Intro
In this episode of our podcast Beyond the Canopy, host Alexander talks with Tim Christophersen, Vice President of Climate Action at Salesforce and former UN Environment Expert, about his groundbreaking book “Generation Restoration: How to Fix Our Relationship with Mother Nature”. Tim, a key architect of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, shares his journey from UN diplomat to corporate climate leader. Discover why he argues the climate crisis is fundamentally a relationship crisis with nature, and how we can cultivate “conditional optimism” to drive action. This is essential listening for anyone interested in building a more resilient relationship with the planet.
The episode
About Tim Christophersen
Tim Christophersen is the Vice President of Climate Action at Salesforce, where he leads nature-positive strategy, renewable energy, carbon markets, and partnerships such as the Symbiosis Coalition. Previously, he spent 15 years at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), where he helped architect the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Trained in forestry and seasoned across government, NGO, UN, and private-sector roles, Tim focuses on collaboration at speed and scale to restore nature. He is the author of Generation Restoration: How to Fix Our Relationship with Mother Nature.
Transcript
Alexander (host) :
Welcome to Beyond the Canopy, the podcast where we explore the most innovative approaches to ecosystem restoration and impactdriven investments. I’m your host, Alexander, and today I’m speaking with someone whose work has influenced much of what we now call the global restoration movement, Tim Christophersen. Tim is vice president of climate action at Salesforce, but his story goes far beyond the corporate world. Before joining Salesforce, he spent many years at the UN environmental program where he helped architect the UN decade on ecosystem restoration, which is a global framework that inspired millions to rethink their relationship with nature. I followed Tim’s work for years and we have met at different moments from the global landscape forum investment case symposium to climate week in New York even at the Salesforce tower when Tim introduced the symbiosis coalition and today we will explore not just Tim’s career but his book generation restoration and how to fix our relationship with mother nature. So, here’s also the book. Looks pretty nice. It’s a book that blends science, storytelling, and strategy to help anyone. So, from policy makers to everyday citizens to understand the necessity and what it takes to heal the planet. Tim, a warm welcome to Beyond the Canopy.
Tim Christophersen :
Thank you very much, Alexander. It’s very nice to see you again and thanks for having me on the podcast.
Alexander :
Yeah. So, let’s really start with the roots and the motivation also for this book. You have an outstanding career and we will come to it in a moment, but you are not usually in the business of writing books. To be honest, I was curious to find out if your book really lives up to your career path. So, and I read it. Early spoiler for those maybe who do not want to wait till the end of the podcast. The book is really worth reading. I would say it’s really outstanding but maybe you can tell me what does it take to write such a book.
Tim :
Yeah, thanks. I never thought I would write a book, but then I have a high school friend who is an author and we had a high school reunion a couple of years ago and when I told him what I do and said, “Wow, that is really interesting. You should write a book.” and then he helped guide me through this process of finding a publisher. And it’s a it’s a it’s its own universe to write a book. And it took me I would say the better part of two years to finish it. But it was a really worthwhile process because many of the challenges we face in our time don’t fit into 140 character tweets or sound bites or even short form social media videos. you need longer and deeper reflection on how we can fix in this case our relationship crisis with mother nature which is what the book is about. And I really got to like this ability to write and not be constrained by 100 words or 200 words. Uh and this is also why I like the podcast format because it gives you a chance to really dive deeper into what are the underlying reasons for the problem for the problems or you could say the poly crisis that we face of climate change biodiversity loss pollution these are all symptoms of some deeper misalignment between humanity and nature and that’s what I explore in the book.
Alexander :
Yeah. And this is also what I feel. So when I’ve read it, it feels very personal. So you you’ve written about your grandfather in Germany and how he inspired your relationship with nature. How does that early experience influence the work you’re doing today, especially now that you operate on a global and corporate stage?
Tim :
So my day job right now as vice president of climate action at Salesforce does involve a lot of work with nature. One would maybe not expect that, but Salesforce has a nature positive strategy and has made commitments to conserve, restore, and grow 100 million trees by 2030, which is a very fun task that my team and I have. And I’m also responsible for our renewable energy portfolio and our carbon credit purchasing and our internal decarbonization and collaboration with other people in the sustainability team. So, it’s a it goes beyond a nature remmit, but nature is a big part of what I do in my day job. And what helped me get here throughout my career is I believe the the deep love and respect for nature that I’ve had ever since I was a child. So that I think is important to carry you through whatever you want to achieve in life is to have some basis that you can go back to and build on. So it started with my upbringing in a small rural village uh in in northern Germany and there wasn’t really much else to do but spend time in nature, go hiking, camping, fishing and I thought you know at when I when I was a kid I thought that’s just normal. most kids grow up that way, but that’s actually not really the case and less and less so with what is now called the indoor generation. More and more kids spend a lot of time indoors, but it helped me to get a deeper appreciation for nature and importantly see that there’s a need for reciprocity with nature. Nature supplies us with everything we need, but nature also needs us. And this is something that is often overlooked even in conservation circles. There is this narrative that nature would be fine without us, you know, and that might be true, but that’s not the point. It’s not the point of why we need to have a healthy relationship with nature because it’s also about the relationship we have with each other and the role we play as humans on on this planet. So that’s the that’s what the book dives into. It’s a pretty big topic as I found out when I was researching for it, but it’s really worthwhile to to go into that in a bit more depth because it’s so important for the for the crisis that we’re currently in.
Alexander :
Yeah. So you have a forestry background. So I know you also went to the same university that I did. So in in you also you’re a farmer and you also describe yourself as sometimes part farmer part diplomat so say in your career you had the luck to look on things from different perspectives and how has that helped you navigate between the policy the business and of course the nature side
Tim :
so I’ve uh worked for a national government in the beginning of my career and then I was uh briefly at the European Commission and then five years with international union for the conservation of nature and then 15 years with UNEP before joining the private sector. So indeed I’ve worked for the UN international organization for a government for an NGO now the private sector it’s like taking a long walk around a mountain you look at the same issue from different perspectives and what you realize is that for everybody who wants to achieve the same goal there are different paths to take but everybody in a sense wants to be on the same journey and connecting and linking and exchanging information between especially public and private sector but also civil society governments and and private sector is really important and helpful. I believe that all the delta for collaboration we need all the improvements and speed and scale for climate and nature action lies in collaboration. It doesn’t lie in individual actors necessarily doing more even though that is a big part of it and we can all do more but a lot of potential lies in better collaboration and for that it’s helpful to understand the different perspectives of public sector private sector science civil society and how they can come together.
Alexander :
Yeah. You spend a long time of your career developing this UN decade on ecosystem restoration with within the UN and this book was it part of a longer vision to to give that decade also a voice.
Tim :
So the decade was the UN decadeonic system restoration was adopted as UN resolution by the general assembly in in 2019 and it covers the years 2021 to 2030 and when UNEP and FAO were tasked with leading the decade we had a an early brainstorming meeting and uh it was this brilliant young woman called Selena Abrams who’s now chief of staff at who came up with the hashtag generation restoration as a way to show to everybody who wanted to be involved in the UN decade but had no link to the United Nations to get involved and show their support but also be supported by an overarching narrative and movement. So, in a sense, it’s a movement of movements. And if you go on Instagram right now, where I’m not so active, but probably many of your listeners are, and you search for hashtag generation restoration, there’s like about 140,000 posts or so. So, there’s really like an it’s almost like a ground swell of interest in regenerative agriculture, restoration of ecosystems, and connecting and that makes me very hopeful. So setting up the UN decade and writing the strategy, we really took a long-term view of global ecological literacy of a multigenerational approach to restore planet Earth. And many of those things I pick up again in the book, but hopefully not written in a UN technical style of a of a UN decade strategy, although that is also a good document. But I try to write in a more easy easily readable accessible style with stories from around the world with key projects that I’ve observed both successes and failures of of restoration projects. Sometimes we learn more from failures than from success by the way. So this is this is what I try to do in the book. It is a continuation of my work in some way. But five years ago I didn’t plan actually to leave the UN. It was just the offer from Salesforce that I found so intriguing. So I didn’t plan to write a book, but I think it’s now as we’re in the halime of the UN decade, it’s a very good time to take stock from a different perspective and hopefully also bring the UN decade to even a broader audience that is not normally reading UN updates or UN reports or newsletters. So hopefully the book will resonate more widely also beyond our regular audience that does follow these issues.
Alexander :
Yeah. Well, when I picked up the book the first time and looked at the title, I did not immediately catch the connection between let’s say the the UN indicate on ecosystem restoration. I was first thinking about something like Gen X, Gen Z. So generation restoration. Maybe it could hopefully be at some point a time for a new period, right?
Tim :
That is actually exactly why we opted for that hashtag to show that this is a task for anybody alive today. It doesn’t matter if you’re a millennial or a generation X like myself or Gen Alpha or a boomer. This is a task for everybody. And actually, UNAB ran a very ran a great campaign at World Environment Day two years ago uh about that theme of this is not if you’re Gen X, you uh achieved something remarkable. But this is now the task for all of our generations. So they they played on that theme very cleverly. And you’re right. This is it’s it’s the hopefully what people will remember about this hashtag and the generations. So the UN decades approach to unite also across generations people who want to live on a cleaner, greener, healthier, more abundant, more diverse planet with more economic opportunities which all of all of which you can get from ecosystem restoration.
Alexander :
Yeah, fully agree. So hopefully we will look back at some point and say well after generation alpha generation restor we speak about generation restoration. Let’s turn a little bit the perspective and go to the philosophical psychological perspective of the generation restoration. So in your book you say that you don’t just fa that we don’t just face a climate crisis biodiversity crisis pollution crisis but first a relationship crisis with with nature so how can people imagine this how can they perceive this crisis in their daily lives
Tim :
so first I started to ask myself why is it that we’re making such slow progress on so important important issues like climate action or stopping the loss of biodiversity. And I came across this saying by an agricultural adviser called Don Campbell. If you want to change small things, change the way you do things. If you want to change big things, change the way you see things. So it is a mind shift that we need rather than just doing things in a different way. So that’s when I started to dive a bit more into the into the underlying aspects of what is the driving force behind our extractive world economy. So when you’re when you imagine our relationship with nature as something quite literal, imagine you’re in a relationship with someone somebody and one of the partners in the relationship only ever takes they take everything. They take attention. They take your resources. They take your time. They never give anything back. I think we all know of such relationships and maybe have been in one like that. And those relationships are toxic. They’re abusive. And this is literally the relationship that we’re in with nature. We take take. We don’t give anything back. And that kind of relationship has to end at some point one way or or the other. And of course the difference between that kind of a worldview and the worldview of indigenous peoples and and also many local communities still is that there is reciprocity in the relationship. We take yes but we also give back there. There is there is an element of of reciprocity that we have to rediscover in our relationship with nature. And to me that is really fundamental and not only related to yes we need to invest more money in nature of course we need to mobilize more financial capital to rebuild our natural capital all of that I describe in the book but there’s something even more fundamental that goes to the intention that we approach nature with and the understanding we have of our own role in nature instead of being a consumer of commodities that nature provides and seeing nature as a commodity or as a warehouse full of things we can just burn and eat and liquefy and turn into financial capital. We have to see nature as our home. Nature is our family. Nature is more than a line in our balance sheets of big companies or governments. Even though it’s very loudable that governments now start to measure natural capital, companies now start to disclose their nature related dependencies. There’s been great progress on the task force on nature related financial disclosures. All of that is important but nature is more than a line of our balance sheet. Nature is our balance and that requires a different attitude and understanding of what our role is. We are ecosystem engineers like uh elephants and beavers and earthworms. We’re just in we’re just incredibly more powerful as ecosystem engineers and we don’t take our role serious enough and have it and play it with the right intention.
Alexander :
Yeah. Sometimes I think just because we are dress different we think we are not part of the system because our fur is cut in a different way. So you describe in your book really the let’s say destruction of the environment in very clear words but also show the potential which still ex exist. So and you have a section where you speak about stubborn optimism. So it’s it’s also for me sometimes very difficult to stay optimistic seeing the the decline of nature. But on the other hand without this optimism we cannot drive things forward and so how can people cultivate this optimism optimism without denying the reality.
Tim :
Yeah. Before I come to the optimism, I wanted to do one quick follow up on your earlier question of the philosophical underpinnings because it’s actually very interesting especially for for Europeans that if you look back at the philosophical advancements in what is called the era of enlightenment, you know, these were Rene Deard and Rouso and and other philos philosophers of late 16th early 17th century. That was actually when this split between humans and nature really happened and it hasn’t been questioned much in our western philosophy ever since. It was Rene Deart in particular who promoted this mindset of this reductionist mindset of humans being the only divinely imbued beings. We are the only ones with a divine spark. Everything else is just sort of an intricate machine that’s put here for our convenience. Animals don’t think or feel. They’re just sort of pre-programmed entities. And it’s it’s that philosophy that is we still carry with us that is the underlying principle for most of the western world’s extractive mindset. So I think it’s a really good time now as we’re in this crisis to question First of all, the era is is mis is is misnamed. I think it’s not really the era of enlightenment in the sense that that most people would understand enlightenment. But yeah, coming to your up to your question about optimism. There are two kinds of optimism. It’s one is one is unconditional optimism. This is Paul Romer’s uh framework. is an economist and I really like this idea that unconditional optimism is how most people I think would understand optimism. It’s just something that you sit around and you hope for the best. Yeah, that’s it’s like a child waiting for presence. You just wait and think, you know, this will all turn out well. That’s not the optimism that is helpful and is also hard to maintain at the time we live in. The other kind is conditional optimism. It’s more like a child wanting to build a treehouse. And you know when some somebody’s so enthusiastic about something and says, “Oh yeah, we can if we get some wood and we get some nails and then you help me with this and then you do that.” And that child mobilizes its entire neighborhood and relatives and then they build something really cool. So that that child wanting to build a treehouse and generating the hope and the action and the momentum to do it that is the optimism that we need and it’s a mindset. It’s not something that happens to you because of what you read in the news. It comes from within. So that optimism is is what we need. And I would say it’s mandatory in our line of work. As you said, you know, it’s it’s hard to stay optimistic, but it is a mental discipline we have to cultivate because that optimism creates hope, which is the basis for action. Action is the basis for more hope. And suddenly you create a virtuous cycle that is stronger than any of the negative news that we see. And there’s of course plenty of that. But we are stronger. We have more agency. We have the power to change this. each of us individually but all the more so if you look at how many people are actually supportive of this idea of this movement of restoring nature at at large scale.
Alexander :
Yeah. So I cannot site it correctly but Jane Goodall who unfortunately passed away very recently put into your forward a sentence that stuck in my mind that says if we are the most intelligent species on planet if that’s true why are we destroying our home and I’m just trying to connect a little bit what you said before. So one thing is really the intelligence and the other thing is the mindset and maybe we are still the most intelligent species on on our planet but in a state of a yeah problematic mindset which is really destructive for for our environment at at this point.
Tim :
Yeah. What what Jane wrote in the in the forward was in fact that we’re undoubtedly the most intellectual species on the planet, but we’re not the most intelligent because otherwise we wouldn’t be destroying our only home. And that is a really it is a powerful sentence and also an interesting sentence to question what is intelligence because we we normally equate intelligence also in the current discussions about artificial intelligence with computing speed and reasoning ability and efficiency and those are all useful things. But any any pocket calculator can then be intelligent if you if you make that your yard stick of intelligence. What you need together with that kind of ability to reason and compute is wisdom and consciousness and a moral compass. All of which is necessary to make the right decisions. So, I’m also not really always in agreement with my techno optimist friends in Silicon Valley that AI will allow us to colonize the entire galaxy because we’ll have self-replicating robots with consciousness and artificial general intelligence. I think the the view of intelligence is much too narrow that we currently have and if we we need to become much more intelligent as a species but that’s also what Jane says in forward that that’s the next necessary step in human evolution that we understand better what our role is on on this planet.
Alexander :
I would also say that intelligence intelligence alone is not sufficient. So you also need the imagination right? So the imagination of a future in order to become creative creative to to get there. So it’s intelligence as a standalone is is is not sufficient here. I really want to go to a very simple question. So you speak a lot about ecological literacy. what does ecological literacy look like in practice and how can we make it a basic skill within society such as reading mathematics. So what are your ideas on that?
Tim :
Yeah, let’s start with the root of the world word ecology which is ancient Greek means our common household or our common home and ecology is the knowledge of that common home. How do things work on planet earth and how do species interact? Economy has the same root obviously it’s because it’s the management of our common household. What we’re doing right now with the world economy is we’re we’re managing this place without the knowledge of how it works. Uh so ecology and economy need to be reunited as one holistic understanding and for that we need ecological literacy. So it’s not a luxury to have so you understand better how nature works. It’s it’s essential for the underpinnings of human civilization. Everything from how we produce our food to where our water comes from and our building materials, our clothes. So all of that depends on ecological literacy. And in the book, I describe some very simple steps of how each of us can do that in a fun and and easy way. And it starts with food. You know, like any good relationship often starts with good food. And when you ask yourself where does my food actually come from in terms of who farmed it, where how did they farm it? Is it was it regenerative farming? Is it extracting nutrients? Is it degrading the environment? Where do my farmers live? How did the food get here? So that’s a really fun way to enter into a new relationship with nature to to understand where the where your food comes from. Yeah. The second is is water. it’s perhaps even more essential. But for many people, water comes from the tap, right? Or if well, if you’re fortunate enough to live in a developed country, in many instances, water has to be carried for long distances in developing countries and is getting more and more scarce. So they actually know more than most of us would where water comes from. But explore which ecosystem provides, cleans, filters, stores your water. And usually there’s a forest involved for about onethird of the big cities in the world. Their drinking water comes from forested waterheds. So this also of course links back to the work that you do with open forests and other platforms to map where we need to support these ecosystem services. And then the third step is one where we understand which species live around us we share our space with and what nature does for us. You know if you live in a big city for example urban trees lower the temperature and city streets during heat waves. They can literally save lives. If you live on a hillside and you’re protected by a forest watershed above you, you’re probably less likely to have landslides or major floods. So, what does nature do for you? And and understanding that will also change the relationship that we all have with nature because it’s it’s unique for any of us, right? Everybody has can have a unique relationship uh with nature which is one of the beauties of rebuilding this this relationship because it’s really unique to each of us.
Alexander :
Thank you Tim. I want to shift a little bit the topics now and have a look to at corporate action and market solutions. as you also describe you yourself have made like an unusual career move from UN to Salesforce. I would say this is this is a big shift from policy to corporate action. So why did you make that transition and what can a company like Salesforce do that the UN can’t or maybe can what kind of complimentary things the the corporate world can can do?
Tim :
Yeah, I had a I had a great job at the UN environment program and I loved my work and I had a what is called a continuing appointment in the UN. So I was basically a lifetime UN civil servant and I didn’t really plan to move into the private sector. But what happened then in 2020 uh this company called Salesforce was involved in starting the trillion trees initiative together with the world economic forum.org and I co-organized planning workshop advising them how this sort of private sector arm of the UN decade could be planned and rolled out and we met in Geneva in December 2019 and just before the launch of the of the initiative uh of one.org And I remember being very impressed by this company that put their capital forward and their leadership and their CEO was involved. And then once the initiative launched they kept coming to me for advice. They asked sort of what do we do now and who are the trusted partners? How do you actually invest in forest restoration? How should we measure it? What what are the key parameters for good restoration? And after some years they they said well we we speak with you all the time and you give us so much advice why don’t you just come and run this program for us and we want to build out a nature team and we want a nature positive strategy and we want to do a nature assessment. So I started three and a half years ago at Salesforce to run that that team and the reason I think that that really made me shift is Salesforce has a manages the data of about 200,000 companies 60,000 NOS’s that means there’s a deep trust relationship with all these companies and that also means their sustainability teams then often come to us and discuss discuss. So what do you do about this thing called biodiversity that we’ve heard about and how do you invest in your forest ecosystem restoration? What do you do for your water dependence? and discussing that with the Fortune 500 companies in a very sort of peer-to-peer level is a fascinating opportunity to make some change at speed and scale which is basically why I shifted from the UN. I still believe the UN is a wonderful organization and it’s probably more important than ever. But I shifted because of the opportunity of innovation at speed and scale and those are all strengths of the private sector.
Alexander :
Yeah. Oh cool. So and so as I understood also as part of your role you helped to launch the symbiosis coalition which is a collaboration between Meta, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce. Why was it important for these big tech companies to work together rather than each pursuing their own offset programs?
Tim :
So the symbiosis coalition is a coalition of big tech players but that was more by coincidence because we are usually the largest buyers in the voluntary carbon market. There are other companies that are joining. actually will make an announcement at COP 30 of new companies coming in and and our first investments through the symbiosis coalition. So the idea was to set an important market signal by saying we would collectively uh provide offtakes for up to 20 million tons of highquality naturebased removals which is basically ecosystem restoration at scale and that market signal is so important. And I’ve seen that so many times since the year and a half that we launched symbiosis. It has triggered innovation. Has triggered investment. It’s triggered venture capital to go into this new asset class called nature that also needed to be better defined. And and what we see now is that we’ve learned so much from the voluntary carbon markets initial stages. And this is getting so sophisticated so quickly that I’m really encouraged by this opportunity to channel large amounts of money into nature-based solutions with a positive outcome which I would have been much more skeptical about 3 to 5 years ago. But now we have a lot of knowledge and skills and tools and technologies and remote sensing to do this very well. So we’ll do our first the co the the coalition will do their first investment in in this year and then next year we hope to do a request for proposals for large mangrove projects which is the next phase of symbiosis where Salesforce in particular has a goal to purchase to contract for 1 million tons of blue carbon. So we’re looking forward to the next phase in the symbios coalition as well.
Alexander :
To some extent you already answered my next question. I want to spend a little moment on this symbiosis collision pledge. So the pledge if I got it right was to to purchase 20 million tons of carbon removal credits by 2030. So it’s it’s just an assumption I made that maybe one credit might cost between 50 to$100 US a ton. Which makes Raleigh one to2 billion US dollars in spending. So which is really an impressive sum but still only about 0.05% of the combined revenue of all these four companies for the upcoming five years time period. It’s just a rough estimation I made. Hopefully it’s right. And I do not want to niggle around. So but I really want to understand and this is how you already answered a little bit how can we motivate corporates to invest at transformative scale. So do we need better data stronger rules or even more emotional connectedness in the let’s say in the executive in in the executive level.
Tim :
Well you’re right. It sounds like a big amount, but it’s of course a relatively small amount for for huge multi-billion dollar companies. But what is important to remember is that these are voluntary payments. It’s for the voluntary carbon market. And I think as long as this is voluntary in addition to taxes that companies pay, there will be a limit of which companies engage because technology companies have usually a very large profit margin. you go to consumer goods companies or you go to other companies, profit margins are in the one or two percent and then spending 10% of that on something that you don’t have to spend it on. Yeah. Your shareholders wouldn’t agree with that necessarily. So I think the only the only way forward is a is compliance carbon markets where and I really love the example of Ketaro State in Mexico and I know you’re very involved in that. Where companies basically have to either pay more taxes or they can fund carbon projects and then it becomes something that is not just a nice to have and something to do because you can but it becomes part of the cost of doing business and there are of course more compliance markets coming up around the world but I think that’s the only way forward to really get deeper broader much more high volume payments into the carbon market and of course article six of the Paris agreement which is being discussed uh now at COP 30 and is making a lot of progress will also change this whole equation because it will allow governments to also enter this market and buy some of the emission reductions that they need on uh from other countries.
Alexander :
Yeah. So basically what you say is we need to establish rules to to create let’s say fair market conditions where every organization is equal but these rules should be in favor of our societies and not at least at in favor of the of the environment because that’s the as you describe the infrastructure for everything that can be built within economies. So they really depend on nature, not the other way around, right?
Tim :
Yeah. Yes. I think there’s two aspects here that are important. One is that in the article six discussions, nature actually plays a role because that’s that’s in the balance right now. And there are people who say, “Oh, but nature is not durable or the term that is used is not permanent because the carbon that is stored especially in above ground. forest systems, for example, can can evaporate again and forests can burn and this is we should only do things that are last a thousand years. I think that is a misleading debate because at large enough scale forest ecosystems are incredibly durable and resilient and in that sense permanent. You just need to look at the right scale. But also it neglects the urgency of doing something right now because every ton of emissions avoided or reduced today is so much more valuable than a ton in 2040 or in a 100 years or in a thousand years from now. So reducing deforestation and reversing deforestation through holistic forest existation is very important right now. And who knows what will happen in a hundred years from now or a thousand years. Hopefully climate change will be solved by then. If not, uh I think we’ll be in a very difficult situation as as human civilization. But we have to act with urgency right now. And for that nature provides the opportunity at scale and at a price that is affordable to do restoration and of course more forest conservation.
Alexander :
Yeah. I really really loved three figures you brought into your in in your book. It’s really about the cost. How much money do we need to solve the climate, biodiversity and pollution crisis? And you cited a study that said we need$1 trillion US per year. So which is,000 billion sounds really really really huge. So if if you look at it from an individual or a state level but on a global level it is relatively small. So and this is where the second figure comes that where you describe that today the public spending on fossil fuel subsidies is estimated to be 7% of the global GDP and the 1 trillion is just 1% of the global GDP. So just imagine taking 1% from the global spending on fossil fuel industry into environmental space is could could really do to really really big work. And the third figure I also found super inspiring is that every US dollar that is spent into restoration and environmental protection is yielding $30 US in nature returns and ecosystem service for the society. So just one want to maybe park this here. I think there are chances on global level on yeah on policy level on corporate level that that are really in reach. So they’re really in reach. So and this yeah gives me to some extent optimism also at this point.
Tim :
That’s right. And at the same time, it shows how important it is that we are all politically active because the decision to spend between five and 7 trillion, depends how you calculate it, but trillion dollars in fossil fuel subsidies. This is taxpayer money. This is your money and my money that our governments use to make oil, coal, and gas cheaper or to ignore the costs that are caused by that kind of pollution. And taking that money instead and doing something useful instead of making the problem worse is a political decision. And that’s a decision that all of us can support. If you look for example at the EU nature restoration law, this great ambition of the EU to restore 30% of its landscapes and seascapes into a good ecological condition. That could be the biggest rural development engine that the European Union has ever seen create millions of green jobs. If we took just a part of the fossil fuel subsidies, take the example of Germany. I think just diesel subsidy to make diesel cheaper compared to uh gasoline would be sufficient to run to give everybody in Germany free public transport all year round everywhere. So why why don’t we do these kinds of steps where yeah somebody might lose in the short term everybody who drives a diesel car but they would gain free public transport. So these kinds of shifts of subsidies take political courage and that courage has to come from us encouraging our policy makers to do this because if we don’t do this and at the moment there’s a lot of lobbying going on in Brussels to go back to fossil fuel cars and to go back to subsidizing fossil fuel cars. If we fall into that trap, Europe will fall further behind China and the US is of course doing a total flip backwards and terms of fossil fuel subsidies. But this is our this is an opportunity for Europe to really advance and put their money in future technologies and the future is not fossil. For sure.
Alexander :
Yeah, for sure. Thanks Tim. So now think about the potential. So if we had big amount of money that that’s been released by governments by corporates for projects. So you described in the book several really successful restoration flagship projects. So because we also need big projects to allocate big money. Um but you also discussed one tree planting project in Madagascar that that has failed. So what can we learn from this failure and how can we make sure that projects are set up well? So just want to give a little bit of an imagination to the to the fun investor world um where they might have have to look at when they um allocate their fundings to restoration.
Tim :
So this is at the same time a a very fast journey through what the world has learned in the past five years in this space. When you think back to 2020 and when we launched the trillion trees initiative, there was this tree hype. You know, Mr. Beast was collecting $20 million to plant trees and everybody was planting trees because it was just like the seen as the silver bullet for climate change. And so there was a notion to just plant as many trees as fast as possible everywhere. And obviously that the people the the people among us who have been in the space for long knew that that was not going to work. But it was at the same time difficult to to channel that hype in the right direction from the outset. So what happened in some projects is it was just about how many trees you could get in the ground for as little money as possible. And that was a mistake because it is not a holistic approach. when when we did a review of the Salesforce projects where we’ve invested 29 projects now I think across 15 countries we looked at many of them that have been successful and some of them have failed and the success criteria was always people it was not actually which tree you plant and where and how although that’s important as well it is what are the what are the enabling condition for that restoration project to succeed seed. And this is what really was overlooked in that project in Madagascar where it’s just about planting as many mangroves as possible in this uh island in a in a river estuary. Mhm. And what was overlooked is that on the same island there was a lot of deforestation and degradation. Yeah. From charcoal burning because the surrounding villages basically needed that income. There was there were no alternative livelihoods. Yeah. So we were on the one hand planting all these mangrove pods and by the way it wasn’t the ideally suited mangrove species even it was just the one that could be planted faster and on the other side of the island people were burning down mature mangroves and turning them into charcoal. So the better approach would have been to create alternative livelihoods have a holistic approach for the entire landscape. Get people to conserve the forest through incentives. let the mangroves regrow naturally. And that is of course now what we are doing and what a lot of people investing in the space are doing is a whole more holistic landscape approach to these large scale conservation restoration projects.
Alexander :
Yeah. It’s always tempting to have like numbers of trees, carbon credits, no people trying to engineer biodiversity credits and I think they are good also they are a kind of yeah KPIs some valid KPIs but they have to be embedded into a landscape approach which has a proper theory of change. So, what kind of interventions are needed to to get a certain outcome and on on a high level and as you mentioned that this should at least include the people who are living there. It should include the environment. It should even include the politics the local specific conditions to to design successful projects. So yeah, I think that’s that was really nice learning. We now come from the corporate perspective back to individual action because we have a lot of people listening to this podcast which are students, investors, entrepreneurs if they fall in love with this generation restoration idea where should they focus their energy? What are the most immediate and impactful actions people can take right now?
Tim :
So, well, first of all, I hope of course that they would uh they would read the book. I’ll just show it again here, Generation Restoration, because there’s a lot more in the book than we can cover in 45 minutes in this podcast. But to to boil it down, actually five years ago, if you’d asked me this question, I would have said you should look where your money is invested. you should be politically active, you should take an interest in uh these issues like subsidies and what your money is spent on by tax by the politicians. I think all of that is still important, but what I now put on the top of the list is to spend more time in nature and with nature. Spend more time in nature and listen. And that is not a long to-do list and maybe doesn’t sound very practical, but it has a much more profound effect because when we spend time in nature, we can observe and understand so much of nature’s wisdom. And that will teach us what is right for us to do. What is right for you to do is different than what is right for me. We we run this farm and you mentioned that earlier. We bought a old dairy farm five years ago and it’s actually my wife who runs the farm. I’m I’m not a part-time farmer. I get some farm tasks on the weekend when I have time. But what we observe on the farm is that you closer the closer you are to nature, the more you can benefit from nature’s flywheel of creating abundance and diversity and productivity. So, we are observing and learning from nature every day. And you don’t need to be a farmer to do that. I think even if you live in a city, spend more time with nature, listen to nature, start to give back. And the best thing we can give back right now is our time and attention and learn from nature. And again, this this doesn’t sound very practical, but it is because it’s fun. It’s good for your health. It’s usually free, and it will teach you everything else you need to do. So that’s my advice. Spend time in nature.
Alexander :
Yeah. Thanks. I have just one last last question for you. Maybe it’s also a little bit too simple in comparison. So to the nice words that that you said now before, but let’s assume we had had some rules in place that let’s say force organizations to spend the the the transformative needed amount. So let’s say symbiosis collision would decide to spend 1% of the annual turnover which would be 40 billion US dollars in the coming five years. So how would you spend that money for the maximum planetary impacts or if they would task you to do that?
Tim :
I would spend it on convincing and then working together with public sector institutions on public works projects because I think this idea that nature is something that’s nice to invest in if you have some spare cash. We need to replace that with the notion that nature is our most essential infrastructure. Whether you live in Germany or Peru or Brazil or Australia, we all all our cities, all our agriculture, we all depend on nature. So nature is essential public infrastructure that needs infrastructure level investments. So I would take that money and go to the key governments that like the country of Sri Lanka you know they have tea as their main export but the central mountain range in the country has been deforested so the forest on top of the mountains don’t no longer produce enough water for the tea plantations. I would go to the government and say, “What does it take for us to set up a private public partnership where we pick up a $500 million World Bank loan? It is supported by private sector expertise, private sector money, and we just do this at the scale that is needed. So, taking that money and trying to combine it with public sector infrastructure level spending would be what I would focus on.
Alexander :
Yeah. So it let’s say closes the circle to your former to your former work. Tim, thank you very much for sharing all your insights and for your leadership in building a bridge between the policy side, the business side and the nature. It’s been a pleasure.
Tim :
Thank you. And and thank you also for everything that you do, Alexander. I know that monitoring and assuring we have the best available data easily available is is also very important for all these projects. So thank you for what you do as well.
Alexander :
Yeah, thank you. Tim, for our listeners, generation restoration, how to fix our relationship with mother nature is available now and it’s much more than a book. I would say it bundles years of experience in the environmental sector. It is ecological insight, example of best practices, strategy and motivation. So I personally would love to have had this book at the beginning of my own career because I think it’s it’s kind of a blueprint of how we can all participate yeah in restoring our planet. So, so I for myself will stay a stubborn optimist. Thank you for listening to Beyond the Canopy and until next time.
