Ten years ago I left Big Tech. I spent more than a decade in Silicon Valley: first at PayPal, then as CTO at Facebook, and finally as CEO of Reddit. Working in Big Tech can be exciting and exhilarating: building products seen and used by millions, even billions of people. The challenges you’re forced to face often dwarf in scale the problems encountered in most other industries, and as a result, tech industry veterans come away with unique skills and perspectives on big problems.
There is one arena, however, where problems loom larger than those contemplated by large-scale technology, and that is planetary climate change. When it comes to climate, the variables are still too numerous for even our best computers to simulate. The number of stakeholders is literally everyone on the planet – the largest possible TAM, or total addressable market. What this really means is that global climate action is ultimately taken by cultures and communities everywhere, and how people relate to it is myriad and diverse. Even the seemingly simplest solutions hide a surprising complexity: it is not only scientific, but also social.
When I began my first, naive attempts to restore a dry forest on a plot of land I had purchased, I began the journey to learn so much more about the earth, air, biology, energy, and Earth systems than I had ever known. I thought possible. While it has been exciting to immerse myself in multiple new fields of study, one key discipline from my days in Big Tech has proven particularly valuable and a source of consistent and useful information. That discipline is scalability.
Ready to be climbed
My years in tech have taught me to think in terms of scale. A social media site or payment platform cannot succeed if it fails when 10,000 or even 10 million new people decide to sign up. After calculating the carbon impact of restoring a single forest, I became curious about the impact of restoring each forest. I realized that, on a large scale, global reforestation had the potential to have a significant impact on climate change, reducing atmospheric carbon by 30%. I soon discovered that scientists around the world had completed research that seemed to lead to the same conclusion.
That number becomes even more significant when you understand that carbon removal technologies like direct carbon capture from the air are nowhere near ready to scale. Years or even decades have passed since that moment. New technologies almost always suffer from bugs and reliability problems. And we don’t have time to wait. On the other hand, a new sapling begins removing carbon from the air the first day it is planted.
I love new technology as much as anyone. But here’s the key lesson, the most counterintuitive one, earned through hard work and tears working in a large-scale technology company: to solve a large-scale problem, you always avoid new technology. It’s best to use reliable, older-generation equipment that requires minimal troubleshooting and comes with the fewest surprises.
That’s why trees are a great solution for sequestering carbon. We know the benefits and risks, and they are accessible to everyone, not just the richest nations. Everyone can participate, and even though there are many unknowns and many missteps, all these problems can be researched and solved more easily if we start from a basic idea that is easy to understand: a tree.
Forestry accelerator
Planting lots of trees seems simple, but mass reforestation is a completely different type of project, requiring a high level of skills and resources. Financing represents a major bottleneck. It is necessary to collect and prepare the seeds of dozens of different species. Water must be made available. Teams must be trained and ready to overcome unique challenges. And because forests are highly interdependent systems, we need to solve them all holistically.
In 2022, my company Terraformation launched the Seed to Carbon Forest Accelerator, a program modeled after startup accelerators like Y Combinator. It provides comprehensive support to early-stage forestry teams and helps investors access high-quality carbon credits. In more than a year, we have launched three groups of forestry teams with the goal of reforesting land in some of the most biodiverse and climate-critical areas in the world, and we will launch a fourth group soon. We have taken reforestation projects from concept to carbon project registration in approximately 12-18 months, among the fastest of all projects of this type. And there are more to come.
Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time. Every year the need to take meaningful action becomes more urgent. It is our intention to create work that our grandchildren and their children will be proud of. That’s why at Terraformation one of our corporate values reminds us daily of why we do this work: “We are ancestors.”
Yishan Wong is the founder and CEO of Terraformation, a global reforestation company.
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