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 …
10 strategic frameworks for clarity, alignment, and follow-through Sustainability programs rarely fail because teams don’t care or lack expertise. They fail because direction is under-specified in environments that demand precision. Across sustainable agriculture, supply-chain, and climate programs, the same frictions show up: Internal beliefs collide with external requirements Pilots proliferate without clear exit criteria Uncertainty …
Read more “Designing Sustainability Programs That Hold Up Under Pressure”
When the problem isn’t the practice, it’s the translation If you’re trying to sell environmental products in agriculture: credits, lower-CI grain, “climate-smart” programs, resilience loans, etc. you’ve probably felt this: Buyers say they want lower risk and better stories Farmers are doing real, measurable things The math can work …and yet the deals stall, shrink, or …
A Sustainable Agriculture Séance How We Know When a Model Works, and Why We Need to Learn in Public At the Sustainable Agriculture Summit this year, I found myself imagining a sustainable agriculture séance, a playful way to summon lessons from past programs, pilots, and ideas.We rush forward so quickly that we rarely pause to …
Why the do-ers need a first principles map before they choose a platform, protocol, pathway, or market. The Pattern We All See (But Rarely Name) In 2021, at my last day at Nori, a voluntary carbon removal market start-up I helped co-found, I wrote a reflection called Do it. Prove it. Sell it: My Evolving …
Read more “The Anatomy of an Ecosystem Service Intervention”
When MMRV Becomes the Mission, Everyone Loses There’s nothing inherently wrong with box-checking. Standards, audits, protocols, and data templates exist for good reasons: comparability, accountability, and basic assurance. They keep organizations in the game and create alignment amongst stakeholders. But somewhere along the way, the environmental world made a quiet but consequential mistake: We turned …
Companies that rely on agriculture, whether as brands, suppliers, financiers, or innovators, increasingly recognize that long-term business health depends on land health. But identifying where to invest in agricultural sustainability remains one of the most complex puzzles facing corporate strategy teams. It’s not because the solutions are unknown. We know which practices improve soil health, …
Read more “Investing in Agricultural Supply Chains for Real Impact”
In a world increasingly built on data, the question of who controls it—and how—isn’t abstract. It’s fundamental. That’s especially true in agriculture, where producers generate massive volumes of data: from yield monitors to soil tests, grazing patterns to irrigation schedules. But most of that data ends up fragmented, unused, or captured by third parties with misaligned incentives. Agricultural …
Read more “Why Agricultural Data Co-ops Might Matter More Than You Think”