Allison Wolff is the Founder and CEO of Vibrant Planet, a firm that leverages the power of narrative to mobilize positive social change. She has 25 years of experience in the space, and her impressive client roster includes Google, eBay, Facebook and Netflix. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Allison joins Ross and Christophe to discuss what sparked her interest in the megafire issue and explain why the California forests are burning—and what we can do about it.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. Hey, if you like the show and you haven’t rated and reviewed us yet, please do so on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. It helps us get the word out about carbon removal, about why its approach to climate change is so important. Help us grow this audience. Today we are finished. God, it’s been too much conferencing. I’m tired. I’m fighting through.
Christophe Jospe: Me too. We conference hard. And here we are at the Verge conference or summit. I’m not actually sure. It’s part of Green Biz. Pretty impressive. Very impressive bunch that they gathered here together. We’re cordoned off illegally in a room in the Marriott Hotel. You asked for permission. I think. I mean, from someone, but they didn’t tell someone else who might just barge in here. So if that happens, sorry, an advanced listener, we’ll do our best to edit that out and make this a seamless and wonderful listening experience for you. We didn’t introduce ourselves either.
Wow, real train wreck. So I’m Christophe Jospe and sitting next to my co-host Ross Kenyon.
Ross Kenyon: Hello, that’s my voice.
Christophe Jospe: Hello. And it’s a special day because we weren’t planning on doing this, but the more we hung out with her and we really like her, we’re like, wow, we need to get her on the podcast. When are we going to do this again? Oh, why don’t we just do it like after the conference? We’re all sort of burnt out and loopy. Sometimes you just got to strike when you’re together. Yeah. We had one of those conversations last night where in like 15 minutes we’re like, okay, we figured it out. We figured out how we can do a methodology for afforestation using nori and things that Allison Wolfe thinks a lot about.
So sitting across from us, we have Allison Wolfe. She is the CEO of Vibrant Planet. Welcome, Allison.
Allison Wolff: Thank you.
Christophe Jospe: Allison, we like to start off with people’s origin stories and their connection to Reversing Climate Change. So how did it all get started for you?
Allison Wolff: Let’s see. I am a Colorado girl and nature has always been a huge part of my life. And I left Colorado, ventured into technology and have worked for many, many years, 25 years at various technology companies, mostly running Brand experience. So forming brands, launching brands, thinking about the digital experience, how people are experiencing the brand and a product. And been lucky to work in a lot of companies in Silicon Valley from Netflix to Google to Facebook and eBay.
Ross Kenyon: Heard of a couple of those.
Allison Wolff: Yeah. Yes. And along the pathway in those companies, I started to get really passionate about the role corporations can play in society and was very early in the kind of sustainability process. Global citizenship, social impact, those kinds of areas in the early 2000s as companies were starting to think about their bigger role in the world besides making money. So I basically have made a livelihood for many years now helping companies establish that. What do they want to stand for? And then how do they actualize that very authentically, not just greenwashing or social washing, but Actually building real tangible programs and partnerships and then product experiences to actually bring that to life and then engage stakeholders, consumers especially, in where they want to head.
So example of that to make that tangible. When I was working with eBay... They have a platform called eBay Giving Works where sellers can donate a percentage of their proceeds from a sale to whatever nonprofit they want. They have every nonprofit in the world registered there. And they were pulling at about $100 million a year in donations, and they wanted to do more. And so I looked into the product experience and just discovered some really easy fixes that would potentially unlock more money in the seller flow. That no one had thought about for whatever reason.
And so a couple of years later, instead of $100 million, they were pulling in about $2 billion of philanthropic money going to thousands of causes. Similarly, on sustainability, thinking about if someone’s trying to buy an EV, what are the barriers to actually pulling the trigger on that purchase?
Christophe Jospe: That’s electric vehicle, right?
Allison Wolff: Yes, electric vehicle.
Christophe Jospe: We didn’t warn you. We’re going to come after you if you use acronyms. If I use acronyms. Okay.
Allison Wolff: I’ll try not to. EV is a good one, though. So, you know, what are all the barriers to, you know, is it bits of information? Is it what are the charging stations in my area, integrating Google Maps kind of stuff to actually help people pull the trigger? So did a lot of kind of deep work in the product. So helped Meg Whitman and her team. I helped Google with their Google Green launch, which was sort of the first narrative around their incredible and broad efforts on campus and then investments in renewable energy and all these other things.
And then I worked with Facebook on similar, you know, all their sustainability stuff and social impact and data for good launches and those kinds of things. And so through that work, I got very deeply involved in climate change and really forward thinking leaders like Bill Weil, who is at Google and Facebook and has really pioneered sort of the next frontier of green energy and aggregated purchasing power of corporations. And so I sort of entered that space more and more. I then when I was inside Facebook, I started working on during the Paris Climate Talks, Bill Weil and I Realize this is going to be a really significant cultural moment.
And if Facebook isn’t there to help catalyze that moment, that’s ridiculous. But at the time, even during the Obama administration, because of politics in D. C. , Even inside Facebook, executives weren’t able to say the words climate change. So that was wild to experience. And so here comes this cultural moment. And about six months out, Bill and I convinced all the way up to Mark that we needed to create a page for Earth, which breaks Facebook rules because Earth doesn’t have an address. And we convinced the policy team that we needed a booth in the blue zone next to the negotiations.
And Facebook Live went out literally the week before. So we were nabbing leaders, having them come into the Facebook booth, which was the sustainability story I had written and was in kind of physical form. And having leaders training them on Facebook Live to give their observations of what was happening at the Paris Climate Talks. And so in doing that, and then we also had about 300 NGOs networked together and we were commissioning films and uproar the articles and all kinds of things. And we were pulsing content out through this network of 300 NGOs working on climate change and environment throughout like in the lead up to for about six weeks and then during Paris and then after Paris to really build the noise about this issue.
So for Americans, especially who had never heard of the Conference of the Party’s process, which is the UN process for Actually establishing the agreement in Paris or the other more famous one was Copenhagen. You know, we really put that process and that cultural moment on the map with the public. And so I got really excited about movement building and we started to sort of wire together, like, how do you actually build a movement? And then we leveraged that for women’s empowerment in Asia and some health related stuff when Zika broke out.
You know, how do you use that same kind of networked distribution to save lives? So that was a lot of my work over the last 20 years. And then I also worked with some philanthropic, some of the Silicon Valley founders, basically. And one of them lives in Tahoe now. And they asked if I could look at various issues that impact Tahoe, but are also global issues. And so we looked at affordable housing and transportation. And then, of course, I started talking to climate scientists about how climate change is impacting the Sierra and started to learn about this mega fire problem, which will lead us into the forest conversation.
I was also before that working with Paul Hawken to launch Project Drawdown. And so for the Carbon sequestration part of the story, I started to see Drawdown is a book that basically reframed the climate conversation. And Paul had a team of about 300 fellows that worked for several years on researching what are the top 100 solutions to climate change. And he was trying to reframe the goal from, you know, a number like 350 or 2. 5 ppm to And so a lot of that is flipping from a narrative just about reducing emissions to actually pulling carbon down.
And so how do you do that? There are 16 land-based solutions in drawdown. Those in combination blow away energy solutions. Not that we don’t want to do the energy solutions because we do have to reduce emissions, but the drawdown space and the land-based solutions and then the side benefits like clean water So that’s when I really got passionate about the drawdown side of things. California’s megafire problem and working with scientists like Malcolm North and Scott Stevens, who are two of the top kind of fire forest ecologists. And hearing that California could lose two thirds of its 33 million acres in the next 15 to 20 years to megafire and climate driven disease and mortality, you start to think about the catastrophic failure of that for the giant ag system, the world’s fifth biggest economy.
And the water system, the carbon storage system that trees represent. And so the family that had hired me to look at that issue and other issues, I went back to them and said, this is the issue that you need to take on. And there’s a huge opportunity for the private sector to play in this. And ultimately, what has to happen is we’ve got to crack a carbon market that’s going to basically scale the economy around really good forest management. And so that’s where I met Paul Gamble from Nori and started to think about how do we think about a drawdown solution and attach an economic system to that for forests in a similar way to what Nori’s been doing for agriculture.
Ross Kenyon: You made our job real easy there. Didn’t feel the need to interject at all. Just wanted to hear all of that. Yeah, I think Paul went down to some event. You guys are trying to figure out exactly like how to marketize this or how to do the correct type of design to make sure the incentives were correct. Did anything good come out of it?
Allison Wolff: Yeah, we were doing all kinds of crazy, we called it the think wrong process. So really mapping the system, there’s a very broken system in the forest management space in California and the West writ large. We’re focused on California because it’s the fifth biggest economy and there’s technology players here that we can tap and money here we can tap. And if we solve it here, we can replicate it in all kinds of other places. So thinking about The economics of the problem, exploring a nori-based solution or other kinds of, you know, how do we tap into carbon markets and how do we start to reframe the problem around the avoided cost of wildfire?
That’s the nut that needs to crash. And if we can crack that and then we can create the economic flows to restore forests, which I can explain what’s going on with forests, if that’s helpful. It’s that kind of financing from carbon markets and water markets and valuing biodiversity and things like that, that is actually going to pay for the long-term work. Because it’s not like you restore the forest once and then you’re done. You have to continuously tend the forest like a garden.
Ross Kenyon: I have questions about what’s wrong with using solutions that are already methodologies inside of other registries. What’s wrong with the existing carbon markets? Why are you coming to Norway with some weird, untested, quasi-bearded group of weirdos to do this rather than something much more established? Do you want to go into this now or do you have a flow that you want to go through?
Christophe Jospe: Are you asking me, Ross? No, I think it’s pretty organic. We should just plant the seed to see where they grow.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. What’s wrong with existing solutions for forestry?
Allison Wolff: There isn’t one, really. So a lot of people are talking about it. No one’s doing it. And I think Nori’s focus on carbon drawdown and the sequestration piece of this is what’s needed. So the model that you guys have created on ag is what’s needed on forest health. Absolutely, 100%.
Christophe Jospe: So maybe just get a little more basic. I mean, obviously, our dot connector, you have done some very impressive name dropping early on. Well done. But those aren’t just names to drop. Those are people who are real agents of change. If you were really cool, you wouldn’t have even commented because you already know them, right? Right? Yeah, sure. We know Reed and Patty, too. Don’t even worry about it. Oh, hey, Mark. Are you listening? But there’s something about forest. There’s something about this being a really important solution to be focusing on.
And I think what’s kind of crazy about this is it’s not like we’re necessarily inventing a new technology. The know-how is there. It’s just the implementation of these practices within a broader system. But why forest management? Why is this so important? Why is this the issue for you?
Allison Wolff: Yeah. So let me give some background on why California’s forests are burning to the ground. So when white people arrived, European Americans arrived in the West, they arrived to giant trees that there really were 100 foot diameter trees, mostly like if you go to the Tahoe area throughout the Pacific Northwest as well, really, really giant trees. And There was very little ground cover between them. And the forests were very heterogeneous, meaning there were lots of different types of species and different aged trees. And a heterogeneous forest is a resilient forest.
So in resiliency in terms of wildfire, so there was always lightning. These are dry forests. They’ve burned forever. So the system has had fire in it for 20,000 years. And so these giant trees are built for fire. So the trunks seal themselves. The pine cones on most of the species are round and they are designed to spread more fire. So if there’s a low intensity fire, these pine cones roll around and take the fire with them. And the seeds only pop if the temperature is just right. Berry bushes only come when there’s low intensity fire and then the berry bushes come.
So part of the reason there’s a lot of bears in trash cans in forested areas, it’s partly because people are there now, but it’s also because there’s nothing for them to eat. And then fire also recycles the nutrients in the forest, but it has to, again, it has to be the right intensity of fire. So the other thing that’s really interesting I learned on this journey is the native folks that were our predecessors, so they came at the So between lightning fire and cultural fire, everything in the West burned. And it was that low intensity regenerative nutrient So European Americans arrived, and our first mistake was we removed Native Americans.
So that’s a problem in lots of American history, right? But we basically, with them, removed fire, which the forest needed. We then clear cut the entire West. So we literally cut every one of those giants. There’s really only 3% left of old growth in the Western United States. So what we have is a bunch of teenage trees. And with forestry, certain species were more desirable than others, whatever was in fashion for the type of wood that was wanted. And so we have these kind of mono forests that are the same species, same age, no heterogeneity whatsoever.
They grew into close together. And so you’ve got these little teenage trees with branches touching. And then we suppressed fire for 130 years.
Ross Kenyon: It was just farmed in that way just so people could easily cut them down and ship them to market. That’s why that happened.
Allison Wolff: Yeah. And we have to remember wood built the American economy. So before there was oil and gas, every building in America was made of wood. Every sidewalk was made of wood. The mines were built with wood. The railroads were built with wood. And so... It was basically the valuation of the American economy. And unfortunately, the Forest Service still operates in that model as the original economy of the United States. So they have board feet targets just like they did in the 17, 1800s.
Ross Kenyon: Did I make this up about before the UK was the UK, just the island had cut down all of their trees and then coal sort of came around as a result of that?
Allison Wolff: Yeah, that’s right. Yep. Lorax. Lorax.
Christophe Jospe: Lorax, that’s right. It’s kind of funny that in a way, coal saved the forest in a certain perspective because you now had a new energy source.
Ross Kenyon: Like petroleum saved the whales, right? You gotta love those neat little ironies that are just built in.
Allison Wolff: Exactly. So the other little known fact that I think is so fascinating. So the Japanese during World War II sent hot air balloons across the ocean to crash into California’s wood. In Oregon, Washington. To burn it. Because that hit us in the economic gut. And so, because still wood was really important back then. That was when we declared war on fire. That’s when we started using war planes to dump water to put fires out. And it was this fundamental shift on how we think about fire. So fire was the enemy.
And we’ve since then... We’ve been suppressing fire for 130 years in a fire adapted ecosystem. And so it’s completely kicking us in the ass now. So we’ve got these teenage trees from clear cutting that have grown in too close. And then you’ve got ground fuels that have grown up because we don’t let any fire come in. So like in California, Cal Fire successfully puts out 96% of fires within about 100 yard run. So we’re really good at putting them out. And the chemicals and all the things we’ve done with plane technology and all of that, we’re really good at putting fires out.
And only 2% of them actually become mega fire. And so mega fire is a new term. It basically captures this hyper fuel load situation where you’ve got ladder fuels that carry fire that would normally be low intensity ground fire. And carry it up the ladder up to the canopy where it never used to go. And once the canopy catches fire and then you’ve got climate fueled winds off the desert. So we’ve always had the Santa Ana winds and Diablo, San Diablo winds. But now they’re a lot hotter. They’re a lot faster.
So like right now we’re in California, there’s a big fire in Sonoma just north of us. And on Sunday, and also down in San Diego, and on Sunday, the winds are expected to be 100 miles an hour. So it’s a frigging nightmare for fire, right? For two big fires, the Sonoma Fire right now as we sit here is totally out of control. So you’ve got these climate-fueled winds coming off the desert, taking this now canopy fire and moving it through the forest at speeds that we’ve never seen the last couple of years.
So all this land management and fire suppression policy is coming to roost. And our forests are bearing the brunt of that. And then these overfueled forests with these winds burn so hot it fries the seed stock. So you lose this massive amount of carbon. So like last year’s fires with the campfire around Paradise, the 2018 fires put out 68 billion tonnes of carbon. So that’s the equivalent of powering the entire state of California for an entire year. So the carbon loss is mind-boggling. And no one really talks about that, what’s going into the atmosphere.
But then you lose that carbon storage and those incredible carbon storage machines forever because the seed stock is fried. The other thing that I learned along the way is... California and Pacific Northwest trees store more carbon than tropical rainforests. And that’s because the roots have to go so deep to actually get water. Most of the tree, even the giants, is underground. And so the carbon storage is remarkable. So you’re losing these unbelievable carbon Wow. So you also lose the water storage and filtration system. So those trees are doing this incredible service for us where they’re delivering clean, fresh water through their filtering system.
So you think about an ag system that’s 13% of the world’s food in California. You think about 40 million people’s water source. Half of that, every other sip plus is coming from forested areas. So if you lose the forest, which the scientists think we will lose two thirds of 33 million acres in the next 20 years, We’re in deep shit. And what’s interesting is nobody’s talking about this. The ag industry is not talking about it. Consumers, we’re sitting in Oakland. Nobody in Oakland knows that every other sip of water is coming from the forest and they have no idea that our trees store that much carbon.
So anyway, so it’s a kind of catastrophic failure situation. The carbon market, water utility markets, those kinds of markets are what’s going to pay for this mass restoration work because we can actually fix this problem.
Ross Kenyon: How exactly does that work? So you have this fire adapted ecosystem that was either lightning strikes back in the day or was deliberately created by indigenous peoples here who are managing it for making it more visible or more prime hunting ground or various reasons I’ve seen proposed for why. Why like Sweden agriculture or like fire management was practiced. What happens now that we’ve stopped managing it and we’ve sort of been like, no, we’re not gonna do anything. We’re just gonna put everything out, but also not provide any of those same services that the fire was providing.
Just start reintroducing the good parts of that without people’s houses burning down. Or I don’t know what the death count is every time there’s a fire just from air pollution being super bad. I know it’s associated with one. It depends on where it is. But how do we get the benefits without having to like restore like low intensity fires as a regularity? Or do we?
Allison Wolff: Yeah. Well, so this the solution is we have to take responsibility for really screwing up the forest. And we ultimately have to get low intensity fire back on the land.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, so we actually do have to do that. Yes. Wow. Okay.
Allison Wolff: So the pathway there, so there’s some areas that are safe to burn and we just need to start burning like crazy. And we need to raise up a giant workforce of super cool burn bosses. It’s like the coolest job in the world. These guys, like they’re, they’re like artists that move fire through land. It’s really something to see if you ever get a chance to see one.
Ross Kenyon: Burn bosses?
Allison Wolff: Burn boss. I’m going to start a Netflix show called Burn Boss.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I would wise like ice road truckers, but with people who start fires. Yeah.
Allison Wolff: It’s like the ice fishermen guys. Oh, okay. It’s going to be burned.
Christophe Jospe: Deadliest catch. Yeah.
Allison Wolff: Okay. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Wait for it. I mean, you have to do it now because you said so on the podcast. So yeah, we’re going to hold you to that. We get co-creator credits and we’re both EPs now.
Ross Kenyon: Absolutely. We heard it first.
Allison Wolff: We’ll launch it here. Okay. So in a lot of places, though, it’s not safe to burn because the fuel loads are so high. And it is the weather fuel load combination. So you can burn heavy fuel loads if you don’t have the crazy wind. So there are times where you can near wild urban interface areas where we have 11 million people in California living now in forests, which is nuts.
Ross Kenyon: How close? You’re talking about Namath Lake, so you’re talking Tahoe?
Allison Wolff: Tahoe, yeah, the whole corridor.
Ross Kenyon: The whole corridor, yeah.
Allison Wolff: Paradise, which burned, yeah. Throughout the Sierra and North, Shasta, Lassen, the whole area. That’s the other problem is we’ve had this massive population explosion and a lot of second homes built. In what’s called the WUI area, the wild urban interface where people just shouldn’t live. It’s a little bit like the question of, you know, when you have a giant hurricane or you have hurricanes year after year after year in the same place, should people actually live there? Do you actually rebuild? And California is asking that question right now in places like paradise that have burned forever and ever and ever.
Ross Kenyon: Does the government help them with the cost of insuring this property? Is that part of the reason why they do it? Is this a derailing question?
Allison Wolff: No, not at all. I mean, insurance is, it’s going to be interesting in a few years to see if there is insurance in California. So insurance is going away really quickly. For homes, you mean?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Allison Wolff: Okay. And commercial. Oh. So I live in Tahoe. I lost my insurance. My mother-in-law lives in Auburn, California, which is in the foothills. She lost her insurance. There’s one insurance company that will insure us right now in California. So California has a state system as the kind of catch. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Oh my.
Allison Wolff: In the United States.
Ross Kenyon: Well, do you think that the state should take that responsibility or do you think they should use it as an opportunity to say, this is your chance to get out?
Allison Wolff: Yeah. So we can restore forests so that we can have fire mostly safely. So what we have to figure out is how do you rally all of the interested parties that have money, like the insurance industry, like the utilities, like big ag, like And so I call them sleeping allies. How do you wake them up to the stakes, what’s going on? And how do you get the investments in, especially in the short term, to kind of catalyze the solutions? And so what’s needed is if we can raise up a big enough workforce, we can clear out the biomass.
So there are parts of California where there’s four feet of slash waste. Slash waste is where the timber industry cuts branches off of big trees and they just leave it in the forest. And so that’s all kindling, right? Like think about when you start a fire and a campfire in your fireplace, you have to have lots of little kindling. There’s lots of little kindling that the, you know, the loggers left behind. Plus you’ve got all these ground fuels that are these little things that burn really easily, shrubs and stuff. So we can remove all that.
And some of that can be done with prescribed burns. And some of that’s going to have to be hand done, like literally dragging it out of the forest or with rakes. I’m kidding, kidding, kidding. And then right now, and then cutting some small trees. So unfortunately, this is one of those weird, there’s all these paradigm shifts where we have to learn to love fire, but the right kind of fire. Tree huggers have to learn to cut trees. So little trees would have burned all these years in natural fire or in cultural fire, but they didn’t die because we’ve been suppressing fire.
And so we’ve got to pull some of them out. And do something productive with them ideally. So right now it gets pulled out and it gets piled up and then they burn the piles. That’s really stupid because that’s carbon that we’re just burning into the atmosphere that could be turned into biochar that sequesters the carbon directly. We can use that small crappy wood in cross laminated timber, which is a building product that would store that carbon for a good couple hundred years. So building those industries is going to be key.
Christophe Jospe: Man, you’re laying so much juicy bait. I mean, I think the cross-laminated timber, biochar, I mean, all of that speaks to carbon removal solutions that are quite modular that once you start collecting data based on practice changes, which can be calculated. I was in this meeting. You were there too, Allison, but you weren’t there for the part that I was where there’s a slide and it was different tree structures. Yeah. But I’m curious. So you’re talking about burn bosses. You’re talking about people who are not raking, but collecting kindling around.
You know, there’s a lot of like human activity. And last night we were talking, you know, we can have all the artificial intelligence and machine learning and blockchains in the world. And obviously these are things that both of us think a lot about and think it’s pretty intuitive. But if you don’t have the human capacity and don’t have the knowledge and the know-how to actually manage and maintain a forest, it ain’t going to work. So what gives you hope and what gives you pause for concern in terms of the forest management techniques that you think can really scale and address this challenge?
Allison Wolff: Yeah. So what gives me hope is we know what to do. So the scientists I’m working with at Berkeley and in the Forest Service, they know what the model is that is going to be resilient from the Doing historic work and soil cores and all kinds of things to looking at there’s a forest in northern Baja, Mexico in the mountains that’s never been logged. And it still has cultural fire and they’ve never suppressed fire. And it’s what our forest used to be, but what will also be more resilient in the future.
So it’s the same species, but adapted for drier, hotter climate.
Christophe Jospe: With burn bosses.
Allison Wolff: With burn bosses.
Christophe Jospe: Okay, cool.
Allison Wolff: But they’re native.
Christophe Jospe: That’s like episode one.
Allison Wolff: They’re Native American burn bosses. Cool. Native Mexican, I mean.
Christophe Jospe: Right on.
Allison Wolff: Yeah, that’s the first episode. They have a vision for where we need to head. They have a vision for what resilience means. And we have pockets of Work that’s been done at Berkeley Sagehen is an incredible experimental forest with the Tahoe National Forest just north of Tahoe. They’ve created the model that is widely agreed needs to be replicated. The Nature Conservancy, they have a project that’s at the headwaters of the American River, one of the really important tributaries into Sacramento and the Bay. And they also very similar model. So we know where we’re headed.
And the question is, can we scale the workforce? And can we get the capital in place to build the industry? So it’s literally workers in the field. It is very much human work augmented by technology to actually get this done at the scale and with the efficiency that needs to get done. Because we have like Five, seven years to really start to tip this before we’ve lost so much of the force. We could lose a lot of force before we even start if we’re not careful.
Ross Kenyon: Why did you choose or why are you looking seriously at a marketplace like Nori? I’m trying to talk you out of working with us. It sounds like... Too scary for you. Or just fishing for compliments. Either way. But I’m sure you’ve looked into things like green bonds, which I think are super interesting, too. People that are downstream that want water quality. They want to make sure that there’s water for their agricultural systems. Is that something that you’re thinking of employing, too? Is that just not thinking creatively enough about this? Does it not really get you where you need to go?
Do you need the dynamism of a marketplace in here discovering prices? What’s the secret sauce of that you’re looking for with Nori or a system like us?
Allison Wolff: I think we need all of it. So I think there are solutions like there is the Forest Resilience Bond and Blue Forest Conservation that pioneered that. And, you know, really thinking about the water-forest connection, they’re doing a pilot right now with the Yuba County Water Utility who is paying for forest restoration upstream because they get it, that if they lose the forest, the water for Downeyville and other parts of California is going to be undrinkable. So, and the fire risk is just insane in that canyon. So... We’ve had lots of conversations about, like, do you have a water surcharge?
So kind of scaling that statewide so that everybody that gets water from the forest is paying to keep the forest healthy. So I think those things are needed. And I think why Nori is interesting, again, is we have to wake people up to the fact that these forests do store as much carbon or more carbon than tropical rainforests and help people understand the value of that and the drawdown component. That natural climate solution, you guys being able to create the marketplace that monetizes that is really important from valuing nature and natural climate solutions perspective.
I also, what you guys have done in ag... The other thing that bothers me about this whole sector is nobody’s looking at whole landscapes. So how the forests are connected to the ag lands through water and lots of other ways. So how do we think about landscape scale solutions where carbon and water are intertwined and working together to pull the carbon down that we’re emitting? So I just see you guys as having thought a lot about that equation and building a marketplace to value that.
Christophe Jospe: What makes us also really excited about this is when we start thinking about using technology tools to establish environmental incentives and just boil it down, what do we need? We need to know what’s the additional human activity that we’re taking? Yeah. It’s the data that can collect all of the carbon stock in an independent and transparent system. So instead of having verifiers running their own bespoke model and walking through the tree and putting a string around the tree and then measuring it every now and then, We say, hey, we can move into the future really quickly.
Like we know it’s all there. Let’s just go. The data is available. And so by taking that approach, we’re very optimistic that we can get to scale more quickly. And I think for us, we recognize there are multiple environmental services from Improving Forests. I think one of the things that you’ve talked about also is like mental health.
Allison Wolff: Yes.
Christophe Jospe: Which is huge. Or I think, I mean, to credit.
Allison Wolff: Biodiversity.
Christophe Jospe: Biodiversity, improved water. But like mental health is for real because it also like go bathe in the forest. That’s a real thing. Japanese doctors are prescribing that. I can’t wait for them.
Allison Wolff: Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, like all of the magic of stories is in forests, right? So one of my partners at Celo Sciences, so Celo Sciences is building the platform. We should talk about that actually. He just published a paper with Gretchen Daly from Stanford’s Natural Capital Institute on this mental health as an ecosystem service. So there’s been a lot in the news lately about the importance of nature for mental health. It’s all over the place right now. So they put this provocation out there, like, could you actually make that an ecosystem service, just like carbon storage or, you know, water quality is an ecosystem service.
And then you tap into public health money.
Ross Kenyon: But definitely could. This is sort of. That application I’m sure will strike people who are already critical of ecosystem service markets as being straight up ludicrous.
Allison Wolff: It is sad we have to put a monetary value to what nature provides, but I fear that if we don’t, we are not going to act.
Christophe Jospe: And somehow, I mean, this is the Reversing Climate Change podcast. So, listener, you know where our biases lie. We’re in the name of Reversing Climate Change. But certain times people don’t even want to hear the words climate change. They want to hear jobs, jobs, jobs. But there’s so many jobs to be created in these natural climate solutions. Yes.
Allison Wolff: We have a large underemployed or unemployed population in rural West, rural California included. But throughout Oregon, Washington, Colorado, all of these states have And there’s thousands and thousands of jobs to actually do this at the scale that’s needed. It’s just got to be funded. So we’ve been playing with like, so I see Nori and these ecosystem services markets. We’re going to need catalytic philanthropic capital, probably an investment capital, impact investing capital to actually catalyze a lot of this stuff. But I think that the carbon water monetizing the value of biodiversity, potentially monetizing the value of mental health, And our connection with nature, that’s how the work’s going to happen over the long haul.
This is a long haul game, right? Like you don’t just tend the forest once, you have to tend it forever. And that’s a weird concept. Like I grew up in Colorado and I always saw forests in Colorado as wild places. And what I’ve learned on this journey over the last year and a half is they kind of aren’t. Our forests everywhere in the West are man-made. We created a man-made nightmare, and it’s now a catastrophe for us. And we kind of have to pierce this notion of wild. Now, I don’t want to manage every inch of what we call wilderness, but we screwed it up badly enough that we at least owe it to our fellow species to sort of restructure forests to some semblance of what they were before European Americans got here.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, did you read 1491?
Allison Wolff: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I was really struck reading that book about just how managed basically all of the continents landscapes are. Yeah. Like the idea of it being wild or pristine or untouched by humans or indigenous people were just sort of like passively wandering through it rather than shaping it. Right. That being a myth.
Allison Wolff: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Pretty mind blowing. I think we’ve sort of like separated ourselves from nature and then in a way just said like, this is wild and that means we don’t do anything with it.
Allison Wolff: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Ignoring the patrimony that we inherited that it requires that and you can’t just walk away from it. Yep. So I think you’re on the right track.
Allison Wolff: Yeah, and there is a narrative out there, including Sierra Club. I donate to Sierra Club every month. But they have been a very loud voice opposing action on Western forests. They want a no-touch policy. They want a let-it-burn policy that nature let nature take its course. And I think they’re dead wrong. And... You know, I just see it, like I said, where we owe it to the forest and the other species, if not ourselves, to try to bring the forest back to some sort of resilience because we’ve made them unresilient and we will lose them.
So if you have a million year view, sure, we won’t be here anymore and things will come back the way they’re going to come back. But I’ve got an 11 year old that I want to look in the eye and say I tried. And I really like my whole climate journey, going back to the original question is, I wasn’t really planning to have kids, mostly because of climate change. And I really was doing this work for other species because I feel so damn guilty of what we have done to the planet.
And the species loss, the mass extinction. When I read about the mass extinction that’s happening, that was really my trigger to get into climate change solutions work. And now I’ve got a kid on top of it. So anyway, I just feel like we owe it to the species that are alive today, including humans, to fix this.
Ross Kenyon: I’m glad you brought up the Sierra Club because I was going to ask you, who do you think is the best critic of what you do or what are some of the challenges that you face? Do you think it’s their work on a no-touch policy for force?
Allison Wolff: That’s one of the biggest problems we have.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think there’s like some merit to it that you’re like, that’s kind of a good point or you just think it’s wrong?
Allison Wolff: I always believed that growing up in Colorado. I just understand the problem so differently now. And I just think we have to take a collective responsibility for what we’ve done. I mean, there’s 3% of old growth left. So everything else we’ve created in some way. So I don’t know. Somehow we’ve got to do a mass process. Public education effort so that people understand that our history with this land, our relationship to this land, the relationship Native cultures had to this land and what we can learn from them.
Unknown speaker: What a cool little micro story.
Ross Kenyon: You’re never going to hear me say this, but I think the solution is reality television.
Allison Wolff: I agree.
Ross Kenyon: I think that actually probably would work for this.
Allison Wolff: I’m telling you. I’m dead serious. Some of the tribes are now training us European Americans how to burn forests. They have that native wisdom. They’ve been doing it. The tribes up north, the Yaruk and the Karuk tribes, are the leading wise thinkers on this. And so they’re bringing it further down into the central and southern Sierra and teaching us the practices that they’ve been doing for 20,000 years. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: I think whenever you have a group that takes an absolutist stance, it gets you on a slippery slope. But I guess where the Sierra Club’s coming from is once you start allowing certain clearing of forests by foresters, they’ll get too greedy, right? They’ll take too many trees. That’s absolutely the problem. But there’s got to be a middle ground because we know what’s right for the forest. We know how to do it. We just need to be able to do it. Yeah.
Allison Wolff: They’re terrified of the slippery slope to big logging. And right now they’re right. So right now to actually clear biomass from the forest. So board feet, which is the big trees, which we don’t want to cut. We want to leave the big trees. The board feet are worth $10 a ton in California. Biomass, which is under... The definition is squishy. Let’s say it’s under a 10-inch tree and smaller. The brush, the slash waste, all that stuff that’s in the forest, the kindling is worth 10 cents a ton. So in order for the Forest Service and any land manager to pencil out a deal to actually pay workers very expensive work, Hard labor to go in and clear some of this stuff.
The only way to pencil that out is to sell board feet. And so until we create a market for the biomass through what will hopefully be a carbon negative biomass industry so that you can actually do carbon negative bioenergy. You can create biochar and you get this beautiful double whammy of you’re directly storing forest carbon in ag soils or even throwing it back into the forest. The soil then restructures, gives little condos for all the microbes. You mix that with some compost and feed those guys. And then you get that double whammy of the soils now storing more carbon also.
And then there’s cross-laminated timber buildings, like I said earlier, where you can use this small crappy wood and compressed wood. Lego blocks basically that snap together. And those CLT buildings have strong embodied carbon, but then they’re incredibly efficient buildings to operate. So there’s an operable carbon benefit as well. So unlocking those industries is gonna be crucial.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there’s many, many angles and it seems like you’ve sniffed out more than a few of them.
Allison Wolff: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Like there’s a lot of potential here to make money, not just to do something nice.
Allison Wolff: Yeah, and there’s like a, In terms of certification and carbon markets, there’s a carbon market for living standing trees sucking down carbon. There’s a market for embodied carbon in products like biochar and buildings and poles that are taking this wood. You have to reframe the whole system around avoided carbon. So if you think about 68 billion tonnes of carbon that blew out into the atmosphere in fires last year, and if the forests weren’t in this shape, and you can do the accounting around that for if that carbon had been stored in buildings or in an ag field in Central Valley through biochar and avoided that.
This mega fire that happened last year in Paradise, then you’ve got this whole new accounting system for carbon, right? Then the last part of the chain is, you know, in a building like a CLT building, that kind of operable carbon too.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. How does it work with monetizing, keeping trees standing now? Because we get weirded out with it sometimes because it has that Rudyard Kipling, once you pay the Dane geld, you never get rid of the Dane kind of thing or like, It’s a nice tree there. Would be a shame if someone cut it down, pay me forever. Like that’s, there’s like weird counterfactuality involved. It doesn’t seem to work that well, but clearly they are pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. They’re storing it in the wood and in the soil.
How do you do it in a way that is truly additional? Should we do a pilot together to figure it out?
Allison Wolff: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I think so. Is this too big of a question to ask at the tail end of a show?
Allison Wolff: No, we have to. I feel like we have to.
Christophe Jospe: We were talking about this last night. There really are three assets. There’s a carbon stock. There’s a carbon retention. And I still find it shocking that in the United States, we talk about our emissions, but we did not count those 68 billion tonnes of emissions that came from forest fires. Who’s fault was that? Oh, that wasn’t climate change. Anyway, I’ll get off my soapbox.
Allison Wolff: Well, it’s one of those things where people... The prediction of this problem is it’s so now that the fire modeling, I’m on a team with some of the top fire modelers in the world that the California Energy Commission did a large grant to. And it’ll be four years before they have really good models of what the fire potential is in the state of California. So it’s this really odd situation where this mega fire situation has been in the making for a couple hundred years, like I said, and it’s come to roost really fast because the climate is changing so quickly now and tree mortality is happening so quickly.
So you’ve got all those dead fuels in the forest as well. And everybody’s caught on their heels. Emergency services teams are caught on their heels. I mean, CAL FIRE, they’re an incredible organization. But their mapping systems for the state of California are from 2005. It has no real-time wind data in it. It has no climate data in it. It’s static. And they don’t have an up-to-date tree mortality map in there. And so we’re on our heels. We aren’t prepared. Technologies like AI and satellite data and all these other things that we have at our fingertips have just not been leveraged until right now.
They also hadn’t been like AI just came into maturity to actually do some of the work that we’re doing on tree mapping, but we’re a little late. So it’s a new area.
Ross Kenyon: I want to do this pilot. I want you guys to figure it out. Are we going to try and figure out how to do forestry soon?
Christophe Jospe: I mean, we basically spelled it out for the listener who’s like, how can I replicate what Noori’s doing in forestry? Here’s how you would do it, straight up. Like, this is open source. Find a data platform that’s really good at collecting the data that can measure We can measure the additional changes that someone is doing, have the tree stock that we can run through some kind of model, and what Nori would do is help an independent third party verify a claim of the project owner. You’re not going to need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to even register that project.
It would be free through the software platform. And I think there’s a way we can do it. And it’s kind of nice being – I used this metaphor the other day where it’s like we can’t be a kid. The kid in the candy shop that just wants to eat every piece of candy and die before we even leave the store. But then how do we get that candy eaten by others who also want to sort of co-author and co-create this thing? The first step of that was really good. You don’t want to do this.
Allison Wolff: You want somebody else to eat that candy.
Christophe Jospe: No, we all want to eat the candy. We want to make the store that sells the candy and not be the kid in the candy shop. Am I killing the metaphor now?
Unknown speaker: You’re in Malifor territory for sure.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I don’t know.
Allison Wolff: I’ll say one of the critical things to that I’m working on. So where my work has been focused is with this team, Salo Sciences. So Salo Sciences are forest ecologists, remote sensing scientists, and AI experts. There are maybe 10 to 15 people in the world that have those three skills. And they’ve done some incredible work around the world on ecosystem services, carbon mapping for forests, Biodiversity mapping, those kinds of things. So we are working together to create what we are calling currently the California Forest Observatory, which is a dynamic real-time monitoring system for California’s forests, for both forest health and also wildfire risk.
And so at the core of the engine is SALO’s AI engine, where they’re taking available LiDAR data. LiDAR is super cool technology where planes or drones fly with spectroscopy cameras. Laser cameras that literally cut through trees so you get imagery down to the ground and down to the needle level on a pine tree or a leaf on a maple tree. And so SALO is ingesting all of the publicly available LiDAR data in California. And then we have access to planet data. So planet is a satellite company that’s imaging the entire Earth every day at three meter resolution.
And then the European Sentinel system, which has many, many bands of spectrum, different ways of light and won’t get into that. But anyway, so Sentinel data, which is 10 meter resolution. So they’re taking they’re aggregating all these. Images of forests and then using their AI engine to get to a tree level map of California’s forest. So right now, what’s available is 30 meter data, which is green blobs. Basically, that’s what everybody’s using is 30 meter data. You can’t see individual trees. You can’t tell what species there are. You can’t really see fuel loads.
You can’t estimate carbon accurately.
Christophe Jospe: And the leaves really mess things up too, right? Because you can’t see what is the actual size of this. Exactly.
Allison Wolff: So the LiDAR gives them the baseline that they’re training the AI engine on. And then, of course, we have all of the geographic slope aspect, all of that. And then extrapolate out the forested areas across the state and then using planet data up to daily to basically keep that map real time. And so as the forest changes, we’ll be able to see That from the sky or in this data platform. So that forest map is really crucial. And then combining that with real-time meteorological data. We’re working with a scientist that is NCAR who is also placing.
We don’t have wind channel maps for California. So there’s all these canyons coming down from the mountains like with Paradise. And she’s now planting new wind sensors on every utility pole in every one of those wind channels. That’s super critical for wildfire behavior. So we’ll have that and other meteorological data. Climate data and then population and infrastructure data. So we’ll be able to map all of the utility lines. PG&E doesn’t know where 20% of their lines are. So we’ll be able to map that accurately. And roads, buildings. So basically those are all the key drivers of wildfire risk aggregated together.
And then you can channel that into emergency response, kind of pre-planning evacuation. Risk mitigation, you know, clearing lines for utilities, that kind of thing. You can use it in situ. The firefighters need the same. What’s the fuel load? What’s the wind speed in this given area right now? And then you can use it for forest restoration planning. So actually creating blueprints for, okay, we have these kinds of risk scenarios. Let’s say there’s three or five scenarios for Truckee, California or Downeyville. How do we mitigate With defensible space and then how do we actually restore the broader forest around us so that it can be resilient to fire so fire can come in and it won’t turn into mega fire.
And so then you start to invest in this carbon market where community can actually make money restoring the forest and managing it and tending it maybe like tribes did way back.
Christophe Jospe: That’s amazing. Clearly you have thought through this. It also seems like you have also worked at a place called Facebook that understands that data has multiple values and figure out all the ways to generate value from that data and then just turn back to create value for the ecosystem. Probably a higher mission than just squeezing us for our social capital. So good on you for making your own journey there, Allison. We’re getting to that time of the show where we invite you to share with the listener if they are interested and all jazzed up about your work.
What can they do? How can they get involved? Where can they go learn more?
Allison Wolff: Share the story. So most people in California don’t know what the situation is with forests. Share the idea of this carbon market that we could create with Nori. We’re going to need some money to do some experimentation. We need a ton of innovation. We need a gig economy to get people back to work in the forests. We need tonnes and tonnes of ideas and innovation for how we’re going to actually do this at the speed and scale that’s needed before we lose the forest. How do we build a biomass industry?
If you have money, we need a massive amount of philanthropic capital to basically kickstart the carbon market we want to do with Nori, the biomass industry, the carbon negative biomass industry that needs to be created, the gig economy app that’s going to get tonnes and tonnes of people to work in rural California. And really the public education is a big deal. So tell people what you know now about California’s forests store more carbon than tropical rainforests. And that’s through throughout the West. Tell people that half of California’s water comes from the trees that are doing this incredible service of storing and filtering our water for us.
The more people that know that and value that, the better chance we have of actually fixing this.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, I’ll scream that on the BART on the way to the airport.
Allison Wolff: Awesome.
Ross Kenyon: Until they ask me to leave nicely. Thanks for being with us, Allison. That was very fun. I learned a lot.
Allison Wolff: Thanks for having me. Super fun.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, of course. Did you name my website? Did I miss that? No, is there some place you want to direct people?
Allison Wolff: You can go to my website, which is vibrantplanet.net. And my partner’s website has more detail on the California Forest Observatory, which is salo. ai, S-A-L-O. ai.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. The links are in the show notes if you would like to follow up there. And thank you so much for joining us.
Allison Wolff: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Ross Kenyon: If you like the show, as I bugged you at the beginning, please rate and review us on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. It helps a lot. Help us get the story out. Talk about how important forestry is. You know, trees are good.
Christophe Jospe: And it’s okay to cut them down and burn around them.
Allison Wolff: And help me pester Nori to do this with me.
Christophe Jospe: I know. She’s like, eat that candy.
Allison Wolff: I’ve been begging for a good year now.
Ross Kenyon: All right. The biochar people are already at our throats. Now we have forestry people coming at us. We’ve got the ranchers who are like, E-Hawk, giddy up. Okay. That’s enough for now. Okay. Bye.
