Bionic Planet: Reversing Climate Change by Restoring Nature

On the ground at year-end climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, Maria Carvalho and Frédéric Gagnon-Lebrun of South Pole Climate Solutions dissect the intricacies of Article 6 of the Paris Climate Agreement. They explain not only how it works, but how it fits into the net-zero movement and the larger effort to meet the climate challenge.

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.

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.

We need to slash greenhouse-gas emissions while supporting activities that remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere, and carbon markets can both accelerate reductions and ramp up removals. Why, then, is the debate so contentious? For answers, I turned to Eli-Mitchell Larson, a self-proclaimed "Carbon Removal Evangelist" who's helping to build up Carbon Removal Advocacy Europe (CRAE). We had a long and fruitful discussion that I think serves as a sort of reductions and removals 101.

Biologists, economists, and environmental activists often seem like members of warring tribes, but Gabriel Eickhoff, CEO of Lestari Capital, says they're more like estranged family members who just haven't started talking to each other yet. In a wide-ranging discussion, we look at the legacy of the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets, the structure of supply chains, and the interconnectedness of all things.

Biologists, economists, and environmental activists often seem like members of warring tribes, but Gabriel Eickhoff, CEO of Lestari Capital, says they're more like estranged family members who just haven't started talking to each other yet. In a wide-ranging discussion, we look at the legacy of the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets, the structure of supply chains, and the interconnectedness of all things.

Biologists, economists, and environmental activists often seem like members of warring tribes, but Gabriel Eickhoff, CEO of Lestari Capital, says they're more like estranged family members who just haven't started talking to each other yet. In a wide-ranging discussion, we look at the legacy of the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets, the structure of supply chains, and the interconnectedness of all things.

Guest: Eron Bloomgarden, Emergent Capital Launched on Earth Day, the LEAF (Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest finance) Coalition aims to double the price of forest-carbon offsets and multiply the amount of money going into forest protection. Heres's how it works. Featuring: Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg; US Climate Envoy John Kerry; UK's Environment Minister Lord Zac Goldsmith; US State Dept Climate Change and Land Sector Expert Chris Dragisic; Amazon Chief Scientist Jamey Mulligan.

We cannot adapt our way out of the climate mess, as Allie Goldstein of Conservation International and Mark Trexler of the Climate Web make clear. We discuss the realities of systemic climate risk. Research cited in today's show: "The private sector's climate change risk and adaptation blind spots" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0340-5 "Persistent Business Blind Spots on Climate Risk and Adaptation," http://gca.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Persistent_Business_Blind_Spots_on_Climate_Risk_and_Adaptation.pdf The Climate Web: www.theclimateweb.com Climate Web Roadmaps: https://roadmapslite.climatesites.net https://roadmapunderestimatedrisk.climatesites.net https://systemicriskroadmaplite.climatesites.net Videos: Playing Climate Chess using the Climate Web https://youtu.be/cnf7FM2zfNg Actionable Climate Knowledge through the Climate Web https://youtu.be/L37v2-DXWk0 Solving Climate Change with the Climate Web https://youtu.be/Py9eJM2DRT0 Link to wildfire risk map: https://bra.in/6pygXQ

We cannot adapt our way out of the climate mess, as Alliee Goldstein of Conservation International and Mark Trexler of the Climate Web make clear. We discuss the realities of systemic climate risk. Research cited in today's show: "The private sector's climate change risk and adaptation blind spots" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0340-5 "Persistent Business Blind Spots on Climate Risk and Adaptation," http://gca.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Persistent_Business_Blind_Spots_on_Climate_Risk_and_Adaptation.pdf The Climate Web: www.theclimateweb.com Climate Web Roadmaps: https://roadmapslite.climatesites.net https://roadmapunderestimatedrisk.climatesites.net https://systemicriskroadmaplite.climatesites.net Videos: Playing Climate Chess using the Climate Web https://youtu.be/cnf7FM2zfNg Actionable Climate Knowledge through the Climate Web https://youtu.be/L37v2-DXWk0 Solving Climate Change with the Climate Web https://youtu.be/Py9eJM2DRT0 Link to wildfire risk map: https://bra.in/6pygXQ

Carpetmaker Interface has won accolades for its carbon-negative carpet, the manufacture of which pulls more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it emits. He're a look back on the company's 20-year journey from plundered of nature to climate leader. Guest: Buddy Hay, Interface VP for Sustainability

What do Bill Gates, Mark Carney, Annette Nazareth, and Agustin Silvani have in common? They all believe that well-designed voluntary carbon markets can help the world achieve zero net greenhouse gas emissions in time to avert disaster. Today, they explain the new Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets (TSVDM) Most music provided by Blue Dot Sessions

The UN's Emissions Gap Report showed that the current Paris Agreement Climate Plans (NDCs )will leave us nowhere near where we need to be to avert a climate catastrophe. Will Burns of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University joins me in a year-end retrospective.

Today I speak with environmental scientist Jason Funk, who runs the Land Use and Climate Knowledge Initiative (LUCKI) about the important findings of a paper called "Long-term thermal sensitivity of earth's tropical forests," which looks at whether forests can continue to pull carbon from the atmosphere as temperatures rise. What they found is: it's complicated.

In this episode, we speak with oceanographer and sedimentologist Steve Crooks, one of the world's leading authorities on coastal ecosystems and climate change. Related Link: https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/em-audio-and-video-em-vietnamese-deputy-prime-minister-opens-katoomba-xvii-vows-to-integrate-economy-and-environment/

In this episode, which originally aired in October, 2018, we speak with the Reverend Dr. Gerald Durley, who says climate change and civil rights are inexorably intertwined, and not just because the destruction of our living ecosystems is robbing us of our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Born in Kansas and raised in California, Rev Durley finished high-school in Oregon and then marched with Martin Luther King Jr while earning his first of may academic degrees -- this one in psychology at Tennessee State. While there, Bobby Kennedy noticed him and persuaded Durley to join the Peace Corp, which he did. That brought him to Nigeria, then to Switzerland before coming home to the United States and becoming a central figure in Atlanta's Civil Rights scene. He says we can tap the same forces that galvanized the Civil Rights movement to fix the climate mess, but only if we recognize its inherently moral nature.

If there's one thing COVID-19 reminds us, it's that global institutions matter. For that reason, I'm replaying this 2016 episode looking at the Sustainable Development Goals.

Global greenhouse-gas emissions will drop 5.5 percent this year because of COVID-19, but they must drop 7.6 percent every year to meet the Paris Agreement's 1.5C target. Forest carbon offsets provide one way of getting there fast, but can we trust these offsets? Do they do what they say they do? This week, we hear how the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) handles carbon accounting at different scales. And my guest, Naomi Swickard, actually makes it interesting.

When US President Donald Trump disbanded his country's pandemic response team, he did so because "I don't like having thousands of people around when we don't need them." That cost-cutting measure could cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and it's a classic example of what happens when we value efficiency over resilience. What are efficiency and resilience? Today we draw on the work of Cardiff University Lecturer Paul Nieuwenhuis to find out.

Costa Rica says it will have zero net greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050, and its electrical grid already runs on 99 percent renewable energy. Today's guest is a key part of its success. As Minister of Environment, Energy and Telecommunications, Carlos Manuel Rodriguez has overseen programs that tripled the country's forest coverage while slashing its use of fossil fuels -- all while growing its economy.

Today's guest, Daniel Palken, volunteers with a group called the Citizens Climate Lobby, or "CCL", which aims to slash US greenhouse-gas emissions by imposing a fee on fossil fuels. The fee will be based on the amount of greenhouse gas that the coal, gasoline, and jet fuels will generate when we burn them, and it will probably make fossil-fuel energy more expensive. But there's a catch -- or, the opposite of a catch... a bonus -- a dividend, if you will, because that's what CCL calls it. Under the proposed "Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act," all money raised by the carbon fee will go back to US citizens in the form of a dividend. We each pay into the system based on how much energy we use -- whether in the form of an extra few cents at the pump or slightly higher groceries -- but every single citizen gets the same dividend back. A fee-and-dividend system is different from the cap-and-trade programs that I usually focus on, for lots of reasons we get into. Daniel says that a fee-and-dividend scenario has bilateral support, especially among younger Republicans, and he has the data to back that up.

Developing countries are the most vulnerable to – and least responsible for – climate change, but new research shows that some of them can dramatically boost their economies by managing their forests, farms, and fields in ways that pull greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere. At a carbon price of $50 for every metric ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere, for example, Costa Rica can go beyond net-zero and end up pulling four times as much greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere as its entire economy emits right now. At that same carbon price, the Central African Republic can use NCS strategies to boost its GDP a staggering 90 percent. Different Countries; Different Scenarios Authored by scientists from 17 organizations, the new paper looks at 12 natural climate solutions across 79 tropical countries and identifies activities that can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 6.6 billion metric tons per year – ore more than all of the emissions generated by the United States – at a price of $50 per ton or lower. "We found a wide variance among countries in the types of interventions that can deliver results," said lead author Bronson Griscom, Senior Director of Natural Climate Solutions for Conservation International. "The Solomon Islands, for example, can make tremendous gains by managing their production forests more effectively, while Kenya can make tremendous gains by doing the same with agriculture." The paper comes at a critical moment in human development, with humankind now actively managing more than half of Earth's ice-free land. "The human footprint is expanding, and the population is still growing, but the rate of population growth is declining," says Griscom on an episode of the Bionic Planet podcast scheduled to drop on January 28. "Meanwhile, our technology – our practices for agriculture – are continuing to improve so that we can produce more food per hectare from one decade to the next." We have, he says, the know-how to feed the world and reduce our footprint at the same time, but it comes as climate change threatens to decimate the world's living ecosystems. "This is hundreds of years in the making, and we're at this inflection point now," he says. "Ecotopia is out there, but so is climate change with all its potential tipping points in ecosystems and looming mass migration due to societal collapse." It's an all-or-nothing proposition. "We have all of these solutions in front of us, and we have this ticking clock," he says. "We know what to do, and we have the means of doing it, but we have just a decade to do it." The Decades Ahead With so many different countries and so many different economies, he sees a phased approach where some countries move now and others follow in their wake. "Some countries have the resources and governance to move right now," he says. "The idea is, 'Let's help those countries move quickly now, and let's invest this decade in helping those other countries to prepare for major actions.'"

There's a lot of money sloshing around forests, and most of it goes into agricultural subsidies and investments that destroy forests, while only a trickle goes into programs that save them. That's why today's guest, Charlotte Streck, wants to implement a Marshall Plan for Forests.

On the eve of year-end climate talks in Madrid, I revisit my 2017 conversation with Bronson Griscom, Director of Forest Carbon Science for the Nature Conservancy. 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.

The third episode of our three-part look at the birth of REDD+, we speak with Annie Petsonk of the Environmental Defense Fund. Related Articles: "Shades of REDD+: A Marshall Plan for Tropical Forests?" Link: https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/shades-of-redd-a-marshall-plan-for-tropical-forests/ "Forests, Farms, and the Global Carbon Sink: The Genesis" Link: https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/forests-farms-global-carbon-sink-genesis/

In this second part of our three-part series on the history of forests in the Paris Climate Agreement, we hear how REDD+ got its name and made its way into the climate negotiations. Special Guest: Kevin Conrad of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations

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

We eat to live, but the food we're eating is killing us – not just because of what it does to our bodies, but because of what it does to our climate. Beef, for example, comes from cows that burp out methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas that traps up to 80-times more heat than carbon dioxide does, and we often chop carbon-absorbing forests to graze those methane-emitting cows, only to throw away one-third of all the food we produce. If there are two things scientists who study this stuff agree on, it's that we can slow climate change by eating less meat and wasting less food, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) new Special Report on Climate Change and Land (SRCCL), which was published this morning in Geneva.

Environmental NGOs have long pressured companies to reduce their impact on forests, and companies have long complained that every NGO seems to come with different demands. Now a coalition of more than a dozen NGOs have called the corporate bluff by creating a framework that provides a universal way of accounting for deforestation. They call it the Accountability Framework, and today's guest, Jeff Milder, is one of the people helping to pull it together.

It's an article of faith among some on the left that markets and capitalism are the roots of all evil, while some on the right see pure, free markets as the invisible hand of God, and regulation as the work of the Devil. Most economists will tell you they're both wrong, because there's no such thing as either a pure free market or a marketless society. We need markets to get things done, and we need governance to keep markets honest. That's especially true in environmental markets, which almost always exist because of laws that require people to clean up their messes or reduce their pollution. To slow climate change, for example, we have to put a cap on greenhouse-gas emissions, but how do we meet that cap? There are basically two ways. In command-and-control, a regulator writes up detailed, step-by-step prescriptions that have to be followed to the letter. In cap-and-trade, which is a market-based mechanism, emitters find their own way of meeting the cap, and they're allowed to sell emission-reductions to others if they reduce more than the law requires. On the other hand, they also have to buy emission-reductions if they fail to meet their obligations. If you're a regular listener, you know that carbon is just one of many environmental markets that are helping to fuel a $25 billion per year restoration economy, and that's just in the United States, as companies and municipalities rush to restore degraded rivers, forests, and other ecosystems on which our entire economy depends. Environmental markets, however, don't replace regulation. What they do is provide flexibility in meeting regulatory requirements. They work, and they work well, but only if properly regulated. Unfortunately, regulators have seen their budgets frozen or even cut -- ostensibly to reduce costs. The result, ironically, isn't just less protection, but higher costs of compliance. Today's Guests: Todd BenDor, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Jason Brenner, RiverBank Murray Starkel, Ecological Service Partners Jud Hill, Ecological Service Partners Dave Groves, Earth Partners

Environmental scientist Tim Male has worked the conservation puzzle from both the NGO and governmental sector -- first with NGOs like Environmental Defense Fund, then as an elected councilman, and finally as an adviser to the Obama Administration's Council on Environmental Quality. In 2017, he distilled his views in a paper called "Nature, Paid on Delivery", which examines the ways the US states of Louisiana, Maryland, California and Nevada are restoring large swathes of degraded land with only small amounts of taxpayer money being paid up-front. Can Pay for Success work in ecological restoration?

We've been fairly US-centric lately, but only because so much is finally happening there. In today's episode, we speak with Rhiana Gunn-Wright of New Consensus. That's the Think Tank that's helping freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and veteran Senator Ed Markey develop policy to support the Green New Deal they proposed last month.

We're losing pollinators at an alarming rate, which scientists attribute at least in part to the loss of native plants, which evolved alongside hundreds of native pollinators -- including bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies. Dave Neu and Joe Krischon of the Conservation Land Stewardship have been helping to resurrect a degraded ravine north of Chicago, and today they explain how this backbreaking work helps revive colonies of bees and butterflies, and how you, too, can join the restoration economy.

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.

We hear a lot about the Sustainable Development Goals, or "SDGs" these days, with major pension funds like Calvert aligning their portfolios with them, and up to $12 trillion in finance, by one estimate, ready to do the same the same. But what are they? That's a question I tried answering almost three years ago -- way back in 2016. It was right after world leaders had reached the Paris Climate Agreement, and right before my fellow countrymen shot the world in the butt by electing Donald Trump as President of the United States. This encore presentation looks at the Sustainable Development Goals -- the SDGs -- which are more important now than ever -- and I think today's show, even though it's almost three years old, is more relevant than ever, too. That's because it looks at the SDGs in the context of the global institutions that emerged from the ashes of World War II, and that Donald Trump, Vladmir Putin, and the Koch Brothers, among a whole bunch of other miscreants, are trying to destroy. We're a big, diverse planet, and we've pushed our living ecosystems to the brink. We need to work globally, together, if we're to fix this mess, and today we look at how we've done that in the past, and how still can in the future. If you like what you hear, then I encourage you to become a patron at bionic-planet.com or patreon.com/bionicplanet. I am listener supported, and you can support me for as little as $1 per month.

Yvo de Boer served as Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from August, 2006 to July, 2010; and in November of last year, he became president of the Gold Standard, which is an NGO-led global partnership that sets standards for everything from carbon projects to the way we recognize contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) In this wide-ranging discussion, we discuss everything from the outcome of the most recent talks in Katowice to the odd phenomenon of explosive chickens -- as well as how we can quantify the impact that countries and companies have on achieving the SDGs.

Agriculture emits roughly 20 percent of all greenhouse gasses, but sustainable management of forests, farms, and fields can turn the world's farms into massive carbon sinks that absorb greenhouse gasses by the gigaton, yet farmers -- as opposed to agriculture ministers -- have been nearly invisible at year-end climate talks. That changed this past year, thanks to a global farmer-led effort to promote climate-safe agriculture and the emergence of the Koronivia joint Working Group on Agriculture, which creates a fast track for integrating agriculture into the Paris Climate Agreement. Today's guest, Fred Yoder, is an Ohio family farmer who has become a leading proponent of climate-safe agriculture within the Americas. He tells us how farmers moved from the fringes to the center of climate negotiations in just two short years. Also appearing: Ceris Jones, Theo de Jager, Tonya Rawe, and Jason Funk

The first week of year-end climate talks have wrapped up in Katowice, Poland, where natural climate solutions are finally getting the attention they deserve -- both in negotiations and on the sides. Everyone, it seems, agrees that we need to improve the way we manage our forests, farms, and fields -- which can get us more than a third of the way to meeting the Paris Agreement targets -- but how do you make that happen? We speak with Chris Meyer of the Environmental Defense Fund, Josefina Brana of WWF, Jason Funk of Carbon 180, Peter Graham of Climate Advisors, and David Burns of the National Wildlife Federation.

Samuel Avaala shakes his head as he dips his fork into a bowl of red-red, a traditional Ghanaian stew that gets its color – and name – in part from red palm oil. "It doesn't make sense," he says. "Oil palm evolved here. It's in our food; it's in our medicine; but we built an economy on cocoa with little attention to oil palm." Oil palm is the tree that gives us palm oil, and the people of Western and Central Africa have been cultivating it for millennia – harvesting and processing the fruit for vitamin-rich oil, used in food and soap, tapping the trunks for palm wine that is distilled into medicinal alcohol, and using the biomass for green power generation. Over the past half-century, the rest of the world has discovered palm oil, too, and today it's a $60 billion-per-year market that provides material for everything from fuels to food to face paint. But that money isn't flowing into Western and Central Africa. The Great Crop Swap Instead, thanks to a fluke of history, it's flowing into Indonesia and Malaysia, which produce more than 80 percent of the world's palm oil, while the dominant cash crop in palm oil's birthplace, is cacao – a tree that evolved thousands of miles away, in the Amazon forest, where the Incas used it to make cocoa. It's all part of an inadvertent crop swap that began when a Ghanaian agronomist named Tetteh Quarshie brought cacao beans home with him in the 19th Century, just as Dutch and British traders were bringing African palm trees to South East Asia and migrants from Spain, Portugal, and Japan were bringing Ethiopian coffee and Asian soy to the Amazon. Today, 66 percent of the world's cocoa comes from Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, while Southeast Asia dominates in palm oil, and the Amazon region produces massive amounts of soy and beef. The Deforestation Boom These lucrative crops have been a double-edged sword, bringing economic wealth to some, economic devastation to others, and environmental degradation to all. Indonesia, for example, lost more than 10 million hectares of forest in just the past 30 years as oil palm plantations spread, becoming the world's fifth-largest (and sometimes third-largest) emitter of greenhouse gasses, and Côte d'Ivoire has lost 80 percent of its forest in roughly the same period to cacao. Now Indonesian and Malaysian palm oil companies are expanding into Africa, and many environmentalists are worried that could accelerate deforestation if natural vegetation is cleared to plant oil palm. Avaala, however, says it doesn't have to be that way.

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 bu

In this episode, we speak with the Reverend Dr. Gerald Durley, who says climate change and civil rights are inexorably intertwined, and not just because the destruction of our living ecosystems is robbing us of our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Born in Kansas and raised in California, Rev Durley finished high-school in Oregon and then marched with Martin Luther King Jr while earning his first of may academic degrees -- this one in psychology at Tennessee State. While there, Bobby Kennedy noticed him and persuaded Durley to join the Peace Corp, which he did. That brought him to Nigeria, then to Switzerland before coming home to the United States and becoming a central figure in Atlanta's Civil Rights scene. He says we can tap the same forces that galvanized the Civil Rights movement to fix the climate mess, but only if we recognize its inherently moral nature.

In this episode, we speak with the Reverend Dr. Gerald Durley, who says climate change and civil rights are inexorably intertwined, and not just because the destruction of our living ecosystems is robbing us of our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Born in Kansas and raised in California, Rev Durley finished high-school in Oregon and then marched with Martin Luther King Jr while earning his first of may academic degrees -- this one in psychology at Tennessee State. While there, Bobby Kennedy noticed him and persuaded Durley to join the Peace Corp, which he did. That brought him to Nigeria, then to Switzerland before coming home to the United States and becoming a central figure in Atlanta's Civil Rights scene. He says we can tap the same forces that galvanized the Civil Rights movement to fix the climate mess, but only if we recognize its inherently moral nature.

When countries around the world ratified the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016, they pledged to prevent average global temperatures from rising to a level more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels. They picked that number because 2 degrees Celsius is the point at which climate models start going haywire, but they also asked the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, to review all of the available research and tell us what we'd have to do to keep that rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the point at which feedback loops like melting tundras and increased water vapor make the 2-degree increase all but inevitable. Scientists from around the world spent the last two years reviewing over 6,000 scientific papers and mapping out different pathways to the 1.5-degree target -- from paths that focus primarily on reducing energy demand to those that focus primarily on expanding carbon sinks that pull greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere. One of those carbon sinks is the one that I cover on Bionic Planet -- namely, natural climate solutions that work by improving the way we manage our forests, farms and fields. The other is next-generation carbon capture and storage, involving new technologies that either don't yet exist or exist but cost a fortune to deploy. On Monday, the IPCC released its report, and the upshot is that we can meet the 1.5-degree target by deploying a blend of these strategies, but it basically requires us to overhaul the industrial and agricultural economies. Simple, right? Actually, a lot of it is simple, but it's not easy to implement, because our economy puts more value on fast cars and cheap beef than on clean air or a stable climate. But the report does identify a mechanism for getting beyond that, and it's a mechanism we've covered before: namely, making companies pay for the damages their greenhouse gasses cause -- or, as we say colloquially, "putting a price on carbon". But how much damage does a ton of carbon dioxide cause, and can we put a number on it? These are the questions an economist named William Nordhaus spent his life addressing, through economic modeling, first on a desktop computer, and then with more and more sophistication. n Monday, within hours of the IPCC issuing its report, the Royal Bank of Sweden announced that it was awarding the Nobel Prize for Economics to Nordhaus and another economist, Paul Romer, who focused on the economics of investing in education and in our collective future. To honor Nordhaus, I'm re-posting parts of two early episodes featuring environmental economist Gernot Wagner, who documented Nordhaus's quest to quantify the social cost of carbon in his 2015 book "Climate Shock".

Hindou Ibrahim grew up in rural Chad, a member of the nomadic Mbororo people. Today, she co-chairs the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change, and she advises -- some would say cajoles -- everyone from major corporations like Asia Pulp and Paper to small indigenous communities from Ecuador to Indonesia to take action on climate change.

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 the underhanded way Pruitt subverts environmental protections: not through argumentation, but through sabotage in the name of regulatory certainty (and just in time for summer break). It's a document that will show up on the Federal Register any day now, and that you and any member of the public will then have 30 days to comment on, but which you'll only understand if you know a bit of history, and that's by design. It's part of an effort to torpedo a Supreme Court opinion that Kennedy penned in 2006 – an opinion that builds on decades of precedent and practice, and that provides the foundation for the 2015 Waters of the United States (WOTUS) Rule (also known as the "Clean Water Rule"), which sets the ground rules for determining which of the waters of the United States are protected by the Clean Water Act (CWA). If Wheeler and James can rescind that rule, they'll manage to undermine the popular Clean Water Act without the voting public knowing until it's too late, and last week's document is part of their effort to do just that. Specifically, it's a supplemental notice to the Trump Administration's year-old proposal to repeal the WOTUS rule and instead "recodify" the mess that predated it in accordance with an opinion written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia – an opinion mostly ignored by courts and practitioners, for reasons we covered in earlier installments of this series. Scalia, as we saw in part three, believed the CWA should only protect "relatively permanent, standing or flowing bodies of water" – basically, lakes rivers, and streams, but not the wetlands or creeks that feed them, and not waterbodies that only flow intermittently. The repeal would leave 80 percent of US waterways unprotected by federal authorities, and it's one part of a multi-pronged attack on WOTUS that includes a two-year delay on its implementation and a more insidious order to ignore the local scientists and specialists who review dredging permits and instead "involve the Administrator's Office early on in the process of developing geographic determinations" – a move that Kyla Bennett, director of science policy for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) described as "a crude Clean Water Act coup d'état." "This latest move by Pruitt is his Plan B as it is becoming increasingly clear that his Clean Water rewrite plan is illegal and will be tossed out in court," she said. In this, the fifth, final, and long-overdue installment in a five-part series on the Clean Water Rule, we try to offer a clear and simple explanation of the state of WOTUS in the current administration. You can see the first installment here. More on the Bionic Planet Podcast The story continues below, but I'll also be editing audio from the interviews I conducted with Shrader and others for this series into episode 32 of the Bionic Planet podcast, which which I hope to have ready over the weekend. You can access Bionic Planet via iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, and pretty much anywhere you access podcasts, as well as on this device here: Timeline The story continues below, but here is a timeline to help you keep key dates in order: June 19, 2006: The Supreme Court's Rapanos v United States split decision introduces massive uncertainty over what are and are not protected waters, sparking hundreds of court cases and demands for clarity. Over time, Justice Kennedy's "significant nexus" guidance becomes the rule of the land. August 27, 2015: As the Obama Administration prepares to implement the WOTUS Rule, a district court in North Dakota issues a preliminary injunction against the rule until arguments can be heard, essentially freezing the rule in 13 states. October 9, 2015: The Sixth Circuit Court issues a nationwide stay, which the Obama Administration begins to fight before the 2016 elections sweep Donald Trump into office. February 28, 2017: Donald Trump signs an executive order instructing the EPA to scrap the WOTUS rule and "consider interp

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 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.

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, and Karin Kaechele, who acts as the point person for both funds Whain Mozambique and Ethiopia. In this episode, we discuss the origin of these two critical funds and explore the role they can play in supporting sustainable agriculture in the years ahead.