Earthshot Q1 Newsletter + Event Invite
Scaling regeneration in turbulent times
Register for our first webinar of the season, How to develop a VM047 ARR project: https://lu.ma/af0zcw74
Dear Earthshot network
2025 at Earthshot is off to an incredibly busy start! We’ve hired two new team members and have three open positions, and in general the feeling of the organization accelerating is palpable.
Macro conditions are still very challenging, however. With the Trump victory, US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, a hold on USAID and domestic grant programs, and a general wave of unpopularity for climate action, it’s again a reminder that we’re in this for the long haul, and it will be a constant uphill push until governments and people prioritise ecological balance. Many of the NGO partners we work with have been directly affected, making our own project finance ambitions even more relevant for 2025.
This counter-climate wave is excruciatingly ironic in light of recent major events like the LA fires, the most expensive “natural” disaster in US history. The price of ecological degradation is increasing, and even from a purely mercenary view of nature, the cost of conservation and restoration action now is far cheaper than the cost of increasing volatility on housing markets in places like California, Florida, Colorado, and the many coastal cities that will be affected in the future.
So, we continue on 🙂
2024 Highlights:
The theme of 2024 was Earthshot becoming a globally trusted carbon development and financing platform.
Worked with 32 reforestation and conservation projects across four continents
The world’s first reforestation project validated under the new Verra VM0047 ARR methodology
New partnerships including a 5-year agreement with Rio Tinto
Financed $62m in reforestation and conservation projects
100% yoy financial growth
LandOS automation of pre-feasibility studies globally, giving land stewards and invdstors the ability to rapidly assess land eligibility and carbon accounting anywhere in the world.
A few of my favorite site visit reports:
Morocco • Mongolia • Colombia • Cambodia • Burkina Faso
The consistency and foundational work in 2024 is the perfect launching pad for scaling in 2025. Our 2025 goals include:
Another year of 100%+ financial and team growth
Work on 40+ new projects
Set up $10m Technical Assistance facility to support early-stage project financing
More comprehensive support for jurisdictional compliance markets
Advanced automation of pre-feasibility and feasibility to lower cost and increase market accessibility for land stewards
We’re all working together because restoring and protecting nature is one of the great challenges of our time. I believe that when looking back 100 years from now, we will recognize an equivalent magnitude of importance placed on reaching a healthy equilibrium with the rest of nature as we will see in humans becoming a space-faring civilization, the ubiquity of AI and robotics, or reaching free and abundant energy. But somehow, in our current hype cycle, nature conservation seems less sexy, instead replaced by a technological enthusiasm that makes us forget the ecosystems that provide the conditions to sustain life on this planet. If ecological degradation continues at its current rate, there could be no remaining unprotected primary forests left on the planet by the end of the century, a similar level of biodiversity loss to the meteor impact 65 million years ago that took 2-8 million years to recover from. We clearly don’t want to do that, and it takes committing ~.5% of global GDP per year to adequately restore and protect nature.
Earthshot’s mission is too important to be swayed by hype cycles. Regulations may be slow. Market dynamics are unpredictable. But on a decade-long time horizon, I believe Earthshot can become a globally critical organization responding to the escalating ecological crisis. We’re in it to see the challenge through, and we’re glad to have you with us.
Reach out if you want to chat or work with us in 2025.
Troy
View from Earthshot’s drone of the Tambopata river, in the Peruvian Amazon, where we hosted our annual retreat
Annual Earthshot retreat in the Peruvian Amazon