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 …
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 …