Transcript provided by Kensho.

Lindsey Hall: Hi. I'm Lindsey Hall, Head of Thought Leadership at S&P Global Sustainable1.

Esther Whieldon: And I'm Esther Whieldon, a Senior Writer on the Sustainable1 Thought Leadership team.

Lindsey Hall: Welcome to ESG Insider, an S&P Global podcast, where Esther and I take you inside the environmental, social and governance issues that are shaping the rapidly evolving sustainability landscape.

Esther Whieldon: On this podcast, we often hear how different sustainability issues overlap and that tackling any issue requires a holistic approach. Today, we're exploring the intersection of climate change and biodiversity through the lens of the voluntary carbon markets.

Nature and climate change will be in focus at Climate Week NYC later this month, and these topics will be a big focus at 2 upcoming international gatherings this fall, the UN's COP 16 Biodiversity Conference that takes place in Cali, Colombia, followed by the UN's COP29 Climate Change Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Global biodiversity is currently in rapid decline due to climate change and human activities, such as the clearing of land for agriculture and mining. We often hear how both climate and biodiversity are gaining more attention from investors, companies and other stakeholders.

The challenge is that the 2 are still often treated as separate. And one good example is carbon markets, where the primary objective of planting trees is carbon sequestration, and biodiversity is often not a consideration. But there is increasing recognition that biodiversity is inseparable from a robust climate strategy.

Lindsey Hall: Voluntary carbon markets are used by companies to reach their climate targets or an expectation of being subject to related regulations in the future. We published a mini series last month on different kinds of carbon markets, and we'll include a link to that in our show notes in case you'd like to learn more.

The kinds of carbon credits that companies buy in these voluntary markets can take different forms. For example, there are technology-based credits that come from direct air capture, pulling carbon from the atmosphere. And there are also nature-based credits that focus on sequestering carbon in trees, including by planting a new forest or restoring a forest that was previously damaged or destroyed.

Esther Whieldon: These projects typically involve planting huge numbers of one kind of tree that isn't native to the area but grows fast and thus can start to absorb substantial amounts of carbon sooner. But because these trees are not native or diverse, they don't offer the same kind of biodiversity benefits as planting native species do. And as we'll hear, these monoculture forests are also less resilient to disease, pests and climate change. And this matters because, for carbon credits to work, they need to sequester carbon for a long time.

We'll explore the extent to which project developers factor in biodiversity with Dr. Spencer Meyer, Chief Ratings Officer at BeZero Carbon, which provides project-level credit risk assessments for voluntary carbon credits. And if his name sounds familiar to you, it's because we've heard from Spencer in the Carbon Markets mini series.

We'll also talk with Jonathan Kim, the Chief Sustainability Officer and Vice President of Climate Impact at Terraformation, a company that is focused on building carbon credits that improve biodiversity. First up, here's Spencer, who outlines the extent to which biodiversity impacts are factored into decision-making and the design of carbon credits.

Spencer Meyer: There's a lot of talk about this, and so many people want to really link the carbon market with the biodiversity world. And my own background as a conservation scientist and a forester, I've spent a lot of time in my career thinking about that very question.

And here we are in a market that is fundamentally about solving the climate question and it's not inherently about biodiversity and yet it's nearly impossible to disentangle the biodiversity impacts, positive or negative, from a lot of these nature-based solution projects that are happening on the ground.

And so there are a lot of folks out there doing the science to measure biodiversity because you can't build a market around something that you can't measure. And carbon itself in the atmosphere is very complex, and biodiversity is magnitudes more complex than carbon. And one of the key challenges is that carbon itself is fungible globally, whereas biodiversity is very specific to a particular location and ecosystem.

We throw the term biodiversity around very casually, but what we're really talking about is how an individual species in a particular place can fare in their ecosystem and what's its ability to survive through natural resource management, through climate change, through other factors, whether it's human or nature-induced factors on the ground. And so it's quite complex, and there are no easy answers there.

And at the same time, there is a golden opportunity right now as we're investing in climate solutions to be also having a significant uplift for biodiversity around the world. At a minimum, we should be looking to not have negative impacts on biodiversity. But I would say a lot of folks in the industry, including us at BeZero Carbon, are thinking really hard about how we can evaluate biodiversity impacts as well.

Esther Whieldon: We've been talking about carbon credits in this episode, specifically the extent to which carbon credit projects consider biodiversity benefits or impacts. But the conversation is also evolving toward creating a separate market for just biodiversity credits.

For example, this was a big topic of conversation at the World Economic Forum meeting that convened business, government and academia in Davos, Switzerland in January 2024. Here, we heard that the carbon credit market could be a model for the nascent nature or biodiversity credit market.

And more recently, the Australian government on September 2 launched a public consultation on its plan to create a biodiversity credits market or nature repair market. The proposal is to establish a marketplace where individuals and organizations can undertake nature repair projects to generate a tradable biodiversity credit certificate. Part of that work includes the development of biodiversity assessment instruments and methods. Here's Spencer talking about how the biodiversity conversation has evolved in both the carbon market and regarding the creation of tradable stand-alone biodiversity credits in the future.

Spencer Meyer: This field of conservation finance for at least a couple of decades has been looking at new mechanisms to invest into biodiversity directly. And some of that work is starting to come together with the carbon market, and we are seeing some carbon credits being sold with nice-to-have add-on benefits that are often about biodiversity and they make their best effort to measure the biodiversity benefits they're having. But we've also seen some stand-alone biodiversity projects out there that are selling credits from those.

It's really early days for that. There are not really significant standards yet or sort of best practices for doing that. There are not yet widespread agreements on how to actually even measure the biodiversity. For example, you could imagine at one very fine scale, going and doing a field-based inventory to measure the numbers of animals of a particular species of amphibian.

At the other end of the scale, you could imagine using remote sensing to look at the quality of the habitat across an entire continent and think about the probability that, that landscape can support those amphibians. And those are 2 just dramatically different approaches, and there isn't yet a clear answer about how a market should think about measuring this particular benefit it's trying to have.

Esther Whieldon: In our mini series on carbon markets, we heard how things are evolving to address some of the recent challenges and criticisms related to how projects are designed and their benefits are measured. Spencer went on to explain some of the nuanced considerations involved in carbon projects.

Spencer Meyer: I think in nature-based projects, the key element is about maximizing carbon. And there are plants that can sequester carbon at faster rates than the species or the other plants that might live on the ground naturally. And so the question is, do you want to optimize for just the carbon? Or do you want to optimize for the carbon plus maintaining the native habitat?

And so if you're doing plantation management for forest to sequester carbon, the project developer can choose what kind of species they put there. And so whether or not you're using native species or non-native species will impact potentially the biodiversity up ground, but it also has trade-offs on the amount of carbon you can sequester from that.

I think as well, in addition to the biodiversity impacts, we haven't yet the social impacts on the ground. And some of the controversy in the market over the last couple of years has really been these unintended consequences of carbon, in some cases, becoming another extractive industry where the value of the asset itself typically was in the community previously and now some of that value could be taking out.

And so we get into concepts like benefit sharing. So if somebody is making money from selling carbon credits from a forest or an agricultural farmland, how much of that money is going back directly in the community and is going to benefit the community members who have been the stewards of that land?

So that's called benefit sharing. And that is not a biodiversity issue, that is a social and local economic equity issue. And so I think we have to look at -- when we're looking at carbon projects, we have to look at all these beyond carbon benefits, both the biodiversity suite of things as well as the social and economic benefits or potentially negative impacts that are happening in the communities where these projects are happening.

Esther Whieldon: I'm glad you brought that up. That was actually something I was just about to ask about, which is the social side of this. Some of the different providers that I've talked with say that they really have to have buy-in from the local actors, right, and they have to see the benefits on their end as well to making this a viable project.

Spencer Meyer: Yes. And the central premise of additionality is you're trying to change the behavior of what would have happened otherwise. And in the case of a community that's been managing a piece of forest or agricultural lands for a long time, if you're going in and developing a project and that community is not fundamentally changing what they're doing on the ground, whether it is avoiding cutting down the forest or whether it is tweaking and improving the amount of carbon they can store in that forest, if you're not changing that, you're not having a real climate impact.

And so at the end of the day, this is -- we're talking about a carbon market. And so you have to work with those communities to make sure they are incentivized to do the action that is going to lead to the climate benefit. So it could mean leaving a few more trees per hectare on the ground when they're doing their forest management, to store and sequester more carbon, or it might mean reallocating the local economy and jobs system so that people have other employment and other sources of revenue so they are not incentivized to manage the property in a way that was maybe not sequestering as much carbon.

And so you have to think about who the owners are, not only in the legal sense of land ownership, but also in the sort of community ownership and sort of responsibility sense. I think it's easy often in places in the north in the United States, for example, where we have clear land tenure and sort of certain expectations around land ownership. It's not always easy to remember kind of the land ownership, and land tenure system can be quite different in other places in the global south and in developing countries. And so understanding who manages the land and who owns the land and who benefits and how these carbon projects impact that is all really important work.

Esther Whieldon: Spencer said that carbon credit projects need to have buy-in from local communities. This is something I also heard from our next guest, Jonathan Kim of Terraformation. Jonathan starts off by describing what Terraformation does and his role there. Well here, Jonathan mentioned the term hectares. Hectares are a unit of measure of an area of land. One hectare is equivalent to 10,000 square meters or about 2.5 acres. Okay, here's Jonathan.

Jonathan Kim: Terraformation is a native reforestation company. So we are dedicated to addressing climate change by using biodiverse native forest as our mechanism to do that. We develop a bunch of high-quality projects using native species all throughout the world. So we have about, call it, a dozen sites in Hawaii as well as projects in places like Ghana and Colombia and the Philippines. I think in total, we're at about, call it, 30 or so projects all throughout the world.

Esther Whieldon: Great. And tell us a little bit about your role and your background in the company.

Jonathan Kim: Yes. So I get to -- I think, have one of the most fun jobs at Terraformation where I get to work with our corporate clients, foundation partners, family offices, people who have these goals around climate, whether it's about protecting biodiversity or lifting and creating social equities or it's around carbon offset claims.

So I get to work with them and see how we can translate those goals that they have into actionable work that our partners are doing on the ground, which may look like a tree planting program or it may look like sponsoring a se bank for restoration or it may look like a carbon credit purchase and acquisition.

So some way to say like, hey, you are a large corporation who's in a position to do something really amazing or family office or something like that, but you're in a position to do something really amazing. Let me help you, let me show you all of the great opportunities that you can be putting that effort towards.

Esther Whieldon: Great. So for those who may not be familiar with why native plants matter here, why this focus on planting native species? And can you give us a sense of how you define native?

Jonathan Kim: Great question. When people think about reforestation and they see monoculture plantations, places where you're just planting a bunch of eucalyptus or a bunch of pine trees, almost like a timber forest. And one of the things that I think is really important to remember is that when you use native species, you actually take advantage of thousands of years of co-evolution, all designed to help a forest thrive overall.

And when you do it right, it actually makes your job easier because these plants, right, if you take shrubs and grasses and tall trees for overstory and understory, these trees were evolved to take care of each other, right? They attract bees and to pollinate the flowers for you. They attract birds who will eat that fruit and spread the seeds for you, creating new plants.

And as a result, the forest becomes more resilient against things like pest and extreme weather starts doing its own natural regeneration. And if you've ever walked through a plantation forest, it's just night and day different, right? It's quiet. It's like eerily quiet. It's all in rows. You don't see any shrubs and bushes because they're all crowded out by this overstory.

And when you walk into a primary forest or a great restoration project, it's wildly different. You just see all this diversity, this abundance of life, it's moist, it's loud. And that's the type of thing that we're really trying to bring back. And I think, again, there's a ton of benefits just because this is what nature was intended to do. And we get to leverage that. It's not just because it's nice and we like it and it's beautiful, but it really is the most resilient form of reforestation.

Esther Whieldon: Can you connect the dots for us, why this focus on biodiversity? Why does it matter in the bigger picture in connection with climate change?

Jonathan Kim: Well, I think one of the ways to think about it that might be practical for everyday people who are listening to this recording is just that everything that we get comes from nature, right? Think about the products that we use day-to-day. Those things all come from nature. I mean, agricultural products come from nature, some of the like medicines that we get all come from nature. And by protecting biodiversity, you're really protecting those types of things.

Esther Whieldon: Who do you work with on deciding these projects from like the ground level through to like deciding what kind of species to invest in?

Jonathan Kim: One of the things I think that the market is waking up to is that really the people that protect these forest that take care of the forest that do this work are the communities. And that's where we like to start. We'd like to start by finding a local nonprofit or a start-up in a developing country that has already been doing 5 or 10 or 20 years of restoration and agriculture restoration in that space in this community.

And so really, if the community is bought in, if you see signs that they're already doing it perhaps through philanthropic funding or community-based fundraising, that for us is the best sign because it really means that genuinely, this community cares about this project and wants it to succeed.

And at the end of the day, it's their project. So Terraformation, we come in and we help support them by adding in some technical experience and expertise. We help connect them with funders who can help fund their project. But that's really where we like to start.

And then our goal is to really help them scale their ambitions. So they may be doing, call it, 50 or 100 hectares of restoration over the past 5 or 10 years using this community fundraising. How do we help them do 1,000 hectares? How do we help them do really large portions of area that engage the community, that put biodiversity and native species at the center and forefront and then add all these benefits back into their local communities?

Esther Whieldon: Tell me about how you work with the scientific community on this.

Jonathan Kim: Yes. All of this stuff has to be in lockstep. And I think because we're focused on things like native reforestation and native species, there's a lot of literature that goes into understanding what was actually native in this area. So we've got a whole team of ecologists to research all of the paperwork that's out there to say like, hey, what is actually local in this area?

Oftentimes, we'll not only consult international experts, but as well as local experts in places like Ghana to say like, hey, what was the -- what are the right ways in which to grow this type of species and what species actually used to be here based on the local literature and tribal knowledge.

And so I think in terms of science, there's a number of different levels or different ways in which we can think about it both at the international sort of paper publishing level as well as local knowledge and local science. But it's a key part of integrating it into a holistic project.

Esther Whieldon: I'm guessing that just because something was native at one time doesn't mean you can necessarily -- that it's a right solution, right? Like with climate change and temperatures shifting and all of that, how does that affect the calculation?

Jonathan Kim: Yes, that's absolutely right. I think one of the really challenging things about doing these types of projects is that they're designed to last for 40 or more years, right? Like really, we go into this thinking about how can we design a project that will last for 40 years at minimum and really ideally up to 100 years or more.

And to do that, you need to factor in all the different types of science around what will the climate look like decades from now? How are these species going to be properly adapted? And so in some cases, we'll say, okay, the species may not have been as prevalent in this area, but we think it's going to be the right one that's going to be climate adapted.

In other cases, we'll actually remove the species that is native, but we know that it's not going to survive over the long term. So factoring in those types of things as well goes into the design of the project because you don't want to end up planting a bunch of trees and certain types of species that are very important and culturally very valuable to the community, but that you know just aren't going to last another 5 or so years based on the climate projections.

Esther Whieldon: How else do you work with local communities to kind of get buy-in and ensure that the project will last a long time?

Jonathan Kim: Yes. I think this is an area where there honestly are no shortcuts. And I think when you do take shortcuts in this area, that's where you find yourself on some of the news articles out there. And for us, there's this process we call internally or the acronym is FPIC, free prior informed consent. And for us, that could take up to a year just to make sure that the community is well informed, that they're giving consent and that they have plenty of time to really understand what the implications of that consent is before we go in and we do a project.

And sometimes I think organizations can stop at just saying, oh, our implementing partner may have been like a timber company who's going to be planting the trees. They said that they are -- they want this project, and they own access to the land. But when you go a level deeper, right, you talk to even the chiefs or you talk to the people actually in the communities, they're completely unaware or they don't want this project at all. And so we really try to go all the way down to make sure that the people in the community living there who are directly impacted are the ones who understand what's happening, are excited about the project and see benefits that they get.

An example I'll give is our project in Ghana. To be honest, I don't think they really care that much about the fact that we're doing restoration of trees. The reason why we're doing the project is because historically, they've been cutting down the trees for firewood. And when you start to understand, okay, why are they cutting down the trees for firewood? Well, it turns out this is a coastal mangrove restoration site. And this community is actually a fishing community historically. But because of climate change, because of intrusions of seawater, the fish in these freshwater areas and freshwater rivers are actually going away, right, so their ability to farm and capture the fish as part of their livelihood has gone away. And therefore, they are driven to cut down these mangrove trees for firewood.

And so what they're actually really excited about this project is that we're building in dedicated to fish ponds or restoring the mangrove ecosystem, which is actually a natural desalinator, going to help bring back the fish and the population and crab. And so they're actually really excited to be able to go back to their livelihood. But if you said, "Hey, we're going to plant a bunch of trees in here," they said -- not that exciting to them. If you say, "Hey, we're going to actually put food on your table and bring back this fishing population and fishing industry that you really are known for and that's part of your heritage," that's something that they can really get behind. And so they're really excited about the holistic package of protecting the trees because they see how it improves their lives.

Esther Whieldon: How has the amount of attention that's being paid to biodiversity related to carbon credits evolved?

Jonathan Kim: Yes. That's a really good question. In some ways, I feel like at Terraformation, we're so insulated from some of the projects that aren't focusing around biodiversity just because that's who we hang out with, that those are our people. I do see probably more monoculture plantation projects and more eucalyptus plantations in places where it's not native than I would like to see.

But I would say, overall, I do see it starting to change. We've been working with a number of large companies lately and what they are telling us that they're looking for are native projects. They want highest quality biodiverse native projects. The average project out there might have like 7 or 8 species, which I think is better than 1.

At Terraformation, we aim for, call it, 25, sometimes over 70 different species on a project. And I think over time, we'll start to get there. But the vast majority of projects historically have just been monoculture plantation. So the fact that we're trending in this direction where native is becoming more of a conversation and biodiverse is becoming more of the conversation, I think, is good.

Esther Whieldon: What, if any, challenges do you run across when it comes to getting companies' interest in a project before sort of the carbon credits can be claimed. Can you talk about that finance gap?

Jonathan Kim: Yes, we could do a whole podcast just on that finance gap, and I think those challenges. One of the things I think that people are still trying to get comfortable with and that we spend a good amount of time educating people on is just that these projects are expensive.

In some ways, you get what you pay for. And I think some of the controversies over the last couple of years show that when you try to cut corners, right, when you try to rush things along, when you don't factor in things like native species or community engagement and you take these shortcuts, it ends up coming back to you in one way or the other.

And so I would say getting people comfortable with the fact that this stuff is going to cost much more than you're used to, maybe more than you're comfortable with. But then in the long term, it's actually better for you as a corporation or you as a foundation sponsoring this work because it's just going to have fewer issues.

And especially in that financing gap where, okay, maybe some work has been done to vet this out, and now you're looking at putting a couple of million dollars upfront to finance planting, right? Or maybe you're waiting for your credits to come, but you have an exposure of a couple of million dollars.

Whereas before, if you were doing a different type of project, you might be looking at only a couple of hundred thousand dollars. Maybe your costs have doubled or tripled in some cases. That's a hard thing to get comfortable with. It's a hard thing to go back to your investment committee or your Board or your shareholders and say like, hey, this is going to actually, long term, be the better move for us, and it's the right thing to do, not just from a sort of PR standpoint or a moral standpoint, but financially, too, it's going to be better for our business.

And so I think that's the thing that we try to communicate to people is, yes, you're going to end up paying more. And here's what you would be paying in PR, in lawsuits in finding new spot market credits if this -- if you underpaid and you had to go out and try to recoup this or recover somewhere else later on 5, 10 years down the line. And I think when we draw those comparisons, I think people are a little bit more open to it, but there's still a ton of education to be done in the market about the importance of these things.

Esther Whieldon: How does the time line for a native plant ecosystem restoration, forest restoration and when you can claim the carbon credits sort of differ from others? Like is it a challenge that some of these species because they're native may take longer to get to a maturity point where you can start claiming the credit or...

Jonathan Kim: Yes. And this is something that I learned myself as well, just getting into this space. So a couple of things to know. If you're thinking about -- say, compare this to a conservation project, right? You walk into a conservation area and the trees are already there. So really, your job is to evaluate how much carbon is being sequestered there, how many trees are there, et cetera, and then prove additional sequestration on top of that.

So that might take you a year, 2 years to be able to do that because you need to wait some amount of time to be able to say, okay, some time has elapsed, more carbon has been sequestered into this area. But the trees are already there, right? It's very easy to see that trees are here.

In a restoration project, we go in and there's nothing, right? These are deforested areas that have been cut down for cattle grazing or fire or logging or things like that. And so we go in and it's oftentimes a barren wasteland.

And from there, we have to -- Step 1 is really build the infrastructure, assuming we can do the project and the community is all on board and all those kinds of things. But in terms of actually getting trees into the ground, we have to build the infrastructure at times.

This might mean setting up nurseries and seed banks. This means collecting the seeds, right, because a native project needs native trees and we grow them from seed to ensure genetic diversity. So we actually have to go out and collect the seeds with the community, right, teach them how to do that, bring the seeds into the project site, put them into the nursery.

And so from Day 1, you're looking at about 5 years out before you can actually start to see any carbon credits coming out of the project because that's how long it's going to take just to get the infrastructure, start doing some of the planting and then actually get the trees to be large enough where it's worth measuring and seeing if there's any carbon stock in that project. And that's tough, I think, for a project to say or for a corporate to say, "Hey, yes, I'm going to give you a good amount of money and 5 years from now, I'm going to hope to get some type of return or some type of indication." I think sometimes that could be a big pill to swallow.

So I think a couple of things. I think the overall majority of this could possibly get solved or would feel a lot better if you had some predictability, right? We're okay waiting years for certain types of investments to mature. Think of a certificate of deposit, right, a CD. Average citizens can put money into a CD and not see anything back out for a year or 2 years or 5 years or 10 years.

And why are we okay with that, right? Why are we okay locking up money for that amount of time without seeing anything back for that amount of time? It's because we feel like it's trustworthy, right? It's something that we know you just put money in and you get money back out. There's no risk involved.

And so I think seeing a number of these projects play through where an investor can say, I'll put money into this project, and I feel pretty darn confident that I'm going to get money back out or I'm going to get some kind of value or impact back out on the other side of the project. I think if we see that cycle go through a few times, that could help a lot.

I think the other piece of it is really on the data and transparency. So while I'm waiting, am I just waiting there in the dark and hoping something happens, hoping I didn't just get scammed or make the wrong choice here. I think the more that we can be providing information and data and updates to the people that are taking the risk here, I think that would go a long way as well.

At Terraformation, for instance, we actually created our own in-house software to project manage these sites. So as they're doing planting over the number of years or as they're collecting seeds, we actually track all of that just for our own ability to project manage these sites remotely. And actually, for our partners who are investing in these projects, we can actually show that same information.

So I could tell you as you invested in a project, I can tell you exactly how many seeds, right, they have collected over the last 30 days or so. I can tell you how many seedlings they have in the nursery. I can tell you their survival rate through that process.

And so what that means is that I can tell you pretty confidently, hey, I think they're actually going to hit their goals around planting. I think they're actually on schedule because of all the upstream steps that they have to go through, right? They have enough seeds that then make it into the nursery for planting and having seedlings and here's their progress actually getting those out into the field.

So it's kind of like why do we have confidence that our package from Amazon is going to get here? It's well, you can look it up on USPS or wherever and see every step along the journey. That's the type of confidence that we want to be able to give to these people who are investing in these projects.

Esther Whieldon: Today, we heard how most nature-based carbon projects are not designed with local biodiversity in mind. And yet Spencer said, we have a "golden opportunity" right now as we're investing in climate solutions to be also having a significant uplift for biodiversity around the world.

Lindsey Hall: We also heard how a biodiverse forest is more resilient to pest diseases and climate change impacts.

Esther Whieldon: Yes. And a through line for both biodiverse carbon projects and the more traditional ones is the importance of having buy-in and showing benefits to local communities. What Jonathan said about replanting mangrove forests in Ghana, for example, is how it can help desalinate the water and thus allow the fishing industry to thrive again.

Lindsey Hall: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ESG Insider. If you like what you heard today, please subscribe, share and leave us a review wherever you get your podcast.

Esther Whieldon: And a special thanks to our agency partner, The 199. See you next time.

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