🌳 #006 — Nature-based solutions

Hello hello!

Welcome to this week’s deep dive. This week, we’re digging into Nature-based solutions.

As I’ve been diving into climate tech, the majority of my focus has been on emerging solutions. It’s easy to overlook that nature has been reducing GHG emissions, capturing CO2, and improving resilience for thousands of years. We just need more of it.

One outcome of COP27 is a fresh commitment to using nature-based solutions like forest restoration, regenerative agriculture, and soil-based carbon capture to fight climate change.

This has indirect impact on climate solutions like wildfire prevention, earth observation, and climate fintech.

📣 TLDR

Nature-based solutions rely on natural environments and ecosystems to reduce emissions, capture carbon, and improve resilience.

Nature-based solutions can provide up to 37% of the mitigation needed until 2030 to achieve the targets of the Paris Agreement, but are often overlooked in favor of technological based solutions.

Building technology that enables nature-based solutions, rather than brand new technology, can have greater climate impact with a higher likelihood of success.

😬 Problem

New climate technology requires significant upfront investment for unproven solutions. Climate tech startups have long timelines, unproven business models, and are especially susceptible to the valley of death.

🎯 Solution

Enable nature-based solutions across forestry, wetlands, agriculture, and oceans that offer proven and cost effective ways to drive decarbonization and emissions reductions.

💪🏼 Innovators

Forestry 

Plant new trees, allow forests to regrow, and improve forest management.

• Pachama develops technological solutions for the protection and restoration of the forests.

• DroneSeed is paid per acre to plant tree seed vessels after a wildfire using heavy-lift Drone Swarms.

• Terraformation provides data-driven solutions and technology to support ecosystem restoration and scale up carbon capture through forest restoration.

Restorative Agriculture / Regenerative Agriculture

Building soil carbon removals, agroforestry, and livestock management.

• Perennial is building the world’s leading verification platform for soil-based carbon removal.

• Klim helps farmers scale up regenerative agriculture to make agriculture part of the climate solution.

• CIBO Technologies scales regenerative advanced platform technology that connects growers to incentives and enterprises to growers.

• Propogate makes it easy for farms to transition acreage to agroforestry with their analytics and project development platform

• Yard Stick enables soil carbon removal at scale by measuring accurately, instantly, and affordably with Yard Stick technologies.

• Terramera provides intelligence developing safer, more effective plant-based replacements to synthetic chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

Oceans & Coastal Wetlands

Restore or expand marine ecosystems and protect coastal wetlands. This is very much an emerging space.

• Propeller is a new $100 seed fund focused on ocean climate solutions with a focus on the ocean

• Vesta is tackling shoreline erosion and carbon emissions with carbon-removing sand, i.e. “coastal carbon capture”

⚡️ Opportunities

• Wildfire prevention and mitigation leads to more natural carbon capture.

  • Gridware uses sensors and software to detect and predict faults that ignite wildfires and expedite repairs during a power outage.

  • Dryad provides ultra-early forest fire detection and monitoring solutions for public and private forests.

  • Overstory applies artificial intelligence to high-resolution satellite imagery to provide real-time analytics of natural resources.

  • Flash Forest uses aerial mapping software and drone technology to support reforestation.

• Align product usage and purchasing with climate action.

  • Treecard is a fullstack green finance platform, allowing consumers to spend, save and invest responsibly.

  • Aspiration offers retail banking and investing services that enable customers to spend and save their money in ways that protect the planet.

  • Patch enables companies to embed climate action into their own products.

⚠️ Challenges

• Nature-based carbon capture is not permanent. Carbon is stored in biomass and can be released again by wildfires, changes in land-use, and general climate change.

• Nature-based solutions can take a long time to produce results. We’re on the clock for 2050

• Nature-based solutions are often in direct conflict with major industries, like real estate development. Business is often prioritized over conservation and restoration, requiring government intervention.

😈 Devil’s Advocate

“We can’t plant our way out of climate change.”

Planting new trees is just step one. We need regenerative agriculture and forest management practices to ensure they grow and produce the climate benefits we need.

“Placing climate action in purchase flows pushes the burden on consumers”

True, but reducing scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions is complex and challenging. Enabling consumer demand to change supply is one of many factors that can lead to change, even if it’s very indirect.

🚀 Takeaways

• Nature-based solutions are a effective way to contribute 37% of the mitigation needed until 2030 to achieve the targets of the Paris Agreement.

• Enabling nature-based solutions, instead of building new solutions, has big impact with higher likelihood of success.

• Forest management and regenerative agriculture are emerging as major solution categories to support.

🔗 Dive Deeper

• What you need to know about nature-based solutions via Worldbank

• Natural Climate Solutions via The Nature Conservancy on