Earthshot weekly check-in
Plus our thoughts on carbon land arbitrage, a hike in the bay area, and our weekly welcome call
Beloved Earthshot community!
This week has been yet another beautiful reminder of the power of bridging and ceremonial consciousness with technical rigor to effect real change. I’m just getting back from a week offline supporting the moon dance, a traditional Nahua communal ceremony for women to dance, fast, and pray for four nights. In parallel, we started accepting our first outside investments in the company, and the Earthshot product teams completed some of the coolest technical innovations I’ve ever seen, and it’s going to be so much fun to start featuring the team demos at the weekly call!
Weekly Welcome and All-Hands Community Call, RSVP here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/copy-of-earthshot-labs-weekly-all-hands-call-tickets-164938679029
Hike at Mt. Tam: For Bay Area folks, send me a note if you want to join us for a hike in Marin this Wednesday 1pm!
Have a beautiful week!
Troy and the Earthshot team
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Measuring and monetizing nature will have huge implications for our planet and civilization. Some of our thoughts on carbon land arbitrage are below.
Carbon Arbitrage
Earthshot Labs is working on measuring global ecosystems to support incentivizing land regeneration for climate change mitigation, for thriving human civilization, and to preserve nature for its own sake. Carbon markets are growing rapidly as companies and governments realize the extent of the need to draw down CO2. However, we can’t predict the full spectrum of unintended consequences from monetizing carbon. Monoculture carbon farms of bamboo, eucalyptus, paulownia, and radiata pine have their place as efficient carbon drawdown technologies, but we don’t want to live on a planet reduced to simply balancing human emissions.
Economic consequences face similar risks of reductionism. The Earthshot Labs team believes there will be a massive land arbitrage event in the coming decade as billions of acres of degraded land around the world are monetized for their carbon sequestration potential. Vast regions that have been deforested over the past century, desertified landscapes with broken water cycles, and marginal or over-grazed land will be repurposed with reforestation and agroforestry, intensive rotational grazing, and water restoration. For tropical regions, the net present value of earned cash flows from reforestation for carbon + agroforestry could be at least $5000/hectare, creating massive arbitrage for land currently valued from $400-$3000/hec. Arid regions, including vast swaths of land in Australia, South America, and western Asia, often are priced as low at $50-$200/hec, and are commercially unusable except for very marginal grazing. Low-tech water restoration techniques including check dams or Beaver Dam Analogs (BDAs), swales, small reservoirs, and shallow injection wells can dramatically reduce runoff during rain events and increase aquifer recharge dramatically. Large-scale case studies include the restoration of seven completely dry rivers in Rajasthan, restoring livelihoods for millions of people over decades. The arbitrage potential for increasing the value of land globally through restoration activities could be more than five trillion dollars, and we’re finally understanding how to practically do it at scale with LandOS tools.
What happens when land worth $400 becomes land worth $5000? Who benefits? What happens when large pools of institutional capital recognize this asset class and start a land grab for undervalued properties? What if ownership is ambiguous? If rural and indigenous community land owners get paid for the carbon, how is the money distributed? How can we reward indigenous and stewards already doing good, rather than just opportunistic carbon developers?
Earthshot’s goals include supporting indigenous land agency, universal access to regenerative livelihoods, and incentivizing ecological regeneration that incorporates humans as a keystone species living in right relationship within an ecosystem. We are designing systems that will have profound consequences on real people and ecosystems, and this is a position that requires the humility of recognizing that we don’t know the best ways to address these concerns. It is in a thousand tiny decisions over the coming decades that will support thriving human and non-human ecosystems, or simply cement our competitive advantage for maximum personal value capture.
Designing systems for all life is a journey. If you feel called to be on this adventure together, join our slack channel to continue the conversation, invest, or contact our team directly to learn how to contribute.