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.
May 01, 2020•53 min•Season 4Ep. 58
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.
Apr 01, 2020•17 min•Season 4Ep. 57
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.
Feb 24, 2020•22 min•Season 4Ep. 56
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 t...
Feb 13, 2020•1 hr 23 min•Season 4Ep. 55
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 econom...
Feb 01, 2020•51 min•Season 5Ep. 54
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.
Dec 02, 2019•38 min
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 ...
Dec 01, 2019•40 min•Season 3Ep. 52
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/...
Sep 16, 2019•48 min•Season 4Ep. 51
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
Aug 22, 2019•56 min•Season 3Ep. 50
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...
Aug 15, 2019•36 min•Season 3Ep. 49
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 ...
Aug 10, 2019•18 min•Season 3Ep. 48
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.
Jun 18, 2019•45 min•Season 3Ep. 47
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 ...
Apr 30, 2019•1 hr 14 min•Season 3Ep. 46
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 ...
Apr 01, 2019•55 min•Season 3Ep. 45
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.
Mar 18, 2019•35 min•Season 3Ep. 44
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 econo...
Mar 06, 2019•29 min•Season 3Ep. 43
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 co...
Mar 01, 2019•56 min•Season 3Ep. 42
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...
Feb 15, 2019•35 min•Season 3Ep. 42
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 Katowi...
Jan 23, 2019•1 hr 23 min•Season 3Ep. 41
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, ...
Dec 24, 2018•52 min•Season 3Ep. 39
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 o...
Dec 08, 2018•52 min•Season 3Ep. 38
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...
Dec 02, 2018•42 min•Season 3Ep. 37
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 – ...
Nov 28, 2018•29 min•Season 3Ep. 36
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 ther...
Oct 31, 2018•1 hr 2 min•Season 3Ep. 35
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 ke...
Oct 10, 2018•1 hr 16 min•Season 3Ep. 34
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.
Sep 11, 2018•1 hr 1 min•Season 3Ep. 33
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-t...
Jul 09, 2018•54 min•Season 3Ep. 32
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 targ...
Mar 01, 2018•40 min•Season 3Ep. 31
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 hi...
Jan 30, 2018•30 min•Season 3Ep. 30
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.
Jan 23, 2018•38 min•Season 2Ep. 29
