4Nature
4Nature
Season 3 Episode 2: The Gold Standard: Valuing Intact Nature While We Fix What's Broken
What if we've built conservation markets backward? Mike Korchinsky, founder of Wildlife Works, reveals how we've created elaborate systems to pay for reducing destruction while assigning zero value to what remains intact. After pioneering REDD+ carbon credits that moved millions to indigenous communities, Korchinsky is now challenging both corporate leaders and environmental activists with a provocative framework: "The market is the worst form of conservation finance - except for all the others." His work with Amazonian indigenous peoples has produced a revolutionary financial instrument that values functioning ecosystems rather than just measuring avoided harm. Join this philosophical journey through the carbon market's turbulent history to discover why the future of biodiversity finance might depend on abandoning guilt-based "footprint" approaches for something radically simpler: recognizing and rewarding what communities have protected for millennia.
Links:
The Kasigau Corridor REDD+ Project
David Meyers: [0:00] Welcome to another episode of 4Nature Podcast. I'm David Meyers, and today on our show we have Mike Korchinsky. Mike is the founder and president of Wildlife Works, which we'll hear about during the podcast. Mike founded Wildlife Works in 1997 on the principle that the needs of wildlife must be balanced with the needs of work for the local communities who share their environment. With over 20 years of experience working directly with developing country governments, private sector, and local communities on implementing diverse conservation projects, Mike has led Wildlife Works to become one of the world's leaders in REDD+. And they are now working with indigenous groups to launch a methodology for nature certificates. Very happy to have you, Mike Korchinsky, with us today. And we've lots to talk about, but let's maybe start with a bit of background on you. How did you get into this field of nature conservation and nature finance? And tell us a bit about your background.
Mike Korchinsky: [1:03] Yeah, David, thanks for having me. Yeah, I guess the earliest relevant point would be that when I was a little kid, I was infatuated with elephants and I lived in a country that was a long way from elephants. So, but I always had this love of nature, even though I lived in a country that has very little. I lived in England when I was a very small kid and then the U.S., but that's probably the earliest fact that got me here. My professional career was in management consulting, my first professional career for 15 years really, and then during which was essentially a very dull job that means that you have no particular skills other than being able to stay one step ahead of your client on any particular issue that you're consulting on. But I was lucky enough to start a company and sell a company in the mid-nineties. I started in the early, in the late eighties, sold in the mid-nineties, and then promised myself I would go see real elephants. And so I went off to Kenya where I had read there were elephants and the.
Mike Korchinsky: [2:22] Accurate. And I spent 10 days in one particular place in northern Kenya, in a place called Laikipia. And after a few days of sort of jaw-dropping splendor, watching elephants wander across a landscape that looks a little bit like California, which is where I live now, I started noticing things. The consultant in me started seeing guns and electric fences, and I started getting curious about why there were guns and electric fences. This is in 1996.
Mike Korchinsky: [2:51] And so I started asking all the stupid consulting questions of my host at the time, and I got a crash course in what has come to be known as human-wildlife conflict, which essentially is a fight over resources between people and animals and is happening all over the world, as it turns out, as there are a lot more people than there used to be and a lot less animals than there used to be. And mostly that's as a direct consequence of conflict. So I got curious about why this was an issue and why people that clearly were in a place that had had these wild animals forever, all of a sudden couldn't find room for them or was having trouble coexisting with them. And so I started researching when I came back from that vacation.
Mike Korchinsky: [3:40] And I found almost nothing in the literature. The internet was, of course, still very young, but I did find a set of papers edited by a guy called David Western who ended up being the head of Kenya Wildlife Service about human-wildlife conflict and it was the papers written for a symposium or a conference in Botswana I believe and so that was the only thing I could find. I came back from my trip and I went to Washington and I visited all the conservation groups I could think of and I asked them what they were doing about this issue of human-wildlife conflict and how they hadn't mentioned to me as a donor why they were spending my money on guns and fences instead of baby elephants and things that they put on their envelopes. And I didn't get any good answers so the straight answer to how I got here is I thought gee if we don't find a way to make wildlife work for these communities so that they're not in constant conflict then we're not going to have any wildlife and no amount of science or education is going to solve that problem. It's fundamentally an economic problem of competition for resources. So I started Wildlife Works with the idea of bringing markets into conservation because we knew we needed a lot more resources than were currently in conservation and those resources are all in the marketplace and not in philanthropy unfortunately. And so that was the purpose of my efforts with Wildlife Works and we started in Kenya because that's the only country I knew that had elephants and I'd been to. And I started a project in southeastern Kenya in a place called Rukinga.
Mike Korchinsky: [5:09] And that was the origin of how I got into Wildlife Works was essentially a love of elephants and a curiosity for solving problems.
David Meyers: [5:21] That's great. Yeah. I mean, we're so much of what drives our behavior, of course, is the passion that we experience and our love of nature too. And recognizing how important it is, but you also recognized how economics plays a key role of it. And I know that Wildlife Works has been a pioneer in a way with REDD+, you know, and other forms of carbon finance. And maybe just can you just share a little bit about your the work that the Wildlife Works has been doing and, you know, how it's addressing these economic costs and benefits that are experienced by local populations and, of course, nature.
Mike Korchinsky: [6:09] Yeah. I mean, it seemed reasonably obvious to me. I don't know why it was so late coming that this was an economic problem and not a science problem. But, you know, recognizing that it was an economic problem and having an economic solution are two entirely different things, as it turns out. And so I started on a path of lots of ideas, none of which work very well for how to create economic solutions for communities based on the presence of wilderness and wildlife in their environment. And then I got lucky in a way, I suppose, because the carbon market sort of bailed me out in late 2000 and late 2000. So around 2009, the carbon markets became a thing. And we'd been looking for something because I knew we hadn't found the answer to how do you create value in the market from for communities that live with wildlife. Tourism I knew wasn't the answer. It has a role to play but I had been a high tourist in a relatively successful place but its success was being threatened by this issue because people were invading the space and killing the animals and the tourism people couldn't do anything about it essentially. And so that struck me as a problem that didn't have a solution, an obvious solution, so I had to wait. And then the carbon market, when it came, was the obvious one. It seemed very obvious to me that initially that the idea that you would value.
Mike Korchinsky: [7:36] The protection of forests based on two things. One, how big the forest is, how much carbon is stored in the forest, and two, how threatened it is, so how quickly is it disappearing. Those two things were directly analogous to the conservation finance challenge, which is, if it's a big forest and under heavy threat, you're going to need a lot of money to convince the communities to do something else. If it's a small forest with little threat, you're not going to need much money. So it seemed like a particularly well-designed mechanism.
Mike Korchinsky: [8:01] It's gone off the rails a bit for reasons that in hindsight seem obvious but yeah so we jumped into the carbon market. We were the very first project to get certified under Verra's avoided deforestation standard under a methodology that we actually wrote for Verra that then Verra then adopted and validated in their own method. And that project which is the Kasigau Corridor project has been the longest running project under the Verra system. Sometimes you can get fooled because Verra allowed historical start dates so some projects that actually got through the process later than us actually have an earlier start date than we do. But we were the first one and then you know we had to sort of invent a market because Verra wasn't really interested in doing that for us at the time. They were interested in helping us create independently certified assets which were carbon credits by verifying the science that we were using and the threat that we were claiming etc., but they weren't active in creating a market. They're a small Washington NGO so we had to go find customers and we had to go essentially sell the first of these things to the market in 2009-2010 and again we got a bit lucky. Always better to be lucky than good as my dad used to say.
Mike Korchinsky: [9:28] Because there was a South African bank called Nedbank. That became our first customer. And they did because their CEO had gotten up on stage somewhere and said, we're going to be the first carbon neutral bank in the world. And not many banks knew what carbon neutral meant at that moment, but one did, which was HSBC. And they had already made that declaration about six months prior. So somebody in his organization pointed out that he couldn't be the first one in the world because HSBC already said that they were going to be. So he said, I'll be the first one in Africa then. And we're going to do it with African credits. And that was the moment where our idea of having carbon credits finance our work actually became a reality because we were one of a very, very small, I don't remember, projects in Africa that actually had carbon credits. Africa famously hadn't participated under the clean development mechanism, which was the Kyoto Protocols market mechanism. And so there were very, very few projects in Africa actually creating carbon credits. And we didn't have any yet. We were still in the process of getting them. But they found us, his team found us, and we entered into a forward contract, assuming that we could deliver these credits at some point. And then we did. And then that kind of proved the model, at least for a little while. And so that's how we ended up getting started and where our first customer was. And then since then, we've been working on this mechanism, trying to see how far it can go, really.
Mike Korchinsky: [10:55] And we struggled through many years where it wasn't going anywhere. And then the Paris agreement happened and then it kind of got a new breath of life. And then the market kind of took off crazily because of speculators in 2020, 2021 and 22. And we benefited from that with our projects by which now we have a project in Kenya and we have one in the DRC.
Mike Korchinsky: [11:18] The Congo and we have six in Colombia and then we have a whole bunch of projects that we started a few years ago all over the world but the only ones that sell credits are the Kenya project and the DRC project and they benefited enormously from the uplift in the market but then we of course have become very dependent on that as of the communities that we work with for things like schooling and healthcare and clean water and all the things that Carbon Projects can finance, which communities really struggle to finance otherwise. So we've become a bit of an expert. We've helped a lot of NGOs get through the process too. We ourselves are not an NGO. We tried to be a market-supported company to see if that was possible in the space because we didn't want to be another hand at the till of the philanthropy, which was already not enough money for those existing NGOs. So we've been a company since the beginning and we became a profitable company in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022. And then not so much in the last couple of years when the market has turned.
David Meyers: [12:27] Yeah. I mean, I've been involved in carbon markets, I guess, since the early the 2000s before there was a concept called REDD+. We called it Avoided Deforestation. We helped finance some work on protected areas in Madagascar, the Makira Forest, which you're familiar with, of course, Natural Park. I think it's the largest protected area in Madagascar currently and will be into the future.
David Meyers: [13:00] You know but there's been a lot of ups and downs and from one perspective the carbon is only one of the, you know, climate regulation for which the carbon markets are related to is only one of the ecosystem services that forests provide and it's a shame that we, you know that there's only one or two maybe sometimes water regulation and ecotourism as you mentioned before. There's only a few ways to capture revenue from standing forests and from intact ecosystems. It's a problem across the board that we really need to work on and fix. And so it's a real shame. I want to dive into biodiversity credits and nature credits in a little bit, but can you just maybe just tell me what your take is on the sort of slowdown in the REDD+ markets and the criticism that it's gone under, obviously it's something that's people are familiar with and it'd be interesting to hear your perspective on it.
Mike Korchinsky: [14:01] Yeah I think they're, you know, I've become fond of a repurposing shall we say of one of Winston Churchill's quotes which is, his quote was democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others and my version of it is the market is the worst form of conservation finance except for all the others, because it really is the only place that has the scale of funding, of money really of wealth to actually address the scale of the challenge which is an economic challenge for billions of people literally in mostly in the global south. And so but the market comes with all kinds of baggage right comes with people who think once you have a market that's all about them making money and they don't need to worry about the outcome somebody else will worry about the outcome they just need to make money and so you know you have bad actors in every market and there were bad actors once the market became substantial enough of course bad actors don't show up until the market has enough liquidity and for them to actually make their piece without anybody paying attention so that was what happened. Some bad actors came into the market that's for sure part of the problem. The activists amongst us who I applaud for holding the fort against the forces of evil for generations.
Mike Korchinsky: [15:28] But they decided that corporates shouldn't be involved in conservation. And so the only way that you can get corporates involved in conservation is if corporates can say nice things about themselves because they're involved in conservation. There's no inherent value that says a corporate or reason other than regulation, which we'll come back to, which is never going to solve the problem because regulators are not brave enough to solve the problem at the scale that needs to be solved. So they'll indicate and they'll direct but they won't ever seize because they're so worried about their the corporates within their own political environment but we operate in a voluntary space really which is companies spending money they don't have to spend from their profits which technically they're not allowed to do. Companies aren't allowed to spend any money from their profits that is diverted from shareholders unless they can demonstrate that it's going to make their shareholders more money in the future. So it's kind of a fundamental rule of corporates that is a problem in this context. So the only way they can demonstrate value is if they can say good things about their brand for doing things that are to the societal good, and if that helps them do better as a company. And it's, of course, impossible for them always to be able to join those dots. But the fact that they might be able to join those dots is enough for most corporates to be willing to jump in and participate because They're also people, and they also see these problems that are facing humanity, right?
Mike Korchinsky: [16:54] But the problem was that the activists attacked the claims. That corporates were making. So the activists said, you know, you're greenwashing yourself, you know, Netflix or whatever. You're not really saving the Amazon.
Mike Korchinsky: [17:07] You're just buying some carbon credits or, you know, Delta. You're not really a carbon neutral airline. You're emitting all this pollution. And who's to say whether these credits that you're buying are the equivalent of all this pollution? So the activists attacked the claim.
Mike Korchinsky: [17:22] And in the absence of a claim, there's no value that the corporates can demonstrate to their board or to their shareholders and therefore they can't do it. So they basically most of them stopped doing it until they figure out okay what's going to happen. So now there was a sort of smoke screen about quality and all these other things which was not completely untrue. There were certainly bad projects in the system but they were a tiny minority of projects. They became easy targets for journalists and people to attack. And there are factions out there in the environmental groups who just don't want markets to be involved at all. And therefore we, we that are bringing markets into conservation are essentially the enemy to them. And so that's been a challenge that I hadn't anticipated was just how bitter and vitriolic that community can be against the new idea that is, you would think are additive to the problem to solving the problem and not competitive. But yeah so the markets have gone sideways largely because the corporates can't make a claim now. So the corporates that are still involved and there are still, we wouldn't be here if they weren't still some involved, the some that are still involved are the heavy emitters because and they control the market and that unfortunately it was a foreseeable problem of defining the market as a mitigation market and defining accountability for participation as the footprint of an individual company or person.
Mike Korchinsky: [18:49] Because as soon as you do that, then you're defining the market to be controlled by the heavy emitters, by those that have the heaviest emissions. And those are generally not the companies that activists love. And so you're creating an easy target for activists with all the companies that are the heavy emitters. And, you know, they deserve to be attacked and challenged, no question. But really on everything, even when they're actually using some of their profits to actually try and mitigate the harm that they're doing, there seems to be some subtlety that got lost there. And but it was, again, as I said, it may have been a great tragedy. It may have been inevitable since defining the market by accountability. So those players that have the biggest footprints, which are largely aggregating the emissions of all of us. So, you know, the oil and gas company's footprint is largely us using their product. And so it's hands down the majority of the emissions of a company like Shell or BP are the emissions of their customers using their products by a long, long way over the emissions associated with them getting that product out of the ground.
Mike Korchinsky: [20:00] But, you know, if they didn't exist, of course, then we wouldn't be able to use their product and the whole thing would go away. But that's not a very practical solution given how we built our modern society. And so, yeah, so the attack on the claim is really the fundamental challenge that we now face if we're going to resurrect the carbon market is how do we get it? How do we get a claim that the activists won't attack or that is defensible, at least in a court of law, that these companies can't be sued for spending their money voluntarily to perform a public good? And so that's where I think the carbon market is, is it's going to keep going because there's so much momentum and there's so much.
Mike Korchinsky: [20:40] Invested in this being part of the solution really without the carbon market generally we all agree even those even though we're somewhat biased because we're in the carbon market but there's just not enough wealth to solve this problem through regulation alone and there's not enough political will to solve this problem through regulation alone especially you know look at what happened just recently here in the United States so we have a administration that that is essentially full of climate deniers. And so we're the largest emitter. It's a convenient position for the U.S. to take because we're the largest emitter.
Mike Korchinsky: [21:16] We're happy enough until very recently when China became the largest emitter because they make stuff for us, essentially. And so, yeah, it's a complicated puzzle. I think it will persist, the carbon market. It will grow. It's going to improve its internal integrity checks And certainly we've been working on that with people that are of high integrity within the market to try and make sure that things don't get through, bad projects don't get through, bad actors don't get in, because they make the market tough for all of us. But we'll see. I mean, the market's recovering slowly, I think, and we're seeing signs of life. And again, there's really no version of climate mitigation that is being posited that achieves what we need to achieve in the next 30 years without a carbon market and essentially without a voluntary carbon market in addition to the regulatory markets.
David Meyers: [22:12] Yeah. I feel it's a shame. There's so many externalities, positive and negative, that nature provides. And it's just a shame that regulation is so off the table in so many cases. And because compliance markets, where they have existed, have really moved much greater amounts of money. And the voluntary market, as you say, it's been in a way where experimentation has taken place, where we've learned what works, what doesn't. But in the end, it's a poor substitution for governments taking responsibility and private companies taking responsibility for the externalities that are not accounted for in their corporate filings and GDP estimates and all the measures that we use to track, rightly or wrongly, the economic progress of our societies. And so again, I do see it as crucial and really glad that it will continue to provide some funding for conservation and other activities, but I also see it as relatively limited and not all that we need but part of what we need.
Mike Korchinsky: [23:37] Yeah no I mean the challenge with regulatory systems is that regulations are made domestically right there's no, the UN is not a regulatory body it doesn't create laws it creates goodwill and protocols and agreements and but it doesn't, it can't regulate literally.
Mike Korchinsky: [24:00] And so the regulations happen domestically. And guess who gets the biggest voice in what regulations occur in their own country? The citizens of that country, because if they don't like the regulations that are being put in, you know, the U.S. is not regulating what happens in the Amazon. The U.S. is regulating what happens in the U.S. And so if the U.S. decides to spend too much money on the Amazon, then the U.S. citizens get upset because they feel like there's problems here that need to be solved. And so the challenge with the regulatory solution is that, in this particular instance, is that the environmental need is in countries that don't have the capacity to regulate and finance the solution. That's the fundamental challenge. So I think that's always going to be the limitation of regulation in this environment and why voluntary action has to be a big part of the puzzle forever, because we have to move wealth from the global north for one of a better simplicity to the global south to solve this problem and governments can't do that not at very large scale or they won't remain in government for very long in their own countries and so the idea that they could sort of do that by proxy through companies through regulating companies in their own countries is also tricky because those companies can move and they can object if they don't like being regulated in a particular place, in a particular way.
Mike Korchinsky: [25:20] So, yeah, so regulation is, of course, important. It's directional. It creates the understood mandate, but it's not going to solve the problem without a healthy voluntary market that.
Mike Korchinsky: [25:32] That agrees that we're all part of the problem and we need to, the participation in the solution needs not to be based on our own contribution to it. Although, I mean, that's fine if you want to tax people for that. But how about who can afford to solve the problem? Because we're all suffering from the problem. And certainly those people in indigenous communities and local communities in the global South are suffering for it more than most of us. And so they need financial help to be able to adapt and because it's not about stopping the damage now it's about adapting to the damage that's already been done to them and to biodiversity etc. So that got us into thinking me as a person thinking well gee you know if that's fundamentally where the carbon market is and it's not really going anywhere how do we how do we stop the decline of intact ecosystems because the carbon market can't reward intactness is one of the ironies of the carbon market is that it really rewards the reduction of damage. It doesn't reward intactness. And in most of life, thinking about the ideal is always important before you start thinking about how you get there.
Mike Korchinsky: [26:42] But we've decided to now focus a lot of effort on how you get more ideal without actually thinking about how we value the ideal, which is an intact forest with intact biodiversity and intact culture and communities that are thriving and so we don't we haven't figured out a place of value on that and that started to bother me because i was being reminded of that constantly by indigenous people i know who would ask me how, you know, if we were all stupid in the global north and I would have a hard time suggesting we aren't because of our collective actions but I decided that we they that we should listen a little bit better and that we should engage them and not just have them tell us how stupid we are, but engage them in telling us how we could be smarter and how, how could we create a market-based solution.
Mike Korchinsky: [27:25] Should we create a market solution and how would we create a market solution that they want to participate in and that they think reflects their contribution to global society in a way that also meets their economic needs and their ability to mitigate economic challenges that they face because of climate change and other avaricious behaviors that we have in society? So that got me down this path of moving away from the carbon market because the carbon market missed that opportunity, in my opinion. I think the carbon market needs to prevail and continue because we have to stop the damage that's being done. But we also have to stop those places that are still intact from sliding down the damage path before they can be financially supported. So we started working with an indigenous community in the Western Amazon called the Yawanawa in co-creating a methodology based on the intactness of biodiversity and intactness of forests and culture in a way that represented them in the way they wanted to be represented in the market. But that was rigorous enough scientifically and measurable from a performance standpoint so that the market could participate and not think it was wasting its money or spending its money on the wrong thing. So we started working on this thing called Biodiversity Stewardship Unit with the Yawanawa.
Mike Korchinsky: [28:53] They will own the methodology that was important to them and to us to a degree, although they've granted the world the right to use it. But they wanted to recognize that their contribution was not just the territory that represented the ideal, but the thinking of how you would create a solution to value that contribution that they're making. And so that's what we've been doing lately on the biodiversity front.
David Meyers: [29:22] Great. Yeah, we've been involved in trying, as you know, to try to develop these nature stewardship certificates together with Verra and all the CFA's nature task force, nature credit task force. And very much in line with what you're doing, although you've pioneered it ahead of us. And so tell us a bit more, how would, I know you released the initial version of it at the Biodiversity COP down in Cali. How do you see this unit being used by corporations? What claims can they make and how does it fit into the sort of overall picture? Of this vastly diverse and emerging biodiversity credit space.
Mike Korchinsky: [30:14] I'll have some answers but not all the answers otherwise I would share them but you know I was concerned a little bit that the biodiversity market starting from the conversations really in Montreal a couple years ago where for the which is the first CBD, the Convention on Diversity that I had attended. I've been to, you know, 20 years of COPs, climate COPs, but not a biodiversity COP. And it was just the first time alleged apparently that the conversation about markets and a market mechanism was really starting in biodiversity. And then over the last couple of years, I've seen that a lot of people maybe for lack of imagination or just thinking, let's just do what the carbon market did, but for biodiversity. And so that sort of made me crazy because I was thinking, well, gee, aren't we supposed to learn from our mistakes and shouldn't we do better this next time around? And especially this notion that everything is mitigation and everything's accountability.
Mike Korchinsky: [31:11] And, you know, to a degree, that's always what regulators think, right? Regulators don't create a vision. You don't get elected for creating a vision of the future. You get elected for dealing with your current problems, right? And so mitigation is kind of a political thing, not since Kennedy maybe, or I don't know, Obama. Have we had an election here where somebody got elected because they had a vision for a better future? And as it turns out, that's quite difficult to achieve in a country that's complicated but yeah so you have this issue where the biodiversity markets were being drawn into the same mitigation and accountability model that that would have defined that or will define that market by the worst actors in biodiversity which which is exactly the problem that the carbon market has it's the market is defined by the worst actors in climate right and so that's that that would be in my opinion a huge shame a real missed opportunity to rethink how markets can engage in solving this problem with their wealth, and base it on their wealth. Who can afford to do it? Not who should do it because they had a history of creating damage, but who can afford to do it and then how do they get benefit out of it? So I think that says, let's focus on good and not bad. Let's not focus on stopping bad. Let's focus on recognizing and rewarding good.
Mike Korchinsky: [32:34] And let's see if we can make that claim something that is harder to attack. Let's see if we can make a claim that says, look, I'm a company, and my job is to make money for my shareholders, but I'm taking some of my profits, and I'm going to spend them over here to protect these precious resources, that have nothing to do with my business, but that I can afford to do, and that I know ultimately, is affecting all of us in global society, and therefore, I'm going to play my role to do it. And if you can unleash the creativity of corporate marketing to identify for themselves what value they can create, that's the point, right? We shouldn't be trying to figure out what slogan a company should be able to say for spending their money that they don't have to spend on a public good. They're really good at that. And yes, of course, there's this notion of greenwashing, but that's generally so obvious when it actually happens. And I wouldn't call greenwashing a company that is voluntarily spending their money on something that's outside their business to do while they're, by the way, spending as much money as they possibly can to fix the problems in their business, because it's generally the good actors in the corporate space that voluntarily spend any money. The bad actors don't voluntarily spend any money. They just give it all to their shareholders.
Mike Korchinsky: [33:46] So I think for me, it was a chance to rethink the way the markets interact and to start with something that's clear, it should be clearly a value. You know, if you want to know what restoration is worth, shouldn't you think of, shouldn't you put a value on the intact thing that you're restoring towards first? It's like, okay, we love alchemists. Really? Why do we love alchemists? Cause they make gold. Oh, okay. Well, what's that got to do? Well, gold's valuable. Okay, there you go. So we know gold's valuable and therefore alchemy has value. So we and yet here we are just trying to define a thousand ways to restore nature without actually putting a value on intact nature it's just madness. So I think we thought that this was a missed opportunity we thought that but to answer your question on the claims I don't want to spend a ton of time thinking about that I want to create an environment where they're telling the truth so I spent this amount of money that I did not have to spend and I did it over here and this is the outcome that was measured from the money that I spent over there in tangible ways right whether it's uplifting or whether it's maintaining just tell the truth but then you can dress that truth up you know use your marketing people. If we can't unleash the marketing people.
Mike Korchinsky: [35:01] Corporates are going to spend a very small amount of money on this because they won't be able to justify it for any reason other than philanthropy whereas if they can actually use it to create brand value by telling the truth about something really good that they're doing with their wealth, then that is a marketing effort and that's a much higher value to the company and therefore they'll spend a lot more money on it. And we need to move lots of money into this space because there's lots of challenges in biodiversity and climate. And so that's the thinking is not to try and literally say that you can't say, but say what you can't do. You can't make some, you can't not tell the truth. You can't say that.
Mike Korchinsky: [35:39] Somehow this money you're spending in the Amazon makes your data center better. It doesn't have anything to do with your data center being better. It makes you a better company because you voluntarily spent profits that you didn't have to spend on solving a societal good. It didn't make your data center any better. So you should also be figuring out how to make your data center better, especially because if that's where your impact is or your agricultural fields. Yeah, focus on making them better and clearly and transparently report what you're doing over there. And then separately, and don't conflate the two, report what you're spending your profits on over here. But I feel like we somehow in the environmental community think we're going to imagine what marketing people are going to do with this when we unleash them again. And then we're just going to jump on them again. I feel like there's this, I actually feel like making a cap that says this is topical in light of our recent election make greenwashing great again.
Mike Korchinsky: [36:38] Because in the end when companies were allowed to say what they were doing and there was a whole bunch of innovation in ways in which the money could flow from corporates into these environmental solutions in a really genuine way okay yes there were some bad actors but lots and lots of money flowed in a genuine way to solving these problems that really needed that money and then it's now because of this now we're in the green hushing world right where corporates can't say anything so now all of a sudden that tap got turned off and it didn't get turned off because those companies were lying they were telling the truth the good ones about what they were doing they're spending money voluntarily on real projects so I think we've got some work to do to be a little bit more forgiving as an environmental community of ideas that aren't our idea of solutions that aren't our solution and because we need everything. You know, everything, everywhere, all at once, right? We're so far behind that we can't really pick and choose at this point. We've got to be all-encompassing.
David Meyers: [37:35] Yeah, absolutely. And that's a good perspective. I've found it useful to make a clear distinction between companies impacting nature, you know, harming nature, and then companies where there's dependency on nature.
David Meyers: [37:51] And, you know, although, again, I agree with you 100% that it's not necessarily because you benefit from it that you should be paying for it. But I do like the user pays principle. And I do think that where you have a dependency on an ecosystem service, be it water, pollination, soil protection, climate regulation, contributing to that does make business sense. But it is voluntary. There's no government saying you must do this. You know, so at this stage, it's all really up to those that have the ability to pay, as you're saying, to make that, to make those investments or fund those projects to achieve the outcomes for ecosystem services, which we all benefit from. And, but I do feel that that distinction, you know, impact should be regulated. It should be, you know, part of a compliance is there. They exist for, you know, biodiversity offsets and other kinds of offsets. But that dependency piece is, there's really little out there that other than payment for ecosystem services, which are for the most part, you know, voluntary type mechanisms, there's very little out there on the.
David Meyers: [39:02] You know, to create markets in that space. And I think that, to me, is a huge opportunity in addition to just being able to, as you say, let loose the marketing team and have them be honest, be truthful, and benefit from their contributions. But it's kind of corporate philanthropy to a certain extent until there's some clear connection with their business models.
Mike Korchinsky: [39:28] Yeah, I mean, I agree that there's lots of different approaches we can take. I mean, I'm not so sure I agree that it's pure philanthropy, right? Because companies don't do pure philanthropy. That's not a thing, right? Even their philanthropy is about brand building, right? There so there's that's I mean and I'm not saying that to be mean to companies that's just in their charter that's like the whole point of a company is to make money for shareholders literally and they can do greater good but they better be able to show the connection to better company from better good so I think that and again that's not a bad thing it just means we have to harness that idea and let them let them be able to the good ones because again the bad ones aren't engaging the bad ones are just doing whatever they're doing and trying to avoid regulation and not spending anything voluntarily right so so those are the ones that maybe point the activists to those for a while and rather than the ones who are sort of leading their space and trying to go ahead but it is this funny thing that market-based finance for conservation is the enemy of in some in the minds of some NGOs the enemy of philanthropic conservation because they feel somehow that if it's drawing in more money then they'll have trouble drawing in money from their donors.
Mike Korchinsky: [40:44] And we see this already. There's a real challenge in the field because in the field, communities are getting tired of NGOs raising money on their story and that money not showing up in the communities. That's a big issue right now for the many generational big NGOs in the conservation space is that there's never been an accounting of how much money has been raised for these problems and how much money is actually going to these communities. And most communities that we talk with are fed up of that. And most communities we talk with want to see that who's getting money and why aren't they getting it? Because if they're going to be part of the solution, they want the money for solving the problem. And so that's the nice thing about markets is it can really connect the money directly with these communities if it's done properly, where the communities own the projects and the communities decide whose help they need and how much they're willing to share of their project. And that's, I think, the future both for these biodiversity projects and hopefully for carbon projects is really a recognition that to do it right, you have to start from the community out and not from the market in. And then if you do, then we're really talking about high positive impact, not negative impact, but positive impact in terms of driving significant amounts of financial flows to these communities that desperately need it and know they need it. It's not like we're imagining that they need money. They all well know that they do.
David Meyers: [42:03] Yeah. Yeah. And they're the ones providing the services, basically.
Mike Korchinsky: [42:06] It's a service. And it makes me crazy when I hear people in the carbon market go, well, what is the theory of change for these communities at the end of the carbon project? I'm like, wait, so you want me to tell you what the theory of change for a community that's lived the same way for 40,000 years is in the next 20 years after your carbon money runs out? And by the way, you haven't even committed to paying them for the next 20 years. They're getting it year by year as the market is like, what the heck do you think their theory of change is? Their theory of change is leave us alone and let us live the way we are, but we need money to fend you off and to deal with the damage you've already created. So it's madness to think that that job isn't a job. That job of protecting nature the way they've decided to as a community isn't something of great value to the global community. I think we just need to, you know, for me, it's a moment of philosophy to sort of think that, why can't we just recognize good. It's good enough. It's great. It's awesome. Let's recognize it, quantify it in a rigorous way because we have to do that because we're science wonks and then monetize it for these communities so that they actually then don't have to think about what's next. What's next after 40,000 years? How about the same?
Mike Korchinsky: [43:16] Only finance now in a way that allows them to deal with all the externalities that are impinging on their way of life, right? And so So I think that to us is really the next few years is to, can we reorient the market's involvement in this in a way that the wealth matters so that we have a league table of contribution? Like this is the company that spent the most, right? It's not the company that did the most damage. That's another table over here. That's the shit list over here. Pardon my French. The good list is the list of companies that spent the most money on this voluntarily from their profits and and you can go and trace where all their money went and see which communities benefited from it and see what's going on in those communities as a consequence right and so that to me is where we have to get in the next few years for biodiversity to take off as a market that's meaningful and that misses out on a lot of the challenges that the carbon market had and that ensures that some of these unbelievable places that still exist against all the odds on earth remain into the future.
David Meyers: [44:21] Right. We so depend on them and value them. Mike, thank you so much for this conversation. Really, really enjoyed it. And thank you for all the great work that you're doing and the support, you know, and the collaboration that you're doing with indigenous people. And I really wish you the best of luck with these biodiversity stewardship units. And yeah, and we'll be in touch soon.
Mike Korchinsky: [44:42] Thanks, Dave.