nature-based-solutions
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Green Generation Initiative: A forest you can eat
A shortage of seedlings helped Elizabeth Wathuti start GGI. Now the Kenyan nonprofit connects tree growing, school meals and community livelihoods - with a chicken coop making a surprisingly persuasive argument.
Terraformation Is Trying to Turn Forest Restoration Into an Investable Machine
The former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong found that planting trees was the easy part. Terraformation now packages seeds, software, training and patient capital into a bid to make native forests financeable - without flattening them into plantations.
Revalue
Revalue (Revalue Nature) is a London-based climate-tech company that develops high-integrity, nature-based carbon credits and builds the analytics platform behind them. Combining forest science, AI, remote sensing (satellite, drone and LiDAR), dynamic baselines and biodiversity monitoring, it partners with on-the-ground project operators and capital providers to design credits that avoid, remove and durably store CO2. Founded in 2022 and led by CEO Stuart Rowland, the company raised a $10M Series A in 2023 co-led by Ecosystem Integrity Fund and SJF Ventures.
Saif Bhatti
Saif Bhatti is the founder and CEO of Renoster, an Austin-based carbon credit ratings agency that uses remote sensing and open science to grade nature-based carbon projects on whether they actually remove carbon. He started the company in 2019 as anti-poaching technology - a device that listens for gunshots on the African savanna to protect rhinos - and pivoted it into one of the sharpest, most independent watchdogs in the voluntary carbon market. A Northwestern-trained industrial engineer and philosopher turned data scientist, he has helped review hundreds of millions of credits and published deep-transparency reports that have rattled some of the world's largest carbon projects.
Kurt Tsuo
Kurt Tsuo is the Chief Business Officer of Varaha, a Gurugram-based carbon removal company building high-integrity credits with smallholder farmers across Asia and Africa. A Harvard-trained economist who spent seven years in agriculture before it was a climate headline, he has built business lines at the Gates Foundation, Farmer's Business Network, ProducePay, and Breakthrough Energy, and co-founded the carbon storage startup Graphyte. His through-line is unglamorous and stubborn: make the economics of fixing carbon work for the people who actually grow food.
Varaha
Varaha is an India-based climate-tech company that builds high-integrity carbon removal projects in the Global South. Working with roughly 170,000 smallholder farmers across about 1.7 million acres, it generates verified carbon credits through four pathways - regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, biochar, and enhanced rock weathering - and quantifies the results with a measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) platform powered by remote sensing, machine learning and field science. Its credits are bought by buyers like Google, Microsoft, Lufthansa and Swiss Re.
Troy Carter
Troy Carter is the CEO and Co-Founder of Earthshot Labs, a Sebastopol, California-based climate tech company that uses AI-driven ecological modeling, satellite data, and geospatial analysis to develop, finance, and verify nature-based carbon projects at planetary scale. Before founding Earthshot in 2020, Carter co-founded RIZOME, a bamboo building materials company, and was an early employee at Airbnb. Raised on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands and educated at Stanford, he brings a rare combination of entrepreneurial grit and ecological urgency to the carbon markets, with Earthshot managing 50+ client projects across more than one million hectares and directing $55M+ in project financing.