staples Danna Smith of the Dogwood Alliance Ally Bahroudi of the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility

More and more countries across the developing world are launching large-scale, climate-smart initiatives to transform the way local communities derive their livelihoods from forests and broader land use. A key component to the success of these programs is engaging the private sector to shift behavior toward sustainable business models. The World Bank Group’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) and the BioCarbon Fund Initiative for Sustainable Forest Landscapes (ISFL) have spent years working with private sector companies that produce, trade or buy commodities that play a role in driving deforestation or forest degradation. These funds have gained valuable insights into what has worked, and what more is required to bring about land use change in partnership with the private sector. Early lessons are captured in a new report entitled, Engaging the Private Sector in Results-Based Landscape Programs. On the eve of the report's launch, I caught up to Elly Baroudy, who coordinates both the FCPF and the ISFL,

Under the Paris Agreement, countries were asked to present their own climate action plans, and 90 percent of these action plans -- technically called NDCs, for "nationally-determined contributions" -- incorporated farming fixes -- or shiftint to sustainable agriculture. That led to a major breakthrough this week at year-end climate talks here in Bonn, Germany, where our guest is Tonya Rawe, who runs the Food and Nutrition Security program at CARE International. CARE is a humanitarian aid organization formed in the wake of World War II, but it's become a key player in the environmental space as well, especially when subsistence farmers are involved. 

 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 applic

The DOGWOOD ALLIANCE is an environmental NGO based in the Southeastern United States -- a region that produces 12 percent of the world's wood, pulp, and paper. STAPLES is a massive stationary and office-supply chain based up in the northern part of the country, in Massachusetts, and it buys reams and reams of paper from suppliers like Georgia Pacific and International Paper, who in turn buy paper made from trees taken from forests across the very region that Dogwood is trying to protect. The two organizations haven't always gotten along, and they even fought each other for years before today's guests sat down over beers at a pub in Asheville, North Carolina called Jack of the Wood. Mark Buckley is the Vice President in charge of environmental affairs for Staples, and Danna Smith runs the Dogwood Alliance.

Today's episode is different from most: For the most part, it's just raw audio from the Climate Week that we built episode 22 on -- namely, the event where Tropical Forest Alliance 2020 unveiled its 10 keys to slashing deforestation by 2020.  I didn't edit the audio except to adjust volume levels here and there, and I don't pontificate, proselytize, or prognosticate, except towards the end, where they cut away a video that you obviously can't see with your ears. Here is a list of speakers: Marco Albani, Director – TFA2020 Michael Jenkins, President & CEO – Forest Trends Charlotte Streck, Co-Founder and Director – Climate Focus Dewi Bramono, Sustainability and Stakeholder Engagement, APP Jillian Gladstone, Senior Manager, Forests, CDP Ignacio Gavilan, Director of Sustainability, Consumer Goods Forum Stephen Donofrio, Senior Advisor, Forest TrendsDharsono Hartono, CEO, Katingan ProjectAshley Allen, Climate & Land Senior Manager, Mars Inc.Simon Hall, Manager, National Wildlife FederationStina Reksten, Se

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 re

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 st

Have you ever heard of a company called Marfrig Global Foods? How about JBS? Hint: JBS is named after "Jose Batista Sobrinho", a Brazilian rancher who's something like the Oscar Meyer of Brazil, only much bigger.Yes, JBS and Marfrig are two of the world’s largest meatpackers, and you’ll find their products in Walmart and McDonald’s in the United States, Marks & Spencer in the United Kingdom, Albert Hein in the Netherlands… but usually with someone else's name on it. Both companies grew at the expense of the Amazon Biome, which which farmers have been chopping to grow soy and graze cattle. That started in the 1950s, and it accelerated for decades -- until about ten years ago, when consumer-facing companies like the ones I just mentioned started getting pressure from their customers, thanks to environmental groups like Greenpeace and others - and that led to something called the “Cattle Agreements”, which  are  a set of voluntary commitments to stop buying from any farms that either chop forest to graze cat

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

Today we speak with Andrew Mitchell, founder and director of the Global Canopy Programme (GCP). A zoologist by training, Andrew realized that to save the forest, he had to leave the forest and enter the economic system that was impacting it. So he founded and runs GCP in Oxford and recently became a Senior Adviser to Ecosphere Plus, which is an impact investment group that funnels money into sustainable land-use. I caught up to him in May at the Innovate4Climate conference in Barcelona. I first met Andrew at the 2007 climate talks in Bali, Indonesia, when I was just starting to learn about the impact that forestry and farming had on climate change and how our consumption patterns fit into that. I'd done some research on my own and then plunged into the deep end -- jumping from technical panel to technical panel, and sleeping just four hours per night for two weeks.Andrew stood out from most of the other science guys because of his ability to communicate complex issues in simple ways -- which is a rare skill.