 February 2023 On Biodiversity Credit Futures w/ Jonah Wittkamper AI Summary Bullet Points
(from the transcript) JW: Realizing that there was a spectrum, that for every family in the world that gives away a million dollars a year there are 500 other families that could afford to do that but have not yet started to figure out how. - JW: The Amazon Investor Coalition is creating the reforestation economy and this is what really dovetails with the Anastasia movement. - JW: In many cases you just have to have the best project out there that, as you mentioned, is solving all the problems of the world simultaneously - having a program or a series of programs that appeal to all three of these (funding) interests. - JW: The capital markets are in a panic, they realize that the world is reaching this Tipping Point when it comes to biodiversity and deforestation and if we overrun that Tipping Point then we will lose the fight against climate change. And we need pollinators in order to keep these plants alive and if we destroy too many habitats, the pollinators, the birds the bees the insects they're going to disappear - there already is massive insect collapse and massive amphibian collapse. JW: So, Kin's Domains that are integrated with biodiversity and agroforestry represent a strategy for carbon sequestration and greater biological diversity and global food security and the restoration of the water cycle because trees are much better for the water cycle than low-lying annual monocultures. So advancing this new economic pattern is also becoming, more and more every day, super interesting to the global capital markets because there's all of this accumulated wealth trapped in oil futures and the biggest industry of the future is going to be biodiversity preservation and carbon. - JW: So a lot of money can be made through nature restoration and through economic activities in partnerships with standing forests when there are accompanying pledges not to cut down those forests - that's where in my analysis the world's greatest future economic frontier is - in the future you will be able to make a heck of a lot more money preserving and restoring nature than cutting nature down, and unless you're at the forefront of making that happen in your entrepreneurship you're going to miss the boat and your family that has a lot of assets tied up in oil is going to lose it in a couple decades. - JW: Right now there is way more money pledged for biodiverse rich carbon removal than is available - the high integrity carbon products projects are in way under supply. 10 years ago - way oversupply prices - way down now. Every day more and more corporations are saying, "I'm going to become carbon zero - I'm going to become carbon zero" - carbon for carbon alone is actually a dangerous story. - JW: The whole anti-carbon offset movement has been pointing out there are flaws in the system - rather than carbon being in the lead of this new market development biodiversity should be in the lead of this whole market development process, so the UN made a call to action during the convention on biological diversity saying biodiversity markets is where the future is - how many biodiversity credits are out there - there's an organization called the Biodiversity Credit Alliance which is brand new it's got a couple dozen organizations involved. The Anastasia Foundation should be one of those. You guys could be at the very Leading Edge of Designing a new global economic system that really worships biodiversity over extractive culture. - G: But basically if we were able to present the idea of kin's domains and settlements - show the scale of the movement, show the fact that all these families are going to be doing this all on their own - would this be a vehicle for people to say instead of doing carbon offsets they're investing in these settlements or this way of life and these projects to increase biodiversity - to get all these benefits. - JW: Yes, the real opportunity here is to get involved in the design of the new markets. - JW: There are several dozen companies that are designing drones that can fly around and measure biodiversity - the industry is following to make these biodiversity markets viable and they're underdeveloped, but there's billions of dollars that is already pledged to make them valuable for the future, so getting involved in the design of those is a way to lead the process of that new wealth creation opportunity. I'll just give one statistic - last year the powers that be that are involved in carbon financing made some conclusions - carbon financing projects that exist in a kind of isolation are not nearly as effective as carbon projects that are part of a jurisdictional or statewide wide strategy because then instead of just favoring the best carbon project in one small area you favor a constellation of them working together with State policies for enforcement and things like that in the process. - JW: The opportunities are there to basically make these new markets, make them high quality, make them high integrity and to lead to lots of New Wealth opportunities, and the financial markets want to do it as well and don't really know how so they need partners like the Anastasia Movement to get involved in the process and to design the new portfolio. - JW: If you guys can aggregate a couple hundred families that can have these great biodiversity outcomes and they can work in tandem and measure the process you might be able to qualify for a multi-billion dollar agroforestry bond that has biodiversity credits and carbon credits embedded in it. - JW: You do that by getting involved in the process of designing it. - JW: You can name the largest banks in the world - Citibank UPS HSBC - they all have staff inside their teams thinking 'I don't know how to do this biodiversity thing, how am I going to set out this amount of land, how am I going to find 500 forest entrepreneurs who will pledge to do reforestation and biodiversity, I don't know how to do this, how am I going to do the accounting for it' - it's possible to arrive at the table with those people and I can introduce some of them and talk with them about the opportunity. - WW: But if you move to the Anastasia model it's all about being local it's all about morals and family and the stewardship of your hectare and to scale that into a community - that model is hands down going to be far superior than just oh we're going to leave that forest exactly how it is and let it grow how it is and you know it's been ignored and if you continue to ignore it it's not gonna grow into the civilization that we know we can create as we include ourselves with nature. - JW: It is much smarter to protect than to just reforest because many of these trees are hundreds of years old they've got hundreds of years of carbon in them and so it's very interesting if you are spending a thousand dollars on regenerating that cattle pasture that was cut down for cattle years ago or you're spending a thousand dollars on creating a permanent Nature Preserve or helping an Indigenous Community get sovereignty and land ownership - that thousand in Nature Preserve Indigenous Sovereignty is gonna be bang for buck better for the carbon story better philanthropic spend etc. That reforestation process can follow a for-profit model - making the standing forest more valuable than the cut forest is challenging - there are business models that can do that. - JW: Indigenous people are the most effective at preserving nature and therefore they really need to be at the front of this new biodiversity market design and preservation and rewarding process and that's why many of the largest map makers who spend decades developing their strategy - when they enter the carbon market they're like "oh no the present strategy is not the new technology the present strategy needs to be prioritizing indigenous participation in these international events" so that this narrative that they want to cut it down for us is invisible or is out competed by the Narrative that actually indigenous people want to preserve things and that's bang for buck right - we have limited money in the world, bang for buck the best thing we need for our sustainable future and our biodiversity preservation is leadership of indigenous people and preservation of existing lands that are super biodiverse. - G: So what I hear you saying is how can we present this model that is so regenerative so biodiverse so really not that expensive and laborious to manage or even do, to these new markets these investors and these people that want to see biodiversity in the future. - JW: It's valuable to look at it as a way of making money simply because of where money is available. The American philanthropic spend per year is 400 billion dollars but the gross national product is, I don't know what, 20 trillion dollars so the investment money is dozens of times if not hundreds - depending on your geography - hundreds of times larger than the philanthropic money in terms of an individual family, like I've got a house and an urban center and I can sell and have a little bit of money available and I can survive financially by going to a Kins Domain, whether it's philanthropic or for-profit doesn't need to enter the equation of that family - but if you really want scale and you want to mobilize, not a million product strategies but instead a billion, then if you make a for-profit strategy out of it and you're able to demonstrate that model then a bank might be able to give you a billion dollar loan or an operating business that pledges to buy the next three decades of sustainably harvested wood that you're going to produce or if you're able to get Home Depot to sign a long-term purchase agreement that can be turned into a bond - a corporate bond or an agroforestry bond - or something like that. JW: And so we need the people who design interesting products to get involved in this process and as the new biodiversity money and carbon money becomes available it's going to sweeten the deal and make those things that could be financially self-sustaining actually far more successful because the Future Money wants to chase a biologically diverse and rich future. - JW: So by designing these future farms in collaboration with a guaranteed buyer - that social responsible food company that wants to diversify a cereal with hazelnuts - that you guys are going to produce in five/ten years from now work in concert - you help the many companies fearful that the carbon bomb that's coming is going to eliminate - the sea level is going to rise, it's going to eliminate all the future markets that it has present access to, and so if you develop a long-term strategy with them about a business that is preserving nature and sequestering carbon and ensuring food security for that region, they're gonna abandon their monocultures and join your polycultures and everyone's going to make more money in the process. - JW: Kin's domain or not kin's domain, if you can aggregate agroforestry entrepreneurs as a team to do things in a regionally intelligent way with some carbon and biodiversity outcomes wrapped in whatever brand you want it's going to be attractive to the carbon offset market. - G: This model is the ultimate answer for food security, it's two and a half acres every family they're growing this huge diversity and then the trade and the economy that developed in that Community in Russia. We need to put the proper offer in front of the proper people in order to start tapping into that because our options are way broader than we think. - JW: If you develop it as a venture thing that has infinite scaling possibilities and it has some technology involved that makes it easier for farmers to monitor what they've got going on then you may be able to get that high risk outsize money that is really looking for scale. There's actually a startup for agroforestry that is super relevant for that called Propagate Ventures that you chould look up because there may be a business partnership opportunity with them. - G: But those same people if they were to take their plans and put it into something that they can present to any of these groups that you're talking about here then there's really, with persistence they could really have a shot at like getting the money and the resources that they need and it's we don't necessarily need to just look to the government or all these other entities to get us these things and so I hope everybody who's listening can start to broaden your horizons and I'm encouraging you to think creatively about how you can fulfill your plans because there's a million ways to do it, it just takes careful presentation of what you have to do and getting it in front of the right people, like there's tons of people who are willing to help it's just they don't know about it and they need to be informed and educated. - G: I think that this would be a lot more appealing and viable to people if they know that there's a giant amount of people who want to do this. It's like if we give you the funds and the access and the help and all these things then the supply of people who are willing to fulfill these plans is virtually infinite and I think that's pretty appealing to people who are willing to fund and help these things. - JW: May the Anastasia movement become the tip of the spear of new agroforestry entrepreneurship and wealth creation and financial product design so that you can seed the communities of consciousness and spiritual curiosity and religious devotion around the world to adopt the same patterns of human preservation and nature preservation that you guys are propagating. Addendum: California Tropical Forest Standard We're in the very early ages of many brand new industries that the world has never seen before and when many things get started there's a lot of chaos and things go wonky but theoretically they continually iterate and the voluntary carbon market is a space for that to happen. The compliance carbon market which is hundreds of times larger, which is basically the regulated carbon market by a state - like a cap and trade system or something like that - represent a way to take the patterns of high integrity that you figured out and to really scale them - and so just for those of you in California - California did develop a protocol for a high integrity carbon market that can finance tropical forest preservation, it's called the California Tropical Forest Standard and it has built within it strategies for FPIC (free prior and informed consent), this is the way that you're supposed to appropriately involve indigenous people in the consultation of the design of carbon products in terms of future advocacy and if you're caring about these carbon offset markets please push California to integrate its California tropical core standard within the state's cap and trade system, the dividends that can feed the Amazon rainforest are super needed and high integrity. |