I have a bone to pick with how we approach agricultural sustainability, and with how I’ve approached it myself. Too often, we settle on a solution, then work outward to find the people and programs it can serve. We pay less attention to the decisions those people face, what would let them act, and what …
Read more “What Milkshakes Can Teach Us About Agricultural Sustainability”
Why better environmental outcomes require us to rethink the relationship between data, decisions, and MRV. Carbon footprints are made up. There, I said it. Before anyone gets too upset, I’m not suggesting that greenhouse gas emissions aren’t real, or that measuring them isn’t important. Quite the opposite. But the carbon footprint we’ve come to treat …
Read more “Carbon Accounting Is Made Up. The Decisions Aren’t.”
New York Climate Week reflections remind me of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, a classic psychological thriller that retells the same event from four different perspectives. The viewer is left wondering whether any account reveals the whole truth. Except in this case, assuming all attendees were to tell it, it’s over 100,000 different stories. What each of …
Read more “Climate Week Reflections: If only… then .. and how”
I woke up this morning thinking about New York Climate Week. But what I realized I’m perhaps most excited about is seeing the antithesis of the marketing gloss telling us how well everything is working and what a great job everyone is doing. And then I started seeing the announcements. For the record, there is …
Pricing environmental outcomes, proving additionality, and thinking beyond the price. I recall a brisk morning right at the end of the before-COVID times: February 22, 2020. I was still at Nori and part of the AgLaunch program, living in Memphis, Tennessee. I borrowed my housemate Mitchell’s truck and took myself on a weekend road trip …
I’ll never forget a meeting at a coffee shop in downtown Seattle in 2018. I was less than a year into helping launch Nori, a carbon removal market place, and we were sitting down with Dr. Emma Fuller, then at Granular, to sketch out a potential pilot for paying farmers to increase soil organic carbon. …
Most people think of stakeholder mapping as a communications exercise. Who should we engage? Who needs to be informed? Who has influence? Who might oppose the work? That is useful. But for complex climate, agriculture, water, carbon, and supply-chain initiatives, it is not enough. The harder question is: Who has to do what differently for …
Read more “Your strategy is only as strong as your stakeholder map”
I spend a lot of time with teams building complex climate, sustainability, and environmental market initiatives. They are usually not short on ideas. They have a promising intervention, a pilot, a methodology, a buyer conversation, a funding source, or a stakeholder group they are trying to coordinate. And still, somewhere in the middle of the …
Most environmental initiatives start with the same challenge: How do we make the economics work to drive an environmental outcome? It’s a reasonable question. But it often points in the wrong direction. Recently, while reviewing material from John Fullerton, founder and president of Capital Institute on regenerative economics, I came across a word (coined by …
Read more “The Hardest Part of Climate Programs Isn’t the Intervention or Funding. It’s the System.”
On cost curves, coordination, and the structural conditions for transformation A collaborator recently told me about a conversation with a group of farmers and agronomists discussing emissions-reducing practices. The refrain was immediate and consistent: “If this were profitable, we would have done it already.” It’s a fair statement. Farmers operate on tight margins. They optimize …