Tag: climate

Matt Schmitt – How to make regenerative food and agriculture bankable

A conversation with Matt Schmitt, founder of Structure Climate, about how to get institutional investors invest in the regenerative food and agriculture transitions. These are big terms we use regularly, but what do they actually mean and, more importantly, how do we get there? How do we get novel climate technologies- like biochar machinery, chestnut agroforestry systems, biofertilizer plants, or weeding robots- bankable? Novel technologies often start as luxury goods with a clear customer demand, even if they don’t yet have many existing transactions, just very clear customer interest.
How do we make these technologies investable, or at least recognisable, by major financial institutions (like the big, “boring” banks, insurance companies, and pension funds). We need billions and trillions to flow to the soil. So, how do we get these asset managers over time to start financing this seriously, in the same way they do solar projects or sustainable real estate?

How does a capital stack for a novel technology look like, and how do we financially engineer it with creativity—the good kind, not the kind that caused financial crises in the past decades? To roll these technologies out across farms and landscapes, we need scalable solutions. While commodification in food and agriculture has a bad reputation, turning enabling technologies into bankable commodities can be a good thing. It helps farmers adopt systems that hold more complexity and resilience on their land.

What we learned in 2023 about cooling the planet, food as medicine, regenerative renaissance, indigenous knowledge and decommodification

As we are wrapping up 2023 we look back at a year which feels even crazier than 2022. Another war has started and we have been flooded literally with extreme weather events. Every month seems to have been the warmest, driest, wettest etc. in history! Let’s look at what we covered and learned in the podcast!

Anastassia Makarieva – Healthy forests invest their capital to create their own rain

A conversation with Anastassia Makarieva, researcher at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute and with a fellowship at the University of Munich, about how healthy ecosystems, and specifically healthy forests, regulate moisture and thus rain. We discuss tipping points and where to look for wet spots even in very dry landscapes.

Clara Rowe on mapping all restoration projects in the world and provide transparency to the restoration movement

Clara Row is the CEO of Restor, a science-based open data platform to support and connect the global restoration movement. This is conversation about technology, transparency, and bioacoustics in our transition to regeneration. 

Judith D Schwartz on why our current economic framework is completely inadequate for regeneration at scale

The landscapes around us are a reflection of our consciousness and wealth is found in our functional ecosystems. The author Judith D. Schwartz joins us once again to discuss her new book, The Reindeer Chronicles, wherein she dives deep into regeneration at a large scale.

Walter Jehne, stop talking about carbon emissions and focus on restoring the water cycle

An episode about the impact of regeneration on cooling the climate with Walter Jehne, forester and agricultural scientist specialising in soil microbial ecology of plant diseases, nutrition, and land regeneration.