Reversing Climate Change presents an enlightening conversation with Kevin Whilden, the co-founder and co-director of Sustainable Surf, where they delve into the captivating world of ocean restoration, the power of storytelling, and the remarkable phenomenon of blue carbon. Join Ross and Siobhan as they navigate the complexities of carbon offsetting, funding pathways for coastal and land-based restoration, and the profound impact of storytelling on driving environmental action.
The spotlight of the discussion falls on blue carbon, which refers to the carbon stored within coastal and marine ecosystems. These ecosystems, encompassing vital habitats such as seaweed, mangroves, and seagrasses, exhibit extraordinary carbon sequestration capabilities, often surpassing their land-based counterparts. The significance of these blue carbon ecosystems lies not only in their capacity to store carbon but also in their vital role in supporting biodiversity and protecting coastal communities from climate-related hazards.
Kevin Whilden emphasizes the deep-rooted connection humans have with the ocean and highlights how this connection can serve as a powerful catalyst for inspiring environmental action. By fostering a sense of affection and appreciation for the ocean, individuals are more likely to engage in efforts aimed at its restoration and protection.
In addition to exploring blue carbon, the conversation delves into the funding mechanisms and pathways available for coastal restoration projects, shedding light on the role and history of carbon markets. Furthermore, the episode provides insights into the non-profit nature of SeaTrees and their collaborative efforts with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to refine the measurement of Blue Carbon Projects.
Discover how you can actively participate in SeaTrees' initiatives and contribute to the restoration of our ocean ecosystems. By listening to this episode, you will gain a deeper understanding of the importance of blue carbon, the role of storytelling in driving action, and the opportunities available to support SeaTrees' work.
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SeaTrees blog on how they choose offsets
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: 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. Hello, and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the creative editor at Nori. I’m one of the co-founders, too. We are a carbon removal marketplace based in Seattle. We do lots of things together, Siobhan and I, here. Siobhan Montoya Lavender — she works at Thanks a Ton, which refuses to die. [unclear] The startup that just keeps on chugging along. Check this out: thanksaton.earth. Love it.
Also, we work on the memes together. So if you like the Carbon Removal Memes for Climate Restorative Teens, that’s Siobhan and Asa Kamer for the most part over there. And we’re going to have some fun today, too, because we’re talking about a topic I’m really interested in, which is blue carbon. We are joined today by Kevin Whilden, who is the co-founder and co-director of Sustainable Surf. Thanks for joining us, Kevin.
Kevin Whilden: Thank you. Hi Ross, pleasure to be here.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah. Well, we’re really curious about blue carbon. For our listeners who don’t know — Ross, have we done a blue carbon show before? Has there been a lot of blue carbon podcasts, if it’s like littoral seas and mangroves and stuff like that? If we did, it’s ancient history, but we can basically assume we’re starting from scratch here. And for those who don’t know, blue carbon is really defined as carbon that’s being stored in coastal and marine ecosystems. And so we’re talking about, yes, mangroves and seagrasses and coral. There’s a lot going on here, and these are kind of powerhouses in the industry of nature-based carbon solutions. So Kevin, tell us a little bit about what SeaTrees is and why you founded it.
Kevin Whilden: Exactly. So SeaTrees is a program of Sustainable Surf, a nonprofit that I started in 2011 with my co-founder Michael Stewart, and we’re based in California. And you might wonder what a surfing nonprofit has to do with climate change. Well, it turns out that both Michael and I were working in climate change in the 2000s in San Francisco. He was doing carbon offset development in the early 2000s. I was doing cleantech — carbon capture development back then was called cleantech. I was working on a company that was developing ocean iron fertilization, which is a form of carbon removal. And we realized what was missing in solving climate change was a good story, and really, like, the heroes in solving climate change. There’s a number of things that are missing in how we talk about and think about solving climate change, and story is where it all begins.
So we are also surfers, trying to figure out why the surfing business wasn’t really leading on climate. I’m sitting there thinking about climate change when Patagonia was charging ahead — like, what a responsible company that manufactures something should be, right? And a lot of companies followed that model. I mean, it really pioneered a lot of that thinking, and yet surfing was asleep. So we thought, let’s do something that we’re passionate about. We’d start a nonprofit to help surfing become leaders in solving climate change. That’s really what we believe. So let me get into that sort of in a minute, but let me just tell you quickly what we do, so your listeners have the context of what we are.
So we’re a nonprofit. We work in coastal ecosystems through a program called SeaTrees, which is our global brand, currently operating 20 blue carbon restoration projects around the world in kelp, mangroves, coral, seagrass and watershed restoration. Now, the astute listener may say, hey, wait a minute, can’t we form carbon credits from all of those things? And coral is a carbon neutral ecosystem, right? So how can that make carbon credits? So let’s think about — let’s define what blue carbon actually is. In my opinion, it’s really about enabling what I call the ocean superpower, which is carbon sequestration.
Now, if you look a bit more at my background, I’m a geologist. I studied climate change in Antarctica in the 90s, and I like to sort of go big picture on geologic stats. And so if you look at the carbon cycle on the planet — the movement of carbon through all ecosystems and all living things, plants, animals, the atmosphere, soil, the ocean — 90% of all that carbon is in the ocean, with 2% being in the atmosphere and only eight percent being on land.
So if there’s too much carbon in the atmosphere, and that’s only 2% of the total carbon cycle, and the ocean, it’s 90% of it — doesn’t it make sense that if we’re going to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, the ocean should be one of the main factors of doing that? And so what we’re trying to do at SeaTrees is speed up the capacity for people to manage ocean ecosystems as a way to enable that superpower of the ocean, which is carbon sequestration.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Okay. [unclear] Yeah, I was just — at the very beginning you had mentioned that you had worked in ocean iron fertilization, which — yeah, I mean, everyone I think that has been around carbon removal associates that with Russ George and that famous experiment off of Haida Gwaii.
Kevin Whilden: Yeah. So Russ was the other group doing it. His company was called Planktos. My company was called Climos, and it was led by Dr. Margaret Leinen, who’s, you know, one of the foremost oceanographers in the US. And we had a team of oceanographers working on how to develop it properly with methodologies — SGS Global was doing our methodology for us — and we were ready to go do an Antarctic deep ocean, the Southern Ocean experiment, to figure out exactly how much carbon you can sequester for the method, and also to measure all the impacts. What people don’t understand about carbon methodology is that it’s basically a glorified science review document, right, where you have a bunch of scientists who come together — this is how you measure carbon — and then simplify it, so you don’t have to be a team of PhDs for every carbon project, right?
And [unclear] science, and it’s designed to be done properly. You can’t have a methodology and quality offsets otherwise. Unfortunately, the whole Russ George thing killed momentum. Has anyone else had a shot at it, for doing it the right way? And that’s why ocean iron fertilization was held back for years. Now it’s actually moving ahead again, quite rapidly. There’s new experiments being planned, and the winds have shifted, recognizing that we need tools like that if we’re going to solve climate change.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Amazing. How, in this industry that’s so burgeoning — although, you know, on the one hand I feel like we’re talking about ecological systems, we’re talking about, like, ancient practices and, like, really natural systems, but then when we’re trying to augment it, or, you know, get the science right and do new experiments, there’s just a lot of pressure, you know, I think, to get it right. And I think there’s a lot of judgment, there’s a lot of scrutiny, and, like, one wrong move could really cause a lot of ripple effects — to your point of, like, one project that [unclear], and the ripple effects on another. What brought you to Sustainable Surf specifically, and then from there to SeaTrees?
Kevin Whilden: Right. Okay, so that’s that point I made on stories. It’s literally all about the story. Our work that we do in carbon is about the story of something that’s really hard to prove, which is the absence of a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas that we’re literally breathing as we speak — and a ton of that. What does that even mean, right? So all this science is needed to quantify that in a way that can be a financial instrument and put value on it. So it’s really challenging, and really it comes down to story, and how the story is told at every aspect of that value chain, and is it done right or is it done wrong? If it’s done wrong, then you get some Guardian article written about you, with the headline being how you’re scamming the world, right? And that’s not a good thing.
So, and I want to get more into the story as well — there’s a lot more to it — but let’s just start with, like, how you tell stories that are engaging in climate change. So, a bit about my history. I was an undergrad at UC San Diego studying geochemistry. I was always interested in geology. I learned about how the very first major climate shift on the planet occurred. That was two billion years ago, during the rise of oxygen on the planet. So most people don’t know that oxygen didn’t exist in the original Earth atmosphere. The first cyanobacteria, the first photosynthetic organisms, produced oxygen as their toxic waste, and when oxygen became large enough, [unclear] happened: it killed all those first organisms off, because oxygen is toxic to them, right?
And so I learned about that and I was like, wow, the Earth’s climate really can shift, big things happening. And about that time was, like, the real awareness of climate change as an issue. James Hansen wrote his paper in the late 80s, and then you could see the IPCC was starting. I was literally in college at that time, right? I used to see them starting to issue their reports, and they were looking at what had happened with the Clean Air Act — the first cap and trade, with sulfur emissions from coal plants, was incredibly successful. Like, wow, market mechanisms. This is a way to actually use innovation and capitalism and entrepreneurship to solve environmental problems faster and cheaper than anyone thought was possible.
And so you could see the winds — I could see the winds of climate change being the problem I wanted to work on my whole life, and I actually really have done that. And so I watched the Kyoto Protocol come about, and started working for Mark Trexler in the year 2000. He was, like, one of the OG carbon offset consultants and developers, and I learned in the very beginning kind of how offset projects work. And I moved into renewable energy for a while and saw how effective that world can be, with renewables and energy efficiency. Then I went to Climos and did that carbon — so cleantech, ocean [unclear], sequestration technology. And then that died, because the story then was about the maverick Russ George just dumping iron off the back of the boat, with no scientists, and saying I’m going to solve climate change — a lot of hyperbole. I needed something different.
And so I realized — I recently had a surf — I realized the power of surfing to tell a story. So let me answer your question now: why surfing, and why a surfing nonprofit? The joke that I make is that the best way to make anything look cool is to put a surfer next to it. And if you look at advertising, you’re going to see surfing used in ads for cars, computers, [unclear], cell phones, beer, insurance, everything, right? And it’s because of the instant cool factor that is really unmatched by many other sports.
And so you would think that surfers would be really keen on environmental issues, and for the most part they’re just as oblivious as everybody else. I think there’s more potential because of the culture of being in the water, and the history of ancient Hawaii being quite regenerative as a society and very holistic in the connection between nature and their way of life. But what we want to do is use surfing as a way to tell the story in a way that’s fun and engaging.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yes. In climate change discussion — how often do you think they’re fun and engaging? Like, they’re almost never. I work at a company that’s based on a pun, and then I make carbon removal memes with Ross here. So, yeah, I think I’m, like, the 1% of people that actually has pretty fun and engaging climate discussions. But to your point, I think storytelling’s the ball game. I mean, we talk about that all the time at Thanks a Ton, and we talked about that at Nori a lot too.
And to your point of this idea of this odorless gas that you don’t see it happening — we had Peter Olivier of UNDO on a while back, and he was talking about how it’s actually not an intangible good. It is very tangible to those who are, like, planting a mangrove, or, you know, crushing up basalt rock and spreading it on farmland. It’s very tangible to those doing the work, but it’s completely intangible to the end customer. And then the story becomes the tangibility of what they’re putting their money into, right? And so I do think storytelling is just — it’s the ball game. It’s super crucial in this industry. And I love that surfing was the co-factor, that you were like, let’s get surfing [unclear].
Ross Kenyon: I guess I’d push back a little bit, just being friends. I think we actually were introduced, Kevin, through a mutual surfing friend. I am not a surfer, by the way. I have surfed many times; I am not a surfer. But, you know, he said that he really got into climate stuff because of surfing, and, you know, we do think of lots of surfing community initiatives. What is it about coastal ecosystems — whether you’re surfing or you’re snorkeling or you’re fishing, you know, a sustainable fish person — what do you think about coastal ecosystems really draws people in? Where’s the story there?
Kevin Whilden: Sure. Okay, so it’s definitely not carbon, unless you’re the one percent nerds like us, in which case it’s huge. Listen, climate change is a major threat to the planet. We have to solve it. And then there’s a growing recognition around society that you need to engage the oceans closer, because of these blue carbon ecosystems, and people trying to figure out how to do it. The science is 20 years behind what it is on land. That’s why there are so few blue carbon credits available right now, and we’re working on that too, with kelp and other ecosystems.
But what draws people into oceans is just being in the ocean. Like, we’re primarily, you know, life evolved in the ocean. There’s saltwater in our veins, and we have receptors in our nose for salt crystals, like salt ions, that act like meditation. That’s why when people surf, there’s a reason why they tend to be more mellow and happy. And when the waves are bad and I haven’t surfed for two weeks, I’m grouchy and not much fun to be around. So there’s real value in just being in the ocean. But I think everybody loves the idea of a healthy ocean. Almost nobody disagrees that that’s a good thing.
And then if you dig deeper into it, you recognize how the oceans absorb 90% of the excess heat from climate change already, right? And we’re about to have a super El Niño this year — you know, probably going to, don’t know how big it is, but my money’s on a pretty big one — that’s going to change weather dramatically for an entire year. And it’s going to be the ocean basically being blamed for it. Yeah, it’s just responding to what we’ve done to it. And so there’s a recognition that the ocean controls weather on the planet, controls life on the planet, and a healthy ocean makes sense.
And then the reason why coastal ocean issues are more prominent is that’s where we live. So we tend to think about, you know, the ocean that’s closest to us. And that also tends to be really highly productive in carbon, because of these ecosystems. So I live in California, and in California it’s primarily kelp forest and seagrass beds, especially kelp. And, you know, kelp carbon offsets are kind of the hottest mythical offset in the world in the market right now. Everybody wants a kelp carbon offset. They’re willing to pay top dollar, like hundreds of dollars a ton, if they could even exist. Yet they don’t exist, because the science isn’t ready yet.
I’d love to tell you a bit more about what we’re trying to do to solve that problem, from my perspective, being someone who’s lived in love with nature for a long time and wants to enhance natural ecosystems. Basically, the role of humans is to enhance nature’s healing mechanisms from climate change. There’s a lot of things that sequester CO2, from even the weathering of rock, right? Yet the time scales in which those things operate naturally are too slow to match the rate of emissions that humans are doing, which is roughly 100 times faster than it’s ever happened in geologic history, right? So we have to speed that up, but we have to do it smartly, with science. And for me, natural ecosystems are the way to go.
So, kelp forests. There’s a paper just published on kelp forests that they provide 500 billion dollars a year globally in ecosystem services in value — fishing and clean water and carbon sequestration — and yet they’re not being valued on the carbon market, or anything else, really. And the reason is that the science isn’t ready yet. Now, a kelp forest is incredibly complex in how it sequesters CO2, compared to any other carbon methodology out there.
It’s basically about photo— like, giant kelp, which is where I live, this is the fastest growing organism on the planet. It grows two feet per day in ideal conditions, and photosynthesizes more than any other organism on the planet. And even as fast as it grows, an additional 30% of what it photosynthesizes each day can’t even be used by the kelp and is exuded as dissolved organic carbon within that day. So it’s incredibly effective at fixing CO2. And yet, what happens to that carbon? Most of the carbon that it’s taking is coming from the water, and that sea-gas exchange may happen a hundred miles away from the actual kelp forest.
And then the export of carbon is not in the bed below — the kelp forest is usually rocky reefs, right, so it doesn’t sequester carbon there — but it’s exported to the deep ocean. And the question is, how much gets exported and when? Because if there’s a big storm — we had a huge winter surf this year and all the kelp got ripped up everywhere, and all that got pushed somewhere else, probably into the deep submarine canyons nearby, where I live, right? And quantifying that in a way where we have a repeatable, regular methodology that can be verified each year is a pretty complex problem.
So what we’re doing to solve that is we’ve actually partnered with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to design a three-year study of a global giant kelp forest, to measure the carbon fluxes on every aspect of it, for basically at least a year, if not two years. And that’s a combination of biological samples, chemical and dissolved organic carbon sampling, physical oceanographic modeling — especially, like, when there’s big events, and modeling where the particulates flow — and essentially do that in a way that we can produce a methodology. We’re also working with Silvestrum Climate Associates, who develop blue carbon methodologies for Verra, to help guide that research, so that at the end of this research study we can actually create a methodology for a giant kelp forest carbon offset project.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: I have a bunch of questions there. So, I think first of all, I’m curious about, honestly, MRV — you know, monitoring, reporting, verification — actually hugely important in industry. Obviously natural systems are harder to do that in than, or open systems, as we call them, as opposed to closed systems like a DAC machine. But I also wonder, is this the crux of getting funding into these projects? Is it lack of MRV?
Because as we’re talking about storytelling, and as we’re talking about people who love and connect to the ocean — is there, what’s the pathway? Sometimes I wonder about the funding pathway for coastal restoration, for land-based restoration. Should it all be carbon credits? Should it be philanthropic funds? You’re a 501(c)(3) — curious why you’ve made that decision. I just think a lot about the funding structure. Are we doing this right? Is this the way we should approach this?
Kevin Whilden: That is an excellent question so far, and that’s exactly the right question to ask. And the answer is no, it’s not about just carbon. The joke I make is that a carbon credit is the tail that wags the dog of solving climate change. The market mechanism, the carbon offset story, was only a small piece of the overall climate change solution story, yet it overshadows everything right now, for a number of reasons — mainly because people can invest in it and make money on it. Like, that’s the whole point of a carbon market. A market mechanism is that our economy values the ecology, and its financial value, in what’s essentially a charitable thing, which is supporting and restoring ecosystems, right?
And so the reason we’re nonprofit is because we actually want to move work outside the carbon markets. The carbon markets are very limiting, right? There’s only certain methodologies available, there’s methodologies that require a project of a certain size so you can be profitable to invest in and develop, and innovation is very slow and hard — really hard to reward. And there’s certain cases where it works great, but there’s many cases where it doesn’t. And as a nonprofit, we’re actually not limited by that. We’re not forced to make money for our investors — specifically not allowed to make a profit. Right now the company’s growing and we’re able to invest some of our donations into new projects and innovate, which is great.
But at the end of the day, any kind of offset is meant to be retired. That means that the money that was spent ultimately is charitable. So there’s a lot of advantages of being a nonprofit. And the way that we work is finding other nonprofits around the world who have an ecosystem restoration project in mind that they want to run. They have some things ready to go, but they need other help, like finance, financial support, or data collection, science support, or marketing and storytelling support. And we basically look for groups around the world that need our help to get launched.
And then our funding is coming from corporate donors who want a good story for their social impact giving. Some of our donors are buying carbon credits that we sourced from a few projects that we think are high-quality that are carbon related, but most of them are just dying to plant what we call SeaTrees. And so a SeaTree is a colloquial term that we use for, like, a mangrove tree planted like a seedling. It could be a square foot of kelp forest restored — that’s a kelp SeaTree — or a coral fragment put on a reef, that’s what we call a coral SeaTree, and so on, right?
And we’ve had so far [unclear] SeaTrees in the last year. Since we launched SeaTrees, we have 20 projects around the world that we’re doing, so it’s definitely growing. And the majority of our revenue is purely charitable, for ecosystem restoration. Right now, having said that, I’ll just make one more point, which is the carbon finance part is still the largest chunk out there, and we’re always trying to find ways to connect that with the projects that we’re doing. That’s why we’re working on this very ambitious three-year science project, to get kelp into the carbon market — but the right way, right, about kelp forests and valuing all the benefits of the forest, not just the carbon, but the fisheries, the tourism, the revenue, the cultural heritage of the kelp forest, which is an amazing story, and things like that.
Ross Kenyon: Do you feel compelled by economic circumstance to plug what you’re doing into a carbon market context that you otherwise would prefer not to be there?
Kevin Whilden: No, not at all. I mean, I think that carbon markets are really, really important, and I want to see them thrive and grow, and recognized as someone who’s been in the carbon market since the early 2000s — like, I guess that’s almost 25 years, right? [unclear] Pretty much. And it’s like, what does a carbon market do? There’s so many things that it does that could be valuable. Let’s just talk about the biggest picture of what I think it does, which is: if you look at the word economy and the word ecology, they come from the same root word, oikos, which is home, right? Exactly. And they’re literally the home in terms of family, the home in terms of the environment, in terms of money. That’s all encompassing, that meaning of that one Greek word.
And yet in our current Western economy, the environment’s an externality. It’s not valued in the way it needs to be, and we need to bring that back. And ancient people, [unclear] Hawaiian and elsewhere, they were literally the same thing. Like, in the Hawaiian language, the word for water is wai, and the word for wealth is waiwai. It’s literally: wealth is water, right? That philosophy needs to be forefront in our Western philosophy. And the carbon markets is one way that’s really driving that forward, right? Charitable giving is another way that’s also doing that, and that’s been like that for a while, but they do need to meet.
And what we’re doing at SeaTrees, we’re actually creating that intersection between charitable giving and sort of the financial value that can be driven, and we’re doing it as a nonprofit. We’re going to the nonprofits and scientists. I think it’s a really, really cool place to work. I love what I do, and our team is stoked to work on the projects that we’re doing. And frankly, we’re getting more and more recognition for it at the same time.
Ross Kenyon: Does that mean that donations to your type of carbon removal, your blue carbon projects, are tax deductible?
Kevin Whilden: They are indeed.
Ross Kenyon: Kind of — I was like, that’s really exciting when I hear stuff like that. Surprised more companies haven’t taken advantage of that, because it’s a great selling point to customers. We get asked that sometimes too, but we’re a private company and we are not tax deductible.
Kevin Whilden: Yeah, indeed. And then also the stories that we tell. So one of the things we’re really focused on is the stories we’re telling from our projects. So when companies come to us and donate, we’re giving them a full media package right back, so that they don’t have to do the hard work of figuring out how to talk about the story the right way.
And as you know, talking about climate change solutions in 2023 is perilous. Like, Delta Air Lines being sued, and others, for trying to do the right thing, for doing the net zero approach everyone agreed was the right thing to stop climate change at the rate it needs to be solved, given that we’re in a state of planetary emergency. And yet all it takes is a little bit of skepticism about what an offset is and whether they’re valid or not, and suddenly now the floodgates have opened for people claiming disingenuous behavior — when the reality is, if you look at it from the US, like eighty percent of the emissions from the US are controlled by households, and people take no responsibility for their own footprint. And so I feel like there’s [unclear] households.
Yeah, because the thing is, it’s an issue. People tend to think, oh, it’s corporations, government, like they’re the ones that aren’t taking responsibility for climate change, right? But the moment you buy something from Amazon or whatever, you own that footprint, not Amazon. You’re the end user. And so if you look at all the energy flows, roughly half of that comes from stuff that you buy, where carbon was emitted on your behalf somewhere else in the world. But ultimately, because you bought it, you own it, and it will [unclear] climate. That’s right. UC Berkeley, they’re doing a lot of that research on sort of household-based emissions in the US, and it’s a good place to start. And frankly, people need to take more responsibility for their own carbon footprint and stop pointing fingers at those trying to do the right thing.
And then also recognize that offsets — like I mentioned before, the methodologies on which offsets are based is based on, like, basic scientific research. It’s a living scientific review paper. Basically, science is always being improved. So the attacks that are happening now on the carbon markets and various companies that are using them will improve how we do things in the future, because we still need the solution going forward. It’s not going to go away.
Ross Kenyon: You know, when you scale up — are you being specific to Delta in thinking that they were acting with the best of intentions? Or are you just saying that anyone in the past who has made climate claims, they may have failed at them and they turned out to be not as rigorous as they may have hoped, but were acting in good faith? I think it’s somewhat intuitive that companies maybe are trying to do as little as possible but still get the marketing cover from this behavior. Is that too cynical of you, in your opinion?
Kevin Whilden: I’m not being cynical by pointing out that science is very messy and brutal in how it happens. I, you know, have scientific discussions with great scientists, and they’re all attacking each other and each of those ideas, trying to find which one’s the right one. And then they move forward with that until the next piece of science comes along and says, no, it should be this way and not that, right? It’s always improving, but zeroing in on something that’s usually a pretty solid result.
And so the attacks are dropping on Delta, and there’s also a number of things happening in Europe that are quite similar right now. All these things will improve how the messaging and stuff works, because that also has to be improved. Again, it comes down to the story of how we’re doing it. And yeah, there may be companies that really are sort of being disingenuous, and hopefully they get caught. But the companies that we work with are all really passionate about it, and we know they’re not being disingenuous at all, and they want to be able to talk about what they’re doing, because it is ultimately an expense. It’s not like they’re making money on it, unless it builds their brand value. And that’s a normal thing — I think that’s a good thing.
Ross Kenyon: What kind of claims are they making with what you’re selling them? Are they — is it too early for a really rigorous MRV, and so they’re a little bit more open-ended, there’s less of a carbon accounting framework?
Kevin Whilden: Well, we’re very careful that if someone is just planting SeaTrees, or expanding mangrove trees, or restoring kelp forest, or doing coral reefs, which is carbon neutral, they are not claiming a carbon benefit there. It’s sort of a qualitative benefit for the ocean and biodiversity and all the other values that matter, not just carbon. Then you do have a program called Ocean Positive, which allows companies who have done their footprint and want to wipe out their footprint with offsets — and notice I don’t use the word offset as a verb, because I think that’s the “you have sinned and now you must pay for your sins” kind of story. We make it fun by saying wipe out your footprint. It’s like wiping out on a big wave, and, kind of, basically take responsibility for your climate impact. So again, it’s really about the language we choose, and it sets the story that we’re conveying.
And so companies have done their footprint, done that work, want to do something about it and buy the best quality offsets, and they’re sourcing them from us. The main project that we choose is the Cardamom rainforest REDD+ project in Cambodia, which I consider one of the best REDD+ projects in the world. It also has mangroves and coral reefs at its base, and it’s in the news right now for some negative press. Again, attacks are going to make this project stronger, just like everything else does. I think it’s still a high quality project.
And then what we do is, in addition to buying the offsets, which gets them to essentially the net zero status, we then plant additional mangrove trees and restore kelp forests on their behalf, that takes out additional CO2 in a qualitative sense, not as an offset. And that basically takes out more CO2 than they emit, and we call that ocean positive. And then we make it an Ocean Positive certification mark that we have. And from there, that’s like, how do you tell the story of being ocean positive, and what are all the benefits? And they get the videos, the media, the stories. We help them with their language and try to make sure that they’re not going to have any issues with, you know, someone saying, oh, that’s disingenuous — because at the end of the day, that’s the solution everybody needs.
Ross Kenyon: I asked you that question about carbon markets only because there has been such a rush to frame things primarily in terms of the carbon benefit, even where you’re like, hey, there’s a whole other set of stories you could be telling instead of the carbon benefit story. But because that’s what many customers have been trained to think of as the main benefit, it almost feels like suppliers are unnaturally sort of pushed into this framework that may not be appropriate for every type of credit that comes around.
Kevin Whilden: Absolutely, right. And I get it. Like, your stories about climate change and buying offsets, or offsetting — you open yourself up for that story, friend. And if you focus on, like, the benefits to oceans and supporting biodiversity, and yeah, people that subsist on the ocean, cultural heritage, as well as the carbon — like, those are other stories that people can attack. And the carbon is the cherry on top of the sundae: you’re taking responsibility for that too. The story framing is so important. Climate change has gotten it so wrong for so long. That’s why we’re in the mess that we’re in now, right?
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Why, like you say, like attacks make a project stronger — you know, I like that you’re not saying just don’t attack us, but like, hey, attacks make a project stronger. I also grapple with the whole idea of offsetting a lot, and so it’s interesting that you guys choose to use wipeout or other terminology, because I think offsetting is tricky. And, you know, Nori just came out with a white paper about a blended ton, because they’ve been grappling a lot with this concept of, like, how to appropriately approach offsetting and how to do the proper carbon accounting, and, you know, bringing in temporal time scales, and then, you know, how long carbon lasts, different cycles. It’s a really tricky thing to get right.
Part of me just wants to throw offsetting out the window. Does anybody else feel that? Like, could we just — is there a better way to think about this and fund these things besides focusing on offsetting? But the reality is, to your point, Kevin, offsetting is a major thing, and to Ross’s point, companies have likely been kind of trained to think about carbon footprints and, you know, offsetting their emissions, whether present or historic. I just wonder if we’re all just digging ourselves into this voluntary carbon market hole, and is there a better strategy? And I wonder, like, how you approach this, thinking of, A, being a nonprofit, B, you know, doing kind of things that are funded philanthropically, and then C, hearing about engaging in the carbon market. It seems like you’re kind of tackling it from a lot of different angles here.
Kevin Whilden: Yeah, thank you. And I’ve wanted to talk to you guys because you have been working in the blockchain world for a while, and I think blockchain has a real role to play in this. How do we improve the idea of offsets? And really, there’s basically two halves to it. One is, how do you track the impact? This world that we’re in is all about transparency of impact and proof of impact, MRV, you know, whatever term you want to use. It’s really about proving that the money I’m spending has the impact that I wanted it to. And what does blockchain do? It’s a transparent ledger that, once it’s written, can’t be changed, right? You can track it all.
And that’s exactly what you should be using to track all the impacts from any kind of carbon project — and not just carbon, but biodiversity credits, sustainable development benefits, everything else that we can measure, either quantitatively or qualitatively, right? And we also need to track stories. So what we’re trying to figure out at SeaTrees is, how can we actually put our impact on a blockchain so that we can track the project impact, whether we’re using [unclear] MRV or ones that we created ourselves? And then two, how do we use that power of blockchain to communicate the impact to the donors in a way that’s more tangible?
Because at the end of the day, what’s really tangible to a donor is the story. And remember what I said about every carbon offset sale being fundamentally charitable in nature, right? So the only thing that matters to the end buyer, the person that’s giving the money to support this work, is the story. That’s all there is. So how can we use the power of blockchain to make that story more tangible? And I think NFTs are a really interesting solution, because as amorphous and hard to define as the NFT is, it’s easier to define that than it is a ton of carbon. And you can put an NFT in your wallet, and you can say, here’s my phone, this is my wallet, I own this NFT, right?
So can you use that as a way to better tell the stories of the impact that you made, that’s already written in a blockchain that already exists? Like, I think there’s a lot of potential there, and I think that groups that are working on blockchain like you guys, Regen Network and others, I think are doing it the right way — about understanding what a methodology is and how you have to have these multiple levels of transparency in how carbon benefit is produced and then tracked and verified. This could really speed up solutions, and then, as long as we can also be flexible and fast enough to match the rate of climate change, which is only accelerating due to tipping points, right? It can’t be a super slow process.
And I think that, frankly, the market mechanism of offsets allows companies like Nori to exist, right? Because there is an investment case, there’s a way to make money by doing this, and that allows these innovative ideas to exist that wouldn’t exist in just charitable funding alone, right? That’s why I believe offsets, this carbon market mechanism of solving climate change, is absolutely essential and needs to improve and speed up.
And, you know, Verra just changed their CEO, and, you know, [unclear] due to poor performance, whatever. I think their performance was awesome. I remember when VCS was first created in the early 2000s and the voluntary carbon market was, like, a new idea, really. And it was a huge improvement over what it was before that time, which was you literally had to develop your own project to get offsets. And they’ve taken that a long way. It’s been a hard road. I mean, it’s really only the last couple years that there’s been a lot of money in carbon, with a net zero frame changing everything.
Ross Kenyon: Kevin, you’re making me want to bring on more people that kind of have a history in carbon markets, because I don’t think I’ve talked to someone like you where you’re looking at it from a very different lens. I think, in terms of, you’ve been part of it for a long time, and so are free to come and say, like, yeah, no, Verra is doing a great job, and here’s why. It’s so interesting to me. I think I often land on the cynical side, where I think, you know, 95% of these credits in this market aren’t doing anything. What are we really doing here? Let’s focus on these really high quality credits. How do we get to them?
And then how do we avoid the historic problems we’ve had, where people have sold credits that were supposedly high quality and turned out, you know, to get burned up in a wildfire, and they still claim them, or what have you? These stories we’ve been told about, like, how these credit projects can go really wrong. And I think it’s really refreshing for me as a cynic to hear you talking about this and bringing kind of a perspective. But you bring up a good point, like, you’ve been in this for a long time, and, like, look where we are now versus where we started. I think that’s a good way to approach this.
Kevin Whilden: Yeah. Well, if you’re a scientist, I call you a professional skeptic. That’s exactly what a scientist is — actually a professional skeptic. You have to be skeptical and really attack things, but understand that there’s a process that you’re following, right, to improve and create a result that’s beneficial, right? And so carbon markets have been going through this cycle of attacks for 20 years, and they’ve gotten better every time. I think there has to be a much faster evolution in how they work now, primarily because the threat of climate change is almost unmatched.
Like, I remember being in grad school in the 90s reading about, like, the slowing ocean circulation, the thermohaline circulation in the Atlantic, the Gulf Stream — that’s slowing down due to the melting freshwater from the Arctic and Greenland, right? And I couldn’t imagine, like, 25 years in the future back then — I was only 25 years or 20 years old, so it was like, well, we’ll have solved it by then, right? That’s essentially what I was assuming: we’ll definitely figure this out. And we haven’t gotten even close, and it’s getting worse every year, because of the tipping points we’ve already crossed, like the melting permafrost, the burning rainforest, slowing ocean circulation.
Like, if we could snap our fingers and somehow stop all CO2 emissions by humans forever, from all time going forward, like today, we’re still locked into runaway climate change. We’ve already crossed tipping points. Now, it’s not too late to uncross the tipping points, but you can definitely do it if we have the right approach. And the thing that’s missing the most is this story of how humans connect to nature, as it being part of ourselves, and we are stewards of it, a way to enhance it — and enhance specifically the healing mechanisms that nature has from prior CO2 emissions that have changed climate. So that’s what needs to be brought into the markets, is that story, if we’re going to really evolve it.
Ross Kenyon: You’ve offered a nice alternative story to Nori’s origin story, which, like any startup, you have to believe that to some degree the incumbents are wrong, or you would not bother to start a company. You would just join an existing one. That just makes intuitive sense, right? So, like, for us, the foil has always been the registries and the early carbon market incumbents. And as time has gone on, I’ve seen posts from people who work at the main players, and I’ve actually had a lot of respect for them.
And I feel like when I was younger, I had this folly of youth, like, throw the Pharisees out [unclear], we’re starting over. And now that I’m a little bit older, and I know these guys run into problems too, where even acting in good faith — you’re like, these problems are enormous and very challenging, and I can only imagine what it’s like to get a company much bigger and harder to change than even this one. I do have a lot more empathy than when I started for these people. I feel like even acting in good faith, these problems are so hard.
Kevin Whilden: Yes. [unclear] It’s really hard to quantify carbon, right? It’s the least tangible thing in the world. The statue I can make, right, but the ton of colorless, odorless, tasteless — and not a ton of it, the absence of a ton of it. What does that even mean? So all these mechanisms of, like, additionality, baseline, leakage, permanence — like, all these terms of art in carbon markets were developed to solve that problem by really smart people over decades of hard thinking and work and experience.
And that’s the key thing I could say about experience. It’s about not just sitting in a room and saying, this is how we’re going to solve it, and figuring it out in one day. It’s like, make your best guess, you get out, you run the projects. Some work, some are scams, some are awesome, and that will shake out in the market. The market will figure out exactly what’s the good stuff and what’s the bad stuff. And part of that market is the press and the media scrutiny and impact, and given how high the stakes are now in climate change, that scrutiny is even greater.
Yeah, we have to keep trying and keep improving. And I do think that the story element is missing, because an offset is such an intangible thing that has no inherently interesting story, unless somehow you include the story in the offset — and that’s not being done. And so I do think that’s where [unclear].
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah. Kevin, as we kind of close out here, I would love for you to kind of tell us a story about one of your favorite projects, or something that you want to highlight, that you want people to understand that you guys are working on at SeaTrees. What’s a story you want to tell to our audience?
Kevin Whilden: Okay, great. I’m going to do a two for one. So one of them is kelp. So I live in California. Most people who aren’t Californians probably don’t know that California’s lost 90% of its kelp forest in the last 10 years due to climate change, and that’s primarily Northern California, which is bull kelp. And I live in SoCal, where it’s primarily giant kelp, which has also had a pretty dramatic loss, though not quite as great. And so the question is, how do we restore kelp?
And so there’s some pretty pioneering work being done here in Los Angeles by our partner The Bay Foundation, to figure out how to restore a kelp forest by smashing the sea urchins. Basically a kelp forest in many cases gets replaced by a sea urchin barren, where essentially the urchins eat all the kelp, and that floats away, and the urchins go into a zombie-like state where they can live for 50 years with no food and the kelp can never re-establish. So the way that they solve it is to send sea urchin fishermen, commercial divers, underwater with rock hammers and smash all the urchins. And then, because kelp can grow two feet per day, within six months you’ve got a full-grown kelp forest, and, you know, within a few years it’s fully restored in biodiversity.
And so these guys figured out how to do this, and no one really noticed them. They’re sort of toiling away underwater, and SeaTrees came along, and their last grant had just run out, and we were able to step in and keep them going to restore the kelp forest off the Palos Verdes Peninsula, which is in Los Angeles. And they’ll be finished restoring the kelp forests in the next year. And that story has informed kelp restoration around the world.
In parallel, there’s other forests that aren’t lost due to urchins at all. So we’re working with Scripps scientists right now to study how to bring back the kelp forest of La Jolla, which used to be an amazing kelp forest, and it’s a tourist destination for kayaking and swimming and diving and whatnot. And it hasn’t had kelp since the last marine heat wave in 2015, and it’s not too different from barrens [unclear]. So we actually just got a tour of the lab that is doing all the research about growing kelp, growing more thermally tolerant kelp, and figuring out how to understand the microscopic life stage of the lifecycle of kelp to better enable restoration to occur.
And that’s going to restore kelp forests that — hopefully by the time that research is done, we’re also able to then bring kelp into the carbon markets to fund continued conservation and restoration of kelp forests. The idea that we call Blue+, similar to [unclear], but it’s about maintaining a healthy kelp forest. That’s story one. Story two is coral. So I haven’t said this yet, but the biggest irony of the carbon markets is that the ecosystem that is the most biodiverse on the planet and the most threatened by climate change can never be funded by carbon markets, because it’s essentially carbon neutral, right? Coral reefs.
There is the coral reef restoration technology, and the process is in its infancy compared to other systems that can sequester carbon, because there’s no money in it at all. Like, there’s no way to make money restoring corals at all. So there’s been very little research investment in it, and I want to change that. I think it’s time to make a coral ecosystem marketplace. And so again, we’re working with sort of the leading coral researchers in the world at Scripps Institution of Oceanography to figure out a coral restoration MRV process that will enable donors to get a much more tangible impact from their coral restoration donations, and essentially create a thriving marketplace where various methodologies and technologies in coral restoration can exist and thrive.
Yeah, much like the biodiversity credits that are being created now at the UN — it’s basically similar to that, and we’re going to tie what we’re doing into that for sure. But there’s an opportunity with coral to actually do this, because the MRV with coral is extraordinary. So Ross, you were talking earlier about how challenging MRV is with carbon; with coral there’s an opportunity to make it incredibly fast and cheap and easy and high quality. And here’s how it works.
So basically the way coral monitoring is done today, the best way to do it is something called photogrammetry, where someone swims over a reef with a high resolution camera — a 2D camera, not 3D, a 2D camera — and swims and basically takes successive pictures that overlap at least 80%. So each picture you take, if you’re swimming, take a picture every second, and then all those overlapping pictures can be reconstructed by a computer to be a full 3D model of the reef. And what Scripps has done is they’ve got the ability to actually understand exactly what coral is there, which species are living, which ones are dying, and so on, in that 3D model image.
And so you can send someone out with a GoPro camera — we actually work with GoPro pretty closely to figure out a way to use GoPros to make it much quicker and easier to swim a reef. So anyone who is restoring a coral reef can swim with a GoPro camera and capture images, like, once every year or every six months. And that just gets sent to Scripps, processed into the 3D modeling, which then is the MRV that shows whether the reef restoration is living or dying, if it’s working or not. And you actually do real science, because the science of coral restoration is also in its infancy. So even if the project fails, if you could understand why it failed, that’s actually a really good result.
And the hope is that we can actually create a blockchain sort of based marketplace to do that. We haven’t decided which party we’re going to do it with yet, we’re still in the early stage. There’s a number of different partner players in that space — I’m sure you know most of who I’m talking about. You have ways to create unique methodologies that could be used to quantify not just carbon but also biodiversity benefits. And I mean, to me, if we can create this and allow any enterprising entrepreneur, nonprofit group, anyone in the world to say, I’m going to run a restoration project for coral — that’s how we get people around the world to start maintaining and protecting their coral reefs.
Because at the end of the day, what we need is a way to put ecosystems on life support while we reverse climate change, right? Until we figure out — everything is under threat, but we can keep things alive until that gets done. And I’m an optimist. I hope that we can do it. I think we can do it. I’m not going to take no for an answer, as long as [unclear].
Ross Kenyon: All right, Kevin, where can people find you? First of all, you have a beautiful website for SeaTrees, and it seems like it’s a perfect podcast for you, because on the front page you have “the ocean has the power to reverse climate change.” Here we are on the Reversing Climate Change podcast. So, alignment. Where can people find you?
Kevin Whilden: So yes, we’re at [unclear] — so it’s sea-trees.org, C-dash-trees dot org, is our program — and sustainablesurf.org is our main nonprofit website, where we do stuff about sustainable surfboards and other things that are specific. But SeaTrees is really the main thing that we do these days.
Ross Kenyon: At the end — but I was going to ask, like, why isn’t there a project at Nazaré? Like, that’s an obvious thing that needs to happen.
Kevin Whilden: Actually, we are working with a kelp restoration project [unclear] in Portugal. And what they’re doing is green gravel, where they basically put kelp spores on rocks and drop them off the edge of the boat. But those only work for places that are not high wave energy. So Nazaré is the opposite of where that works, but elsewhere in Portugal it does work.
Ross Kenyon: You think? Well, I think so. Very interesting show. We clearly need to do more blue carbon content. We should stay in touch, Kevin, as your projects develop. Thanks so much for being here.
Kevin Whilden: It’s my pleasure, Ross and Siobhan. I’ve been wanting to be on your podcast for a while. I’ve been following it for a while, so it’s a pleasure to be here.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts, or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media. We will catch you next time.
