“Don’t use rainforests or any other carbon sink as a way to offset your reliance on fossil fuel.” Interview with Martin Simonneau, Cool Earth

“The unconditional payments are not results-based payments, but rights-based payments.”

Interview with Martin Simonneau, Advocacy Lead at Cool Earth. The interview was conducted online on 24 April 2025.

REDD-Monitor: Let’s start with who you are and what your role is at Cool Earth. You’ve been working with Cool Earth for six years, I believe. Could you say a bit about what you did before joining Cool Earth and why you joined the organisation.

Martin Simonneau: Currently, I’m the Advocacy Lead at Cool Earth. I’ve had many roles at Cool Earth.

But originally I wasn’t really in the conservation sector, more in the development sector. After university I spent a long time in Latin America, mainly working with small producers and small producer associations, small cooperatives, and with local fair trade networks.

Actually what brought me into the world of conservation was a very small grassroots project of Ecuadorian researchers partnering with the University of Sussex in the UK who were trying to protect a healthy population of of brown-headed spider monkeys in the Choco rainforest of Ecuador. On the other side of the Andes from the Amazon, a coastal rainforest system called the Choco, which goes into Colombia. They were trying to also help out a farming community there and that is really how I entered the world of conservation.

After that, I started working for chocolate companies, still in Latin America and always on the social side. Back then, they used to call it the CSR department, corporate social responsibility. My role was to develop projects with producing communities that were supplying the products to make chocolate.

Then I moved back to the UK, to Cornwall. And I discovered there was a rainforest charity called Cool Earth with an office in Cornwall.

Their mission was to protect rainforests by backing the people that lived in the rainforests, Indigenous Peoples and their communities. And it did that through the delivery of cash transfers, which was quite an unusual idea for me.

I applied for a role and got it. And I’m still there.

REDD-Monitor: Cool Earth was founded in 2006 by Johan Eliasch, who was the CEO of the sport equipment firm, Head. Two years later, the UK government published the Eliasch Review: “Climate Change: Financing Global Forests”. (REDD-Monitor’s take at the time was that the report was good but the promotion of carbon trading was problematic.)

I know you weren’t at Cool Earth back then, but can you say a bit about the beginnings of Cool Earth and how Cool Earth moved away from carbon offsetting.

Martin Simonneau: Johan Eliasch is one of the founders. He’s still on the Board of Trustees. I’ve never met him.

There were two founders. The other was Frank Field, who sadly passed away about this time last year.

As you say, I wasn’t with Cool Earth back then, but what I’ve heard over the years is that Frank Field saw an article that Johan had published in a UK newspaper. This was before the Eliasch Review.

Frank Field was not really in the environmental world at all, he was involved in social justice in the UK, a Member of Parliament. What he saw was that there was gap in the market in the way that there was not enough money going to rainforest protection.

I don’t think Frank Field picked up on the carbon trading aspect of things or carbon offsetting. He picked up on the fact that protecting the rainforest to tackle the climate crisis was probably a cost-effective thing.

That’s how they got in touch. Then together they decided to do something about it. That’s how they created Cool Earth.

There was never an assumption that Cool Earth would become a carbon offsetting scheme. We were, in fact, never a carbon offsetting scheme.

Now, the tricky bit there is we were founded during the time that REDD was taking off. Obviously there was a huge influence from REDD on the creation of Cool Earth in the sense that it was pretty much everything that everyone was talking about back then. Fortunately, we never became a carbon offsetting scheme.

There were probably some dodgy narratives at the time that could have confused us with a carbon offsetting scheme.

But we never became a carbon offsetting scheme. We never issued credits. We never said that a contribution to Cool Earth creates any sort of emission reduction.

REDD-Monitor: Yes, I remember back then, when REDD first appeared, it was all anybody could talk about. It almost completely took over the entire narrative of rainforests and climate.

Could you explain Cool Earth’s current position on carbon trading and REDD?

Martin Simonneau: I think we’ve become even stronger opponents of it. I think in the early days, because we were so new and we had to kind of make a name for ourselves, we’d probably be quite diplomatic around the topic.

Nowadays, we’re very strong opponents. I mean, they are a fraud. They are a stunt.

I think we believe two things, really. If you want to tackle the climate crisis, there are two things you can do. One, protect nature. Two, wean ourselves off fossil fuel.

Don’t do them separately. Do them simultaneously. But don’t use rainforests or any other carbon sink as a way to offset your reliance on fossil fuel.

We’re very clear with that. If you come to Cool Earth and say, I want to work with you, I want to donate to you, I want to contribute to your work, what you’re doing is protecting rainforests. And you’re essentially providing a contribution to do just that. You’re not reducing your emissions from fossil fuels.

We used to have Johan Rockström on our Board of Trustees. He’s now an ambassador, not a trustee anymore. He’s a very well-known climate scientist and he says something really interesting.

The global community tends to celebrate the fact that forests take up 25% of global fossil fuel emissions. But actually, that’s a stress response. It’s emissions that the forests globally hadn’t accounted for, right? And so that’s actually pressure on the rainforest. It’s not something normal.

And the consequence of this is that the rainforest is prone to the impact of climate change. And I think that’s something, instead of celebrating it, we should be actually quite concerned about this statistic.

I think that rationale gives advocates of REDD the reason as to why we should continue to push for rainforest-derived carbon credits. It’s because the rainforest does such a great job at taking up emissions from fossil fuel. It’s problematic.

REDD-Monitor: But in 2023, the forests actually released more carbon than they absorbed. And in 2024, pretty much the same thing happened again. That is an enormous red flag for trading carbon stored in forests against emissions from burning fossil fuels.

Martin Simonneau: Completely. Johan Rockström talks about a zero-sum game. A healthy planet is in balance and we’ve taken up this extra 25%. Then going past that tipping point, obviously we’re not stable enough.

REDD-Monitor: Moving on to some questions about how Cool Earth functions. How does Cool Earth raise funding for its projects? Cool Earth has a series of business partnerships. How does Cool Earth decide which companies to work with? Do you exclude any companies? And if so, on what grounds?

Martin Simonneau: We currently have three streams of funding revenue. There are classic individual givers of various amounts. There are trusts and foundations, which again are quite a traditional stream where you just apply for grants and they give them to you, or not.

And there are corporate partnerships. They are probably the trickiest ones to manage in a way, because you never really know what businesses do internally.

However, we do believe that businesses should be part of the fight against climate change. They need to contribute to what we’re doing. Our partnership team at Cool Earth deals with that. There are various levels of screening and due diligence, depending on who the business is, what sector they’re in, and how much they want to donate.

These are reviewed annually also depending on the amount of the donation. And all of them need to abide by our policies and statements on greenwashing, on modern slavery, on ethical guidelines, etc.

Would we exclude any companies? That’s a big question which we’ve not, I think, answered yet. I think that might be the case for a lot of charities. We’re not a huge charity, far from being a household name.

I think we’ve always been quite big advocates of a carbon tax. Now, we understand that politically it’s very complicated to pass through for a business. But we’re kind of hoping to see whether, businesses, even the big ones, are able to implement that.

In which case, if they were to tax themselves internally, would they contribute to Cool Earth? Which then goes directly to Indigenous Peoples in the rainforest.

What we can say is that we’re not working with the dirty industries, oil and gas, we’ve never accepted anything from them.

And we don’t work with Unilever or Pepsi or any of those brands. Probably because we’re too small, to be honest. But if the opportunity came, if you want to call it an opportunity, we’d probably have to think that one through very, very carefully.

REDD-Monitor: Which countries does Cool Earth work in at the moment? How many projects do you have? And what area are we talking about in total?

Martin Simonneau: We work across the whole of the rainforest world, in the Amazon, the Congo Basin and the New Guinea rainforest.

Our big projects are in Peru and Papua New Guinea. We have offices and teams in those countries. We had a lot of projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon and Gabon. As you are well aware, it’s tricky to work in the DRC.

Actually, in the Congo Basin, we’ve always gone through local organisations. At this stage, we’re only working with one organisation in Cameroon.

Among these three geographies, we’re covering about 2.1 million acres of rainforest. That’s about 58,000 people, all Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

We run about 11 different cash transfer projects, mainly in Peru and Papua New Guinea, where the offices are.

We also have a work stream that we call forest data. You and I can access forest data very quickly and very easily. People that live in the rainforest can’t, even though this is about their territory. We’re trying to bridge that gap between the lack of technology, the lack of accessibility of that data, plus their own knowledge systems, and bring it all together under this framing of forest data.

With that we’ve got projects to tackle wildfires, rainforest labs, which are essentially a way for these communities to have access to all the technology and then monitor what happens on their land, whether it’s incursions, whether it’s the damages of a wildfire or a flood, and then plan what their next step is.

Then there’s a really interesting project in Peru where we’re working with local governments to design better responses in the event of wildfires. At the minute, because of a lack of resources, whenever there’s an increase in wildfire, which happens a lot more nowadays with long periods of droughts, they’re unable to alert emergency services. But with this project they are able to respond a lot quicker to contain fires or even to prevent them in the event of a drought.

So 11 cash transfers and four forest data projects, in Papua New Guinea and Peru.

REDD-Monitor: Can you explain a bit more about the idea of unconditional cash payments and about Cool Earth's way of working to protect forests?

Martin Simonneau: So actually, Cool Earth has always done unconditional cash transfers, ever since the beginning. Cool Earth launched in 2006, but the first real partnership we have with an Indigenous community began in 2008.

That happened because we responded to a call from Dilwyn Jenkins, a Welsh anthropologist who has sadly passed away now. He had lived with the Asháninka, a big Indigenous group in Peru.

He had lived with them during the difficult times of the Shining Path in Peru, this kind of Maoist leftist group that was trying to take over the Peruvian government. It set their headquarters right in Asháninka territory. On the one hand, in the late 1980s, early 1990s, they had the Shining Path. And on the other hand, narco-traffickers were becoming quite a big presence in the area.

The Shining Path and the narco-traffickers worked together to protect each other. But in the middle, this Indigenous group really suffered because of these two groups.

But Jenkins had lived with them. And by the mid-2000s the Shining Path had been almost eradicated, although the legacy still exists, the big threat to these communities came from loggers.

And through him, they called on us to help them. What we did was more or less to match the logger’s offer with an unconditional cash grant.

We said to them, “We’re a UK-based charity, we don’t know how to protect the rainforest. So here’s the money, and you do whatever you need to do with it.”

We couldn’t match the exact amount of money, but we would try to raise the same amount of money and come back the next year and do this year on year. So that’s how it kicked off.

Then the neighbouring community heard about it, and they joined the scheme. Then another neighbouring community joined. Then another Indigenous group in the north, called the Awajún, heard about it and they also decided to join this model.

Then Papua New Guinea as well, through word of mouth, decided to join the Cool Earth approach. In Papua New Guinea, we’ve now got five communities where cash transfers have been delivered.

Until 2020, that unconditional cash transfer was delivered to the leadership committee. I think a lot of Indigenous communities and local communities have quite strong governance structures and democratic processes. It’s whoever is elected on that committee that manages that grant.

Then at general assemblies, they decide how they want to invest it or spend it. But there’s no input from Cool Earth on how they spend it. The reason being that they know best. It’s as simple as that.

REDD-Monitor: In theory, then, the community could say, “We’d like to try oil palm plantations to earn some money, so we’re going to spend the Cool Earth money on some chainsaws, or bulldozers, and we’re going to establish oil palm plantations.” If that did happen, what would you do?

Martin Simonneau: In theory, yes, they could certainly do that. Now, as I mentioned, Indigenous governance structures are pretty strong. Obviously, communities are different, from one community to the neighbouring one. They work differently. From Peru to Papua New Guinea, they are completely different.

But governance structures still exist. To pass a decision like the one you mention, you’d have to convince an entire community to agree to this. And I think you’d have a lot of people within those communities going against it.

We have had cases of chiefs or leaders wanting to mingle with the logging industry or the mining industry. But they’re not the sole owner of the cash that we provide. They still have to go through the General Assembly, through their own processes, to be able to use the cash and spend it in a way that they want to.

We had a case in Papua New Guinea where the community didn’t want to continue working with us. They wanted to work with the palm oil company that was neighbouring that land. And so they did that for a while, and then said, actually, it’s not really working. They came back to us and asked can we strike another partnership?

Because these people hadn’t converted their entire land to palm oil plantations, they remained on that land and still lived on that land.

So I think these cases might arise and the way we deal with it is, we listen to these people. We understand how difficult life in the rainforest is, right? They’ve got far greater problems than many of us here in the UK.

Should the whole community decide to convert their land, it’s because they’ve identified that they need the cash desperately. But I don’t think Cool Earth or any other organisation can control that.

But the cash payments that we provide are actually quite small. They’re enough to meet basic necessities but it’d be very difficult to use them to buy bulldozers or chainsaws. They would have to save up a lot of money. To say, “Right I’ve not eaten for months, now I can buy my bulldozer or my chainsaw.”

Your day-to-day struggles do make you quite savvy with money.

REDD-Monitor: One of the Cool Earth projects is the Basic Income Pilot in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest. Can you say more about how the idea for this project came into being and the ideas behind the project. Was the 2020 paper by Robert Fletcher and Bram Büscher an influence? (Conservation basic income: A non-market mechanism to support convivial conservation.)

Martin Simonneau: Absolutely, they were. And Rob is now a good friend of mine.

REDD-Monitor: Actually, just before we started this interview, I saw that you’ve done an interview on their Convivial Conservation podcast.

Martin Simonneau: Correct. It took us a while to get in touch with them, but eventually it happened a couple of years ago. Ever since we’ve been collaborating quite a lot. The paper had a huge influence on us.

A conservation basic income is a form of unconditional cash payment. Cool Earth runs two different models one of which is communal and the other one, which is a lot more recent and a lot smaller at this stage because it’s still a pilot, is using the principles of universal basic income.

It’s an individual payment paid in cash. It’s regular and completely unconditional. It goes to every adult in the community.

There are various reasons why we did this. In late 2019, we were wondering how to address elite capture. A lot of times it’s true that you give the leadership committee a payment and as we said earlier, they can use it to do whatever they want, right?

And a lot of the time, you’d talk to people in the communities, especially the ones who live really remote in the rainforest, many of them said, “No, we’ve never seen any benefits from these payments.”

It used to be concentrated in, let’s say, the bigger villages, which is what happens everywhere else on Earth. Another thing was that when you send a grant to anyone, there are quite a lot of costs associated with managing that grant. A lot of the budgets we were raising, a lot of that money was just going to paying notaries, dealing with fiscal authorities, and going to the bank.

Especially in Peru, because they’re really trying to fight corruption, you have to report everything. So you’d have to get Indigenous leaders to do an eight-hour boat trip to get to the notary and to the bank. So you end up incurring quite a lot of costs.

The questions were, how do we reduce those costs, so that the money that we raise goes directly to people? And how can we be sure that each adult, at least in the community, sees a benefit?

That’s when I read Robert and Bram’s paper also at the time when COVID-19 was happening and these UBI-style payments were being implemented to protect the economic security of workers around the world. UBI was becoming quite a big thing.

Our rationale at Cool Earth is that Indigenous Peoples know best how to protect their land. They’re not responsible for the climate crisis but are very much on the frontline of deforestation. The threats are becoming more aggressive day in, day out and we’re anti-carbon credits. So maybe a payment that’s linked to just being a human being, a rights-based payment, a reparation payment for all the harm that’s been done in these communities might be the right way forward?

At the same time, we might also be able to lower our overheads and make sure that all the money we raise, say 95% of it, goes directly to people in the rainforest.

That’s how the conservation basic income pilot appeared.

We’d read a lot about it, but no one had done it. So we asked ourselves how are we going to do this? Luckily we came across, or we were put in touch with, a women-led Indigenous organisation called ONAMIAP that works in Peru with Amazonian and Andean women.

We asked them if they wanted to implement a conservation basic income project and design it in the way they saw fit. We were happy to provide support and the money, but we wouldn’t fiddle with how this worked on the ground.

REDD-Monitor: When The Guardian reported on the Basic Income Pilot project in August 2024, it resulted in something of a LinkedIn pile-on from carbon market proponents. I thought Matthew Owen, Cool Earth’s director, addressed the criticisms very well. And much of the criticism was directed at The Guardian’s headline, “Could a £2-a-day basic income be the key to protecting rainforests?” as well as previous critical reporting on REDD in The Guardian, rather than the Basic Income Pilot project itself.

But could you address the following criticisms that were raised on LinkedIn. First, can paying people unconditionally upfront really work? Isn’t a results-based payment system (like REDD) inevitably better?

What we’re really grateful for is that we work with Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and you can very much argue nowadays that their history of rainforest protection is unbeatable. In a lot of these places there are threats, there are loggers and miners. They’re around and always knocking at their door but those territories we work in have continued to have very low forest loss rates.

So that conservation work, in a way, is already happening. Our remit is Indigenous lands. I don’t really want to comment on REDD outside Indigenous lands. Again, I’m not a proponent of that. But when it comes to working with Indigenous Peoples, in a way REDD assumes that they’re going to destroy the forest.

Put very simply, the forest is not destroyed because of Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous practice, and whatever that knowledge or practice becomes in the future. That’s what we need to compensate. That’s what we need to reward. The result already exists, in a way. We don’t need to demonstrate the result.

The unconditional payments are not results-based payments, but rights-based payments.

Indigenous Peoples are human beings. They deserve stability, economic security, financial security, social security, regardless of where they are in the world.

Particularly those communities at the front line of the climate crisis, they probably deserve even more because they’re living very complicated lives.

REDD-Monitor: The second question from the LinkedIn discussion is whether Conservation Basic Income is scalable?

Martin Simonneau: I think that’s the assumption. What we’re saying is that it is already delivering results. The current pilot project is delivering pretty good impact at a low cost.

There is some monitoring happening because it’s a pilot and we want to use the evidence to scale this up. We have to do some monitoring, we have to analyse and evaluate the pilot.

But compared to something like REDD, we have practically no overheads. The majority of the money goes directly to Indigenous Peoples.

It’s a basic income. So it’s a fairly small payment per person.

Researchers have modelled what a conservation basic income might cost. The published a paper titled, “A global conservation basic income to safeguard biodiversity.” They came up with figures ranging from US$351 billion to US$6.7 trillion per year.

It’s quite a large range.

But if you only took Indigenous Peoples, maybe 5% of the world population, it would be actually quite cheap if you compare it to subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, or what we spend on defence and the military.

And that is almost a guarantee to protect one-third of the world’s irrecoverable carbon or well over 50% of the world’s intact rainforest, which are on Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ territories

It has huge scaling potential. Also, the benefits are immediate. You deliver the cash and someone can buy food, someone can send their children to school, someone can access a health post or a hospital.

I’m not against projects that promote regenerative agriculture, reforestation, and more traditional forms of conservation, but they take a very long time to develop. Obviously we should continue these projects, but a huge first step is guaranteeing that everyone can access basic necessities, particularly those at the front line of the crisis.

And we can do that with a conservation basic income, for sure.

REDD-Monitor: The third question from the LinkedIn discussion is how will “throwing money” at Indigenous communities address the underlying drivers of deforestation and exploitation in the Amazon?

Martin Simonneau: I think “throwing money” is the wrong term.

REDD-Monitor: That was a quotation from one of the comments on LinkedIn.

Martin Simonneau: Right. I mean, you’re not throwing money. You’re contributing, or compensating, or repairing for some of the most difficult situations these people are facing.

I agree that this is not a silver bullet solution. A conservation basic income should be part of a much greater transformative framework whereby there is also political activism to lobby governments, to change regulations when it comes to businesses extracting resources from the rainforest

Obviously, there needs to be a lot more funding going to social services so that people can also access the health posts and educational services that they need to conceive their own development.

We’ve got a very small project working with local governments to tackle wildfires. Another huge issue is how do you address the impacts of climate change on these communities?

A conservation basic income is one element of a much bigger package. But I think it’s a great first step. It’s a foundation. When people say, “I can live, I can feed myself every day through receiving a basic income,” that is one step towards greater resilience in these communities, or greater resilience within the household and then the community, to continue to resist the threats to their own land.

So you’re not “throwing money”. One step at a time, you’re building resilience within these communities. And if that resilience continues to exist, that’s probably the best way to counter threats to rainforests.

REDD-Monitor: The irony of this question coming from REDD proponents is that REDD has done very little in the 20 years it’s been around to address the underlying drivers of deforestation and exploitation. If anything, it’s even made it worse because REDD is greenwashing extractivism.

The Cool Earth Conservation Basic Income project started in November 2023. How is it going so far? How much are the payments and how have the payments made a difference? What are communities using the money for?

Martin Simonneau: I think what was difficult was the pre-launch, trying to get all these different stakeholders to conceive something that had never been done, even the implementing partner, ONAMIAP, the women-led Indigenous organisation.

The first time we had a meeting with them, they thought we were crazy. “Why would you do that?” they asked. “This is crazy!”

Sometimes I wonder if it’s because they’re so used to government projects or international cooperation projects coming in to impose their own views that they adopted the belief that unconditional cash is not going to work. So that was hard enough.

The big charity behind unconditional cash transfers is GiveDirectly. They’re a poverty alleviation organisation, they didn’t really work on the environment, although they are getting into it. But they’re big, and the way they were able to scale up was because they were able to use mobile technology to deliver cash transfers.

You can even receive money on really cheap phones. That’s an easy and cheap way of getting money straight to people. In the middle of the rainforest, you don’t have that luxury. So we had to open bank accounts for everybody. So there is a logistical issue.

We’re hoping that eventually the technology reaches those communities. And it is. You can already see that. A lot of the younger generation are using smartphones.

It’s not very well connected just yet but it will happen. That will probably allow us to scale up a lot more because it’ll be much cheaper. It’s a much cheaper way of delivering payments.

In terms of what people do with the money, they will use that money in very unsurprising ways. There are always the myths that they’ll spend it on vice, on alcohol and cigarettes or drugs, or they’ll use it to buy chainsaws.

But actually, people use it to buy food, to repair their houses.

I think one of the big success stories in the communities where this pilot is being delivered, is that they used to be contracted to work on other people’s farms just to earn a bit of money. Now they’ve been able to stop doing that and concentrate on their own farm, grow their own food. And actually increase their production.

They also spend the money on community cohesion. They’ll spend it on celebrating something. Now they have a bit of cash to make sure everyone in the community gets together.

The way we decided how much everyone should receive is not based on any methodology. We took the World Bank’s International Poverty Line, which I think had just been raised to US$2.15 per person per day. And we said, “Let’s use that.” We tested it with the implementing partner and asked whether it was too much or not enough. How much additional income would it be per household, etc.

I’m currently working on another project in Colombia, which will be much bigger. We’re hoping we can launch the project with other NGOs. They’re going through a very methodological approach on how to design and launch a Conservation Basic Income project.

Oddly enough, it can actually be quite expensive in the middle of the rainforest in Peru. For a lot of these communities the cost of living can be surprisingly high. If you grow your own food, that’s fine. But sometimes you have to leave the communities to go and buy food in towns, and that costs a lot of money.

It’s simple, basic necessities. Probably because the payments are low enough that they won’t spend it on something ludicrous, but high enough so they can access their basic needs.

Actually, it’s probably the right amount, in addition to what they already receive through other income streams.

We work with the University of Bath’s UBI Lab, which is brilliant. They are very much behind something called the Basic Income Earth Network, which is quite a big network. I first heard of it in 2021. But it has great resources, and there are a lot of people and organisations piloting UBI.

They are actually doing an evaluation of the Cool Earth project in Peru, as we speak.

REDD-Monitor: This is a two-year pilot project. How will the decision be made whether to continue the project? And who will make that decision?

Martin Simonneau: There are two reasons it’s a two-year pilot project. First, we asked the Basic Income Earth Network, “How long should we run this for?” Two years is good because you can see enough changes in people’s lives to start analysing and evaluating the impact.

Second, we’re still a small charity. We don’t have unlimited funds. So as much as we’d like it to run forever, we had to limit it to two years.

But again, that was decided with the communities and the implementing partners and everyone agreed that it should be for two years, until we planned the next stage.

And the next stage, provided we have the funding, obviously, is very much planned by the communities themselves and the implementing partner.

I would love it to continue. This is why we’re branching out into institutional funding. This is something new for Cool Earth. We’ve always avoided going for institutional funding or government funding because they impose a lot of conditions.

We’ve been very lucky to have very generous donors, even from the business community, who have given us unrestricted grants.

But if we want to scale, if we want to continue this pilot, if we want to reach new communities, we’re going to need a lot more funding.

There is also a policy and advocacy element to start influencing governments to listen to this and back this approach.

At this point, I don’t know whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but we know that Cool Earth is too small to roll this out at the scale that we want.

So who’s the actor or the stakeholder that’s going to be able to do that? Is it a government? Is it a much bigger conservation organisation? I don't know at this stage.

There is a fairly new department at Cool Earth, which I’m working on, to see how we start lobbying key institutions to try and deliver this at scale.