At the end of 2022, 200 countries signed the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework – what some have called the “Paris Agreement for Nature”. It calls on signatories to work together to enhance the resilience of natural ecosystems and to turn the tide on species extinction rates through the setting of national targets, the establishment of disclosure regimes and the creation of innovative financing mechanisms – such as biodiversity credits. While there has been some subsequent positive international progress on this front driven by the UK and others, most biodiversity credit markets remain in very nascent stages. In this episode, HASI’s investment team lead for nature-based solutions Tim Mooradd speaks with Tim Male and Ryan Sarsfield of the Environmental Policy Innovation Center (EPIC). They discuss the imperative of protecting and valuing biodiversity, the existing and potential buyers for biodiversity credits, lessons learned from other environmental markets and much more. Note also that the HASI Foundation recently provided a grant to EPIC for its work at the intersection of climate action and social justice.
At the end of 2022, 200 countries signed the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework – what some have called the “Paris Agreement for Nature”. It calls on signatories to work together to enhance the resilience of natural ecosystems and to turn the tide on species extinction rates through the setting of national targets, the establishment of disclosure regimes and the creation of innovative financing mechanisms – such as biodiversity credits. While there has been some subsequent positive international progress on this front driven by the UK and others, most biodiversity credit markets remain in very nascent stages.
In this episode, HASI’s investment team lead for nature-based solutions Tim Mooradd speaks with Tim Male and Ryan Sarsfield of the Environmental Policy Innovation Center (EPIC). They discuss the imperative of protecting and valuing biodiversity, the existing and potential buyers for biodiversity credits, lessons learned from other environmental markets and much more.
Note also that the HASI Foundation recently provided a grant to EPIC for its work at the intersection of climate action and social justice.
Links:
Environmental Policy Innovation Center
Biodiversity Credits Gain Traction but Questions Persist
Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon
Episode recorded January 10, 2024
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Chad Reed: I'm Chad Reed.
Hillary Langer: I'm Hillary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I'm Gil Jenkins.
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Ryan Sarsfield: The idea that we can't put a price on these things, that we can't put a price or a value on nature in any which way. That it's priceless, that it transcends economics and markets which are so tawdry and so on. I agree with some of that philosophically. I wish we lived in a world that valued nature to that extent, but we actually do put a price on nature all the time, and too often, the price is zero.
Chad: At the end of 2022, 200 countries signed the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework – what some have called the “Paris Agreement for Nature”. It calls on signatories to work together to enhance the resilience of natural ecosystems and to turn the tide on species extinction rates through the setting of national targets, the establishment of disclosure regimes and the creation of innovative financing mechanisms – such as biodiversity credits. While there has been some subsequent positive international progress on this front driven by the UK and others, most biodiversity credit markets remain in very nascent stages.
In this episode, HASI’s investment team lead for nature-based solutions Tim Mooradd speaks with Tim Male and Ryan Sarsfield of the Environmental Policy Innovation Center (EPIC). They discuss the imperative of protecting and valuing biodiversity, the existing and potential buyers for biodiversity credits, lessons learned from other environmental markets and much more.
I will also note that the HASI Foundation recently provided a grant to EPIC for its work at the intersection of climate action and social justice.
Tim Mooradd: Tim and Ryan, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure to have you both. I'm excited to be leading and interviewing this on the first time on the podcast. I'm particularly excited to discuss such a promising topic. My goal here is to give you both a chance to explain biodiversity credits with a holistic and fair focus. First off, Tim, how did you find your way into this climate space?
Tim Male: I had four much older brothers, and one of them had discovered this project where a team of scientists were trying to put nature back on a former military installation, an island in New York that had been completely paved by the army during World War II. I get to spend 10 years, starting from the age of 7, watching birds and wildlife and habitat come back on this place that was literally a concrete desert. It just convinced me that there's so much more we can fix in our world if we try.
Tim Mooradd: That's great. Ryan, same to you. How did you find your way into the climate space?
Ryan Sarsfield: I started a lot like a lot of folks curious about the natural world. I was always the kid at the edge of the pond looking for frogs and whatever else I'd see there. My dad is a retired biology teacher, so that led me to ecology and evolution in college, some field research experiences, and then eventually, I realized I was probably not going to go into academic science directly. I'd be a better fit for conservation and management. It's been, in retrospect, a logical evolution ever since. A range of land and habitat issues that tie together biodiversity and climate. I worked on tropical deforestation for quite a long time, forest monitoring, forest carbon, and now biodiversity crediting. It's all making sense, all in the right direction.
Tim Mooradd: Tim, you founded EPIC, which stands for the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, in 2017. What is EPIC and why was and is it still necessary, and what is EPIC focusing on today?
Tim Male: I'm a really impatient person, and I have spent a lot of time working at other nonprofits, working at government, state, local, and federal. Before founding EPIC, I spent a little time working in the Obama administration and just realized I wanted someplace where that impatience was really center to the mission. There's a big difference between the place where you work, Tim, which is there's a constant appetite for sales and deals, and you need to get to the endpoint to get paid, and the nonprofit world or the government world, where that's not true.
With EPIC, by putting speed into our mission, we're trying to build that kind of impatience into the work. We need action on climate, we need action on conservation, on water quality faster than we've been doing it for the last 10 to 50 years. For us and for me, we needed a new organization that does advocacy, analysis, and advisory services that could fill that gap. It's been reassuring to see it grow. We have about 30 staff now and an impact across the spaces that we've tried to work.
Tim Mooradd: Yes, it's excellent. We've witnessed the growth and it's impressive and promising. Congrats to you on how much your group has grown. Ryan, so speaking of growth, you recently joined EPIC as senior advisor for biodiversity markets. It's a new position at EPIC. Tell us why you joined the organization and what you're focusing on.
Ryan Sarsfield: Sure. Yes. Like a lot of folks I talk to now, they've heard of biodiversity crediting. It's in the air almost everywhere and folks are learning about it. At a certain stage, I was getting curious about it from afar, although it seemed quite a logical fit for me given my past experience. It seemed like a challenging way to go about things, but for the first time, a direct way to value biodiversity. What I had been aiming to work on all along, not via a proxy, say, of deforestation, although that's pretty good, or other kinds of habitat things, or forest carbon likewise, that goes a lot of the way there, but it's not directly valuing the biodiversity that we wanted.
Looking at it that way, I think that working on agricultural supply chains, forest carbon, all these different pieces, how can we actually shift investment into biodiversity directly and have it take its place among other resources that we get from land? How is it going to compete against ag, timber, carbon? EPIC turned out to be the right place to do that. What we're doing, what I'm focusing on, is trying to get that market into reality. Working with partners, developers, investors, landowners, working on all these different methodologies that are coming about, trying to get a good consensus on best practices, and get actual projects on the ground as proofs of concept to make the market a reality. That's what we're aiming to do.
Tim Mooradd: That's excellent. I think we've now said the word biodiversity enough where we're at the point of the interview where we should define it and begin to talk about it. Ryan, what is biodiversity, and why should we care about it?
Ryan Sarsfield: Sure, yes, there's a lot of academic definitions. The term has been around for about 40 years now. To me, fundamentally, it's life. It's life and its full range of variation across plants, animals, fungi, everything else. The differences between species, their ecological relationships, all of it. Sometimes I get grandiose about it. I say it's life on Earth, but that's what we're talking about. We as humans are part of it. Our well-being is completely dependent on it, and our economy is totally dependent on it.
We've been late in recognizing those kind of simple truths. It sounds like a mantra that comes from certain parts of the environmental world, but it's entirely true from an economic perspective. I think biodiversity is starting to pop up as a genuine risk and opportunity in the business world.
Tim Mooradd: Yes, we certainly hear the same. It brings us to the topic of making a market out of this, so to speak, and that would be through the form of biodiversity credits. Would you like to talk to us a little bit about the concept of biodiversity credits and what sort of problem they solve?
Tim Male: I'm happy to jump in there, Tim. Credit is fundamentally just a unit of currency, like a dollar. One question is, can you create a unit of the environment? The answer is yes. It's complicated, but the answer is yes. The other is that it has to be a unit that has value, that somebody wants. Just adding to what Ryan said before, what are the reasons that businesses, that government is interested in units of biodiversity right now? One is just because of social and cultural change. People value nature. National Geographic, David Attenborough, people don't want to lose a tenth of all the species on Earth in the next couple of decades.
It has a set of social resonance, but it also increasingly has business relevance. People realize that the diversity of life that Ryan talked about is pretty critical for a company's products, for a company's workforce, for their future, and the innovative space that they're able to operate in the future. You've got a unit that's increasingly valued for lots of reasons, and a science and a practice that's rapidly figuring out how to partition it into nice, tradable chunks. Biodiversity credits are relevant and interesting now, in part, because we've had so much action on climate and carbon crediting.
Companies increasingly all around the world, and governments and countries too, are trying to figure out what kind of impact do they have on global greenhouse gas emissions, and what can they do to avoid that, and then to offset it. Offset it with things that store, sequester, otherwise create a benefit for the planet's atmosphere. That same need is what's evolving in the biodiversity space. Whether it's European financial regulators or maybe the US SEC or other actions around the world and just voluntary commitments, people are looking for a way to invest in units of biodiversity gain or improvement or preservation to offset or compensate for some harm that they or their supply chain causes.
Tim Mooradd: I think there is, as you mentioned, Tim, there is plenty of parallels and lessons to be learned from other offset or compensatory credit markets, and I think we can get into those maybe in more detail later in the conversation here. Before we get there, maybe, Ryan, you can answer the question of-- and Tim touched on it a bit, but who are the primary buyers of biodiversity credits and why?
Ryan Sarsfield: It is the big question. It's the question I get probably more than anything else from folks who work in the environmental world or outside of it. They say, who's going to buy these things? It seems sometimes far-fetched because it's so novel and people think of all the different ways nature's already valued and they think, "Oh, we probably got it covered." We beg to differ on that front. It's a mix of carrots and sticks. As Tim said, there's a path laid down related to emissions and work on climate, where it became a primary business concern for a lot of industries, and they've acted on it slowly but surely.
Disclosure became a thing slowly but surely, and there grew all of these different rationales for actually acting on climate and treating it with that due seriousness it deserves. Same thing's happening to biodiversity. There's stakeholder pressure from across the board. Investor pressure, in particular, is going to be really an interesting lever. We're seeing it. It's not universal, but in the EU, for example, CSRD, similar initiatives, and anyone working multi-nationally, things like TNFD and other efforts where disclosing biodiversity impacts is becoming the norm, and it's going to hit some folks out of left field.
It seems a bit further along than, I think, a lot of climate-related folks are thinking at this stage, but it's definitely coming, whether we like it or not. It's oftentimes actual regulation. In England, for example, they have a biodiversity net gain policy that's currently being implemented, and that will require a genuine increase in biodiversity as a net product of what they're doing in their business work. There's all these different business risks, dependencies. If you're dependent on pollination, and a whole lot of the world's agricultural economy is, you're going to take extra care to ensure that pollinators, especially wild pollinators, are surviving and flourishing because your business depends on it.
Just as companies who thought, "Oh, water risk is a big thing for us because our factories run on clean water," they will then invest in clean water, not as a philanthropic effort to do good, but because their balance sheet actually depends on it.
Tim Male: Let me just add to that. Some of the sources US, there's a multi-billion dollar per year market for habitat credits, for wetlands and streams, because of regulations. Ryan just mentioned the new regulation in England, so any impact to any habitat by, let's say, a new housing development or a new railroad line is going to have to be offset with biodiversity credits. Australia, at a state-by-state level, has rules. The country of Colombia has rules, Germany has rules, so those are all the regulated sources of biodiversity credits.
Then in this financial disclosure space, you're going to have a bunch of new demand, and there's not demand yet. It's trivial amount, basically, but the kind of bet is, the bets we certainly make and feel confident in, is that within five years, there'll be hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions occurring from this financial regulation-driven need for biodiversity credits. Then there'll always be some purely voluntary stuff, some stuff that people are just doing because their employees like a nice ribbon cutting on a project, and they think it's important as part of their brand and their value proposition.
In the financial disclosure space, I'm old enough to have watched the Brady Bunch as a kid, and there's this episode where Peter Brady throws the ball and breaks a vase. It's not good enough to just disclose, "Hey, I broke the vase." You also have to do something to compensate for it, to fix it. Although the finance rules are only requiring people to describe how much did you break, it immediately generates pressure for people to say, "Well, how much are you avoiding," and, "Okay, you haven't avoided some of that damage. What are you doing about it?" That's where it seems like the biggest new market will--
Tim Mooradd: Right, and then the complicated questions of, did you rebuild the same vase? Is the new vase better than the old vase? Is it actually replacing the old vase? We can get into all those questions later, too. I think when we talk about criticisms and considerations around biodiversity credits, because I think it will make this-- people will be better served by the conversation when we talk about those elements, too. Before we get into that, so we talked about, what's biodiversity, what are biodiversity credits, and who buys them and why?
That leads you to the question of, okay, well, that means you need to build a-- what I'll call a biodiversity project that generates these questions, and you'll forgive me for coming out of HASI, referring to everything as projects that get built. One method could be for the government to just fund these biodiversity projects directly. A second would be for a nonprofit to fund the project directly. Perhaps a third, which I'd really love to focus the conversation or at least this question on, is a market-based mechanism called Pay for Success, really a form of public-private partnership.
Tim, you've done a lot of work in advocating for Pay for Success as a model to build these and other kinds of nature-based projects. What is Pay for Success? How does it work? Why is it good? Maybe what are some weaknesses? Please feel free to walk us through it.
Tim Male: I'll just relate it to what we all do every day in terms of how we get stuff. The three examples I'll give are Girl Scout cookies, a house painting project, and a restaurant. Girl Scout cookies, somebody shows up at your door, they tell you what they're selling, you give them money, and weeks later, they come back with the product. You have a pretty good high level of confidence you're going to get what you bought, including because you bought it the last 10 years running.
A house painter, you sign a contract with somebody, you give them 10% down. The day they show up before they paint the house, you give them the rest of the money. You're at risk. If the project doesn't work out that day and over the next week, you've already paid them the money. The last is restaurants. You walk into a restaurant, you order your food, you get your food, you eat your food, you're ready to go, and only at that moment do you hand over cash.
I give those examples because government has been doing the first two for a long time when it comes to environment and conservation work, and the private sector has been participating in that work. What's really been missing is the third category, the restaurant-like approach, where the business, the business owner, the entity providing, in this case, biodiversity results, takes the risk to produce the product to meet some specification, delivers it to you, and only then gets compensation. It's not a replacement for those. There are two approaches, just like we need them in the rest of our economy and lives. It's a really powerful complementary approach.
You can have specialists who know where to produce value in nature, go out and produce that value in nature with backing from investment and other sources of capital, and deliver it to the market in a way that has a really clear value proposition. I think what we've seen in the carbon space, we can get more into this, is a lot of buyers who have bought in advance, and then it turns out the product isn't what they thought it was, and they see themselves in the front page of a newspaper.
What Pay for Success is offering to private sector buyers, government buyers, taxpayers at large, is the ability to keep yourself out of those headlines. To only buy products when the product is delivered. We've seen a lot of awesome results in that space for things like wetland restoration, for water quality improvements across the environmental space. Again, those are large areas of existing investment and has a huge potential to play a role in biodiversity crediting.
Tim Mooradd: Building off of that metaphor, just like a restaurant, what that means then is the restaurant is not being paid for the food until they've served it to the customer and the customer's consumed it. It means that the restaurant needs to find a way to finance and fund its own operations to produce the food prior to serving it. I think that's what a lot of these developers are faced with now, too, which is a financing need and pay for success.
This is because you're shifting the performance risk from the government back on to the private sector to say, "Bring me a final product." What it costs you to bring it to me is now your problem. You bring the financing need back into the private sector. I think it opens up an opportunity for public-private partnership on the investing and financing side as well as the project construction side. We know that this is a model that works in basically every other infrastructure and project development market.
I think it'd be fair to think it would work here as well, and we have examples of it. You broke a vase. Now you've done something to repair the vase or perhaps build another vase elsewhere. Ryan, what are some criticisms of biodiversity credits from the environmental community? Which would you say are warranted and which are not when you think about these criticisms and considerations?
Ryan Sarsfield: Yes, it gets pushed back in lots of interesting ways. One that pops up in lots of different contexts is more philosophical, I think, than anything else. The idea that we can't put a price on these things, that we can't put a price or a value on nature in any which way. That it's priceless, that it transcends economics and markets which are so tawdry and so on. I agree with some of that philosophically. I wish we lived in a world that valued nature to that extent, but we actually do put a price on nature all the time, and too often, the price is zero.
Looking at in land markets, you've got timber, mining and oil, real estate, every other human endeavor operating out there in the world, doing what they do, extract resources, buying and trading land. The natural environment, if not otherwise formally protected, it tends to fall to the wayside. Valuing it directly is the way to stack its proper value, which is huge up against all the other natural resource values.
I worked for a long time on deforestation in South America in supply chains for soybeans and beef and the value put on biodiversity directly is quite low, and the value put on land for soybeans and the land for pasture, for cattle, and land speculation, is quite high, relatively, and we see the effects of that. We get more and more deforestation. Similar arguments to forest carbon where if you value the carbon, value anything on the landscape that we want correctly, and have a good market for it, we'll get better outcomes. That's what we're up against in some ways, but I think it's better to have a value that's positive than a value that's not even on the charts at all.
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Tim Male: Some people argue that if we let people buy nature as a replacement for the damage that they're causing, that government or society at large is going to allow more projects that damage nature to happen. The concept is like, if we just said no, "No, you can't get a permit for that," that that would be a better result. The problem with, the reason that's not a valid argument is because there's no evidence from anywhere in the world at any time that when government is faced with issuing permits for the economic prosperity of its people and not issuing permits in a binary way, the government chooses the latter most of the time other than a small number of exceptions. That's often the argument.
If we just say no, government won't issue the permit for the mine, or the houses, or the new school, the project won't happen. That's not the choice. That's the false choice. The real choice is, does government issue the permit without doing anything about the biodiversity damage? We've been doing that for 100 years, or do we say, "You actually have to avoid impacts, and then if you have impacts, you have to offset them."
Where we then also get caught up is that things like fixing a desert or fixing a really slow-growing, old-growth ecosystem, that stuff is still super hard. Scientists can't say that we have a recipe for putting those places back or fixing ones that have been damaged. We have lots of other ecosystems where we have a really good track record of bringing a lot, maybe not pristine state, but bringing a lot of nature back, and that's the space where we need to really push this argument offsets are the best possible outcome in a situation where government is looking at growing population, growing prosperity, trying to help people adjust their daily lives with a whole set of other values.
Tim Mooradd: Certainly, which would bring me to my next question, which is other offset markets. We've learned a lot from other credit markets, both compulsory markets like the wetlands mitigation market in the US, the Section 404 market, and voluntary like the voluntary carbon market that's emerging and really emerged in the US, not even really so nascent anymore. How can we port lessons that we've learned in these offset credit markets? You can draw the distinction between the ones that are required by regulation and the others that are voluntary. Now that we have more of a greenfield, bad pun, to work with on biodiversity credits, what lessons would you apply?
Tim Male: I'll let Ryan jump in as well. One from the carbon space is that a lot of the headlines are around what are called avoided loss projects. Where you go out, you take a pristine or a near pristine forest, or other ecosystem and you say, "We're going to unlock this thing up," because what would have happened is it would have been developed. It turns out it's really complicated and full of errors, assumptions that prove to be wrong in terms of how much of that land would have been lost.
That's going to happen in the biodiversity space, too. We have a choice between restoration projects, where you're putting something back, and preservation, where you keep it from going away, and I just think leaning into the restoration side of things as opposed to the preservation side is really key. That same lesson exists in the US with the wetland crediting market, where the vast majority of credits are focused on restoration and uplift and habitats. That's one thing I'd say that's really key.
The other one, and again, it's a rife subject throughout these markets that exist, is liability transfer. At the end of the day, the buyer is paying somebody who's supposed to know something about nature and climate to deliver a service. They should be able to pay them enough that the buyer is walking away from the liability to have to know anything about that project 2, and 5, and 10 years down the line. The provider picks up that liability for a price. That's worked really, really well in the US wetland market, where, at the end of the day, the buyers are often unknown at the end of the day.
Like an individual project may get taken to task by regulators for failing to produce wetlands or being full of invasive species, and they have to fix it. They have to have financing in place to fix it, but the company that bought them is not on the front page and the reverse is true in the carbon credit space. To build biodiversity credits, we really need that liability transfer. A company needs to know that if they're doing something to help jaguars, it's the specialist that said, "We know how to help jaguars," who's really got the liability for doing so. Ryan, you want to add something?
Ryan Sarsfield: To echo additionality, additionality, additionality. We use this term in a lot of these markets. Folks in the forest carbon space are quite familiar with it. We want to know that what we're buying or what is being purchased is actually happening, that there's clarity on that. Just as Tim said, between preservation and restoration, we deal with that. It comes up as well with stacking questions that if we had a consensus on the science and how you can separate the intervention for forest carbon versus biodiversity, despite how linked they are, then we could do that but at least as we get the market going, we want to stress less risky things. We want to stress where additionality is extra clear.
We'll wave that additionality flag from here on forever. More generally, I would say from the US environmental markets, because so much of the biodiversity credit market is building amidst the discourse and discussions, everything going on with forest carbon, it misses a bit of all this experience that you laid out of these markets that we have decades of experience with, lots of very, very well experienced players in those markets that know what they're doing. They're professionals. They prove that valuing and transacting nature uplift is entirely viable as a market.
Granted, it's regulatory. It makes things a bit simpler in that respect. This is not doing a moonshot. This is, it can be done, it can be done well. We have the restoration and ecological science to do a lot of this. It's not a perfect science, but it's pretty darn good. Likewise, as Tim said, contracts, liability, financing structures, all those other things that make a project viable and legitimate, we know how to do that. This is not a brand new world that we have to create from scratch, even if when we talk about biodiversity credit markets, we are not usually referring to these existing markets that we are actually quite familiar with in work.
Tim Mooradd: There's now a few international organizations focused on building corporate and NGO collaboration around biodiversity. One is the Task Force for Nature-Related Financial Disclosures, which has developed a set of disclosure recommendations and guidance for organizations to report and act on evolving nature-related dependencies, and impacts, and risks. Tell us about the potential role of this disclosure framework and organization in driving action to protect biodiversity specifically and support emerging biodiversity credit markets.
Ryan Sarsfield: A lot of this is coming from Europe, there is standard setting happening right now. TNFD is part of this global trend. As we said, that path was laid down by a lot of the politics and the disclosure, and the investor pressure that came out about emissions and climate concerns. Financial disclosure is coming. It's part of the landscape that we're working with. We're in earlier stages where I don't think there's as much of a connection between, as Tim said, the recognition that the vase is broken and what you should actually do about it.
There's a lot of companies out there who are happy to get out with a new policy on being nature-positive, but it's often not as well defined, I think, as they would like or we would like. It's hard to connect the impact one-to-one with the action taken. In some cases, that's traditional, I'll say traditional partnerships with environmental NGOs to do preservation of a particular area, to plant trees in some fashion, but it's not usually quantified ecologically or geographically. We have these impacts, and we want to tie that to a particular mitigating action.
The word offset is fraught in this space because it's common to have a discussion where in the same breath, almost, people will say, "Yes, we want to compensate for what we're doing. We want to be nature-positive, but we can't call them offsets because that's a four-letter word."
Tim Male: Yes. I'll just say there's a bunch of mismatch that exists. It's true in lots of spaces that exist, but a mismatch. Scientists want to talk about how do we measure something, how do we measure nature? We took a really fine degree of precision. A lot of the government participants want to talk about how do we get a lot of money for nature. Then the businesses, the buyers, at the end of the day, which could include and should include government, are talking about, "What do we get in exchange for our money?"
There's various bodies working on various pieces of that. The TNFD conversation, to me, and that's a really valuable effort by experts around the world is focused on a piece of that in terms of how do we create some standards that get us this one thing? There's other efforts to create more standards for the financing. Give us a billion dollars, give us $5 billion. How do we create innovative finance structures or create an easier pathway for a large-scale public-private investment and things?
It's a healthy chaos right now of structures all ad hoc. None are formally driven by a legislative mandate or fiat or something, but they are all working toward increasing standards that make it easier for buyers to buy, for sellers to provide, and for nature to prosper and for us to have data about it.
Tim Mooradd: This gets into the public conversation and cultural conversation around biodiversity. We have a lot of public education around climate change. It's at least now worked its way into not being climate change, not being a four-letter word all the time, sometimes still a four-letter word in certain circles, but now mostly a mainstream accepted trend and term. What would you say, Ryan, is the state of public conversation and education around biodiversity, which I think is a bit more esoteric to people?
Ryan Sarsfield: Yes, it's a funny thing. I'm 44. I've been doing this stuff for some period of time, I'll say, and the folks who are older than I am in the space got a lot of the conversation on biodiversity going 30, 40 years ago, long before climate was, in a literal sense or in a public conversation sense, as big as it is. It was funny how so many people in the environmental conservation space ended up shifting into things called climate initiatives, one way or the other, and not for a bad reason.
This is all part of the necessary work to be done in the environmental world and more broadly, and all the effects of climate change that we're concerned of as humans, likewise, affect biodiversity. It wasn't a bad move, but it has been frustrating at times how little biodiversity has entered that conversation when we've acknowledged this global crisis on climate and not as much the global crisis on biodiversity and acted like it's a global crisis. I hesitate to say that too much attention is paid one to the other. They're both extraordinary global problems.
I would hate to find ourselves in 50 years having largely sorted out the path towards a zero-emissions world where we're actually solving climate change and look back and say, "Gosh, we lost an awful lot along the way, and we actually need that." It's something for our cultural lives, our existence as humans, and all these different aspects of our economy, this stuff is fundamental, and we can't leave that to the wayside as we go forward with climate.
Tim Male: The other thing, Tim, is that biodiversity has its own TV channels, like blockbuster films, National Geographic, Discovery, Disney movies, and whereas greenhouse gases you can't see. At the end of the day, yes, it hasn't pervaded our economic solution set yet. But find me a kid who doesn't understand something about nature that the kids a generation ago didn't know. Really sophisticated exposure to nature all the time. The rarer it gets, the more valuable it gets.
I think we talked about this at the outset of the conversation, that the level of interest in biodiversity has gone up incredibly fast. Part of that is because people intuitively like the birds and bunnies and bees down the road from them, and they already see a connection to it within some reasonable balance with the economy. It's much easier to explain biodiversity credit markets as esoteric as they might seem to my niece and nephew than, say, carbon markets. I'll put it that way.
Tim Mooradd: Entirely. I think it's a huge advantage, for lack of a better term, that that market has in terms of its growth potential. I think that's actually been, on the flip side, the fact that climate is not so tangible, and you can't really see or conceptualize carbon emissions, that's been a headwind for a difficult thing about communicating why climate change matters. I completely agree with you guys and I'm hopeful that biodiversity credit markets have much more of a rapid acceleration in adoption and public support than climate change did.
Okay, so Tim and Ryan, we are almost done, but first we'd like to put you on the hot seat. This is our section of the show where we ask you for your immediate reactions to the following statements and questions. Tim or Ryan, one thing I've chained my mind on is?
Ryan Sarsfield: The role of the private sector in solving biodiversity conservation problems. It's about money and things like contracting structures. I would have never thought that as a college student or beyond that I would need to know anything about procurement strategy but it's way more important than the class I took on insects.
Tim Mooradd: [laughs] Fair enough. Yes, maybe not as exciting, but at least one can help the other. Tim or Ryan, the key ingredient to my productivity is?
Ryan Sarsfield: I think for me it's finding the right balance of collaboration, interaction with other people, solo time, the nature of the work we do. It's a lot of emailing and reading and writing, for sure, calls, meetings, so on. When I hit the right mix, I can get a lot done. If it's too much, just conversations all the way through the day and I don't have the time to actually think and read or vice versa, it's not always the most productive day, I'd say.
Tim Mooradd: The book that has influenced me the most is?
Ryan Sarsfield: I'll go with one. I can't say it's a singularly most influential, but I love it and I talk about it all the time, Nature's Metropolis by William Cronon. It's an environmental history of Chicago,in principle, but it's really this crazy interwoven portrait of how the ecological conditions in the Midwest, the nature of what the land is and what thrives there, how agriculture developed there, technological and economic change, and people's lives were all intertwined. How did commodity futures get created? How did the railroads influence having universal time across the country so that railroad schedules would be aligned, things like that.
All these things grew out of that, as they always do in every place and time, but that was the singular best portrait I can think of that threads these together in a really beautiful way.
Tim Male: Tim, I'm going to add one on this, too. There's a book called Nixon and the Environment, and I've only ever seen one copy of it, which I inherited from one of my brothers. It's basically like an anti-Nixon campaign book when he was running for re-election written by a bunch of environmentalists at the time. It has the inside story on the dog food industry and how the dog food industry was trying to support whaling and keep the Nixon administration, to whom they were a big donor, in place and to keep regulations on whaling from happening.
It is just this fascinating book because at the end of the day, Nixon is giving credit for a pile of the most important environmental legislation that has ever happened in America and yet, everyone agrees that he didn't actually care about this subject himself. It was driven, it was politics, it was re-election. He was trying to do what the American people wanted. It is just full of completely eye-opening insights for me about the kind of shock, the assumption of how progress happens, how change happens.
I have reread that book three times, and I continue to be like-- even things like why does one agency exist in one part of the government versus another because of the interpersonal dynamics of Nixon being pissed off at one of his appointees about something else. It's a great story about improbable things happening for crazy reasons.
Tim Mooradd: I'd love to borrow it, especially because you've only ever seen one copy. It would be fascinating to learn something else about Nixon. He's, obviously, known for-- I'd say predominantly known for other things aside from the environment. Tim Male, I want my kids to know?
Tim Male: That the world they're inheriting is better than the world that I was born into, not worse.
Tim Mooradd: I have a now close to 2-year-old. All of those cliches become very, very real when you have a kid. You certainly don't need to have a kid to feel that way, but when you do, it's really keenly put in focus.
Tim Male: President Obama said something about that if you could choose a time to be born in history, you would choose to be born now, not at any time in the past. I think people think that that's not the case when they're looking at the news headline.
Tim Mooradd: I can take his point that sometimes we look at the past with rose-colored lenses. Now you take things like antibiotics for granted or whatever. Whatever time period you want to choose. Computers, smartphones. I think that is a broad-brush comment when people say that. You'd always want to choose to be born now. I don't know. I think that assumes that everything we've done is just always incrementally better. I don't know if that's always the case.
Tim Male: No, definitely not everything. But on balance, on balance, the collective set of things that exist in the world today are better than where we were. Burning Rivers. Burning Rivers existed when I was born. They don't exist anymore in America. That's a pretty big win.
Tim Mooradd: That's a big win. Next, Tim, you served as an elected city official for Takoma Park, Maryland when it became the first jurisdiction in the US to lower its voting age to 16 for municipal elections and referendums. Tell us why upvoting is a good and important thing.
Tim Male: It turns out 16-year-olds vote at higher rates than 25 to 30-year-olds. If you want the younger generation represented, the easiest thing to do is let those 16 and 17-year-olds vote because the 25 to 30-year-olds just keep not showing up. The second is that everything we think about immaturity and poor decision-making, some of it's true, but a lot of it's about snap spontaneous decisions. It turns out when people look at the data, 16 and 17-year-olds, when making thoughtful decisions over many months or years in the context of elections, turn out to be pretty good at picking politicians that represent their interests.
They have a pretty good connection between the decision-making and the rationale. That sounds like a voter to me. It's a great change. Scotland had let 16-year-olds vote for independence in their country. Austria had brought 16-year-olds. Argentina and Nicaragua brought 16-year-olds into their voting population, full stop. America should let 16 and 17-year-olds vote in every election we have.
Tim Mooradd: The final question. To me, climate positive means?
Ryan Sarsfield: Leaving things better than we found them. We'll put it that way. Not necessarily generationally as we were talking just now, but having a net negative balance of emissions if we're talking climate specifically. In the same sense, nature positive should mean having on net a beneficial balance of nature. I'll cut some slack here and say, at least really be aggressively on the path to do that. It's a tall order at this stage for, I think, almost all companies to truly be net nature positive, to be net climate positive, but the progress is being made, for sure. I'd like to see the standards for biodiversity start to align with those of climate and emissions and we can get on that same path.
Chad: If you enjoyed this week’s episode, please leave us a leave a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. This really helps us reach more listeners.
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I'm Chad Reed.
And this is Climate Positive.