The habitat banker

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1:29We know you know this. So please take a few minutes to save hours of time in the coming year and support NPR. Go to plus.npr.org, get sponsor-free episodes as well as bonus episodes, merch discounts and other perks across more than 25 NPR shows. That's plus.npr.org. The link is in our episode notes too. And thanks. A warning, there is some cursing in Spanish in this episode. It involves a man and a shrub. This is Planet Money from NPR. A few months ago, freelance reporter Stan Alcorn was in a crowded hotel lobby in Cali, Colombia. Test, test, test. Okay. Yeah, I was there to meet a 29-year-old Colombian who was trying to sell a new financial instrument he thinks could help save the planet.

2:27Good morning. Hello. What's the plan? The plan is to talk to clients. Mauricio Serna says the plan is to talk to clients. He's got long curly hair, an untucked green shirt, and on his phone, a list of these potential buyers. They're standing all around the hotel lobby in lanyards and business casual. I have Sony Pictures Entertainment. I have PepsiCo, the Rockefeller Foundation. Who's like top of the list? Top of the list for me, there's the head of sustainability of Unilever. Unilever, the massive conglomerate that makes everything from Vaseline to Ben & Jerry's ice cream to Axe body spray. Okay, okay.

3:05So imagine I'm the head of sustainability of Unilever. Like, what are you going to say? What's your pitch? So my pitch is, so you have a big procurement process of palm oil here in Colombia and in other parts of the world. I know that you've been doing... Mauricio is still pretty new to being a salesman. But in a nutshell, his pitch is Unilever. You get oil from palm tree plantations in Colombia, which aren't exactly great for native plants and animals. What if I told you there was an easy way to do something good for those ecosystems? And do you think, is there a point in that conversation where you'll say the words biodiversity credits?

3:45Maybe. I think at the end. Biodiversity credits. This is the new product that Mauricio is here to sell. And the idea is kind of a twist on carbon credits. But instead of producing carbon emissions, biodiversity credits are aimed at saving some of the million-plus species that are threatened with extinction. He says a lot of people have no idea how they work. Yeah, so a lot of people don't understand the biodiversity world yet. Then, all of a sudden, Mauricio spots his white whale walking across the room. It's him. It's the head of sustainability of Unilever. I should go and talk to him. Can I follow you?

4:26I don't know if he wants, but yeah, you can follow me. Mauricio makes a beeline across the lobby, taking big strides. The Unilever guy gets in the elevator. This is the moment every budding entrepreneur, like, fever dreams about. Mauricio is about to be able to give a literal elevator pitch. But just as we are about to get there, the elevator doors close. Mauricio didn't make it. I didn't want to run. Mauricio didn't want to run. Doesn't quite have that killer sales instinct yet. Yeah, I mean, he really is new to all of this. He studied biology. What he cares about is protecting nature. And it's honestly a little awkward for him to try and win over the companies that are destroying it.

5:07So it's weird. And sometimes I'm like, what am I doing here? Who am I talking to? But on the other side, I'm like, these guys need to chip in. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Gazi. And I'm Stan Alcorn. Our planet is in serious trouble. And I'm not talking about global warming. There are a million species of plants and animals in danger of extinction. And the biggest cause is companies destroying their habitats to farm food, mine minerals, all to make the stuff that you and I consume. Today on the show, we follow budding salesman Mauricio Serna on his quest to make a market for this newish financial instrument, the biodiversity credit.

5:53And we peek under the hood to try to figure out how these credits actually work. Is the hype around them a bunch of hot air? Or could they be a critical tool for saving thousands of species around the world? Including one of the most charismatic megafauna in the game, star of what has been called the greatest film of all time, none other than Paddington Bear. Bust out the marmalade sandwiches.

6:3910 ,000 companies, Zendesk AI makes service teams more efficient, businesses run better, and your customers happier. That's the Zendesk AI effect. Find out more at zendesk.com. As any Planet Money listener will know, the way we often try to understand some obscure, newfangled financial instrument is to just buy one, get some skin in the game. So my reporting partner, Tomas Suprimny, and I decided to do just that. So let's go buy a biodiversity credit. We get on the website for Mauricio's company, and there they are. For$25, we'll get a credit. Basically a certificate saying we've protected a little piece of nature, 10 square meters of Andean cloud forest.

7:21And they show some of the animals that we'll be saving. The yellow-eared parrot, the tree ocelot, and, of course, the threatened spectacled bear, the Paddington bear. For listeners who haven't watched the Paddington movies, first, I'm sorry for your loss, What you need to know is that these bears are the only ones in South America. They are dangerously cute with little white circles around their eyes, hence the name. And some ecologists argue they're kind of an umbrella species. If you protect them, you know you're protecting a bunch of other species. A whole tropical Andean ecosystem. Are you ready to own our own little piece of the cloud forest?

7:59I'm ready to save Paddington. I enter my credit card details and click buy. We did it. Done. And we are now the proud owners of Biodiversity Credit No. 0281. But it still isn't clear what exactly we've bought. So we decided to go see our 10 square meters for ourselves, see what these credits look like on the ground. And the ground, in this case, is also the land that first turned Mauricio Serna into a conservationist. It's a plot of land owned by Mauricio's family high up in the tropical Andes of Colombia. They call the place El Globo, or the balloon, because, they like to joke, it was so remote that for a long time the only way to get there was by hot air balloon.

8:44These days it takes a plane and a bus and a motorcycle to get there. Are we in El Globo now, like this is all part of? This is El Globo right now. El Globo is a big plot of land, more than 800 acres situated on a mountain. There are rivers and wetlands. But Mauricio directs our attention up toward the mountaintop. If you see here, there's a patch of forest that has white trees and a lot of dark green colors. That is one of the most mature forests that we have. He says a couple centuries ago, this whole area was a mature forest. full of yellow-eared parrots and these super rare alma negra trees that translates to black soul trees, kind of metal.

9:34And of course, plenty of Paddington's bear. But over the 20th century, more and more of the region was steadily cleared for cattle ranching. That's what Mauricio's grandfather did back in the 60s when his family bought the land. For a while, they were some of the biggest landowners in the area. And apparently, they weren't super good at cutting down trees. There was a saying that Lugloa was the best land and the most beautiful land in the region because it's the most clean. And clean means no trees, no shrubs, and nothing but grass for cattle. Nothing but grass. That's beauty to a cattle rancher.

10:16The more land you clear, the more cattle you can graze, and the more money you can make. That simple economic logic has shaped this landscape for a century. But one problem with that logic is that it's driven thousands of species to the brink of extinction. Because every acre cleared for cattle is one less for the Paddingtons of the world. They've been forced into smaller and smaller tracts of remaining land, and their numbers have dwindled, along with a bunch of other threatened species. And this problem isn't just happening at El Globo, it's happening all over the world. Mauricio says he really started thinking about all of this about a decade ago.

10:50He was at the university studying biology when he started to fall in love with the natural world and understand just how much of it had been destroyed by things like cattle ranching. And he says it was one class in particular that got him thinking about his family's land in the tropical Andes. I was studying biology and I was actually studying how important tropical Andes is for conservation and how this was considered like a biodiversity hotspot. And that means that it has a lot of species per square kilometer. Mauricio started thinking about how his family land might actually hold the key to start pushing back against biodiversity loss.

11:33Because even though they'd cleared the land for cattle, even though they'd diminished the habitat for a bunch of vulnerable species, that was not irreversible. Mauricio realized that he and his family could be sitting on a biodiversity gold mine if he could just figure out a way to turn the cattle farm back into forest, back into nature. And I started pitching to my family, hey, let's build a nature reserve. And my family being really traditional, we're like, no way. I mean, you're not getting any money from that. This is not an economically viable project. So you're not, I mean, we're not doing it.

12:11Mauricio takes on this new challenge, how to restore the land to a more natural state while also generating a profit. He looks into ecotourism, which could be lucrative in theory, but El Globo is kind of remote. He starts up a beekeeping operation to try to make that honey money, but it isn't quite enough. Still, Mauricio's family is okay with it taking a few years to figure out how to restore the forest and find a way to monetize it along the way. So he forges ahead. Here, Mauricio catches what seems like a little break. He finds an organization that offers to plant 60 ,000 native trees on his land for free, doing a lot of the work he might otherwise have to pay for.

12:54So he decides to sign up. It was a good idea. I mean, there were good intentions behind that project. But we all know what they say about good intentions. And the results here were kind of a disaster. They planted the wrong trees in the wrong places. 70 % of them died. And among the ones that lived is an invasive species, a shrub that is notorious for crowding out native vegetation. We actually ran into one as we were walking around El Globo. Ah, look at this. This is it. All this. This is it. Cotonea serpanosis. And Mauricio got so mad, he started cursing at it. Que pereza, amigo. Que p***a. Que p***a.

13:35So the tree planting was a failure. But it was around this time that Mauricio stumbled on the company that would eventually help create the biodiversity credits that we bought. I was looking in the internet and I don't know where, how, and Terrazos popped. Terrazos is a Colombian company that seemed to have found a way to not only pay for conservation, but maybe to even make it profitable. It is a little controversial. Terrazos was pioneering a model for funding conservation in Colombia called Habitat Banks. The way it works is there's a law in Colombia that says if you cut down trees for certain kinds of big projects, like dams and mines, you have to compensate for that.

14:17So if you mess up an acre of Andean cloud forest, you need to conserve at least an acre of that same forest. And one way you could do that is to pay terrazos to protect some of the land in one of their habitat banks. Mauricio understood this basically meant they were conserving ecosystems by taking money from the very same companies that were destroying them. Was there a part of you that was like conflicted at all about the model? Maybe a little bit, but not really. I mean, many people were and maybe we were like, OK, you are selling your soul to the capitalism. But I think at the end of the day, what's important is that the money was well-planned, was well-used, and was delivering positive ecological outcomes.

15:05Mauricio starts looking into Tarasos' model and quickly realizes it won't immediately solve his problem at El Globo. There aren't any of those big projects destroying that particular part of the Andean cloud forest. But he decides to take a job with Tarasos to learn all about their Habitat Bank system. And then one day, after a few years of working there, Mauricio and his colleagues are throwing around ideas for how to set up a Habitat Bank system in places like El Globo when they come up with a potential model. It was kind of a mix between Terrazzo's old model and what others had done with carbon credits.

15:42Now, there are two types of carbon credits. There are credits that companies buy because they basically have to by law in places like Europe and California. But then there are also voluntary carbon credits that companies buy because they want to, maybe in order to make some sort of PR claim, like they're carbon neutral or net zero. The new idea that Mauricio and others had was maybe they could do something like those voluntary carbon credits, but for biodiversity. So they'd sell a credit that promises long-term protection of land rich with species, and companies would buy them. So they could make claims about being nature positive or something like that.

16:21Mauricio says their theory was that companies wanted to make these kinds of claims. They wanted to invest in biodiversity. They just needed a way to do that that was easy and trustworthy. What we thought is that maybe the private sector needs an instrument to report on what's happening on the ground. And that's where biodiversity credits come along. It was a shot. I mean, it was like, let's try to make it work. And if they could make it work, Mauricio thought, instead of getting people to pay his family per head of cattle at El Globo, they could instead get companies to pay them per 10 square meters of restored cloud forest.

16:57Next, they needed to figure out how much those companies should pay. So how did you set the price? So the price is really straightforward and simple. Basically, they looked at how much it was going to cost to run the Habitat Bank for the next 30 years. So they were going to need to buy and plant a bunch of trees and plants, put up fences, and also hire a ranger to prevent illegal logging or poaching. So you need to understand how much you're going to pay your ranger. You need to understand how many trees do you need to plant. And you need to understand the administrative costs, the sales costs, the marketing costs.

17:36You need to understand all those costs. They added up all these projected costs. Then they looked at the price of things of sort of similar offerings, like an adopt-a-jaguar program. But there was a big range, so they kind of arbitrarily picked a nice round number,$25 a credit. With a total pool of more than 300 ,000 credits, that would cover their costs and maybe even make them a profit. But in order to actually sell any of these credits, he knew he'd have to offer companies some tangible evidence they were helping biodiversity, that the companies could then flaunt to investors and customers.

18:11So he needed data. First, to show that El Globo was already home to a bunch of threatened species. And second, to prove that the work they were doing to restore more and more of the land was actually improving biodiversity. For Mauricio, that meant doing a kind of wildlife census to get a baseline. A lot of El Globo is sort of barren from its cattle ranching past. But there was one super dense, biodiverse patch of forest that was never cut down. And that is where the lion's share of El Globo's biodiversity lives. And so that's where he took us, to show what we'd actually bought with our biodiversity credit.

18:48We start out hiking through what was recently ranch land. There are shrubs and waist-high ferns. And then as we get higher up the mountain, we cross into the thick, dark tangle of the original jungle that used to cover everything. This is how it should look like. Like a really dense forest with a lot of plants growing in other plants. Lots of palm trees growing. And there's also some bird species, some insect species, also some lizards and frogs. You will only see them in the growing old forest. This is the biodiversity that the biodiversity credit is supposed to protect. And it's the kernel that they're building on as they restore the rest of the land here to its former tropical Andean glory.

19:35Using wildlife cameras and stakeouts, Mauricio's determined that El Globo contains some 20 threatened species, including the ones we'd seen in the advertising when we bought our credit. The tree ocelot, the yellow-eared parrot. And most dangerously cute of all, the spectacled bear himself. Mauricio had us play a little game of I spy in the forest. So now I need you to look, I need you to find traces of the bear. Is it these broken off trees? What do bears eat? People. Real ones know it's actually marmalade sandwiches. So they eat mostly bromelades. Bromeliads are a family that includes spiky plants like the pineapple.

20:22They usually live in the most jungly of jungles. They're on the forest floor all around us, and that's where I'm looking. I'm failing the exam. Until Mauricio tells me how the bears actually climb trees to get at the biggest, juiciest bromeliads. So I should try looking up. Oh, I see, I see. Wow, the scratch marks. It's like a horror movie. He climbed all up over there, and you see scratches all over the trees. Wow. Looking at these long claw marks in the bark, I felt like I was seeing evidence not just of bears, but that there's this whole rich web of life here. But as we started our hike back down the mountain, I couldn't help but puzzle over the thing we'd actually bought that brought us here in the first place, that$25 biodiversity credit.

21:12It wasn't a physical plot of land. There wasn't some 10-square-meter patch with our names on it. We didn't get some fractional ownership of a spectacled bear. Really, the credit that we bought helped to cover the costs Mauricio says he'll need to protect and restore this place over the next 30 years. We basically donated$25 to his crowdfunding campaign. And the swag we got in return was just an email with a certificate attached that says biodiversity credit on it. Which brings us to the existential question hanging over this whole project. Mauricio has sold one credit to Planet Money. but can he sell thousands or tens of thousands of credits to actual companies?

21:53And it just so happens that a few weeks after we visited Mauricio at El Globo, he was going to get a shot at some major potential buyers. Some of the biggest players in the world of corporate sustainability were about to descend on nearby Cali, Colombia, for the UN Global Summit on Biodiversity, the COP16. That was going to be a big test for Mauricio and for biodiversity credits. COP will be where we're going to see if companies are really willing to buy these credits and claim these results and add value to their companies. It's like the big coming out party or the big debut for biodiversity credits.

22:35Yeah, that's it. After the break, Mauricio takes off his hiking boots, laces up his loafers, and polishes up his pitch deck to see if companies are going to buy what he's selling.

22:51Every two years, diplomats from around the world descend on one city for a week or two in order to try to save the planet's plants and animals and fungus from mass extinction. This year's summit, the COP16, took place in Cali, Colombia. And like every summit, there was also this sort of shadow conference filled with thousands of people who at least claim to be trying to tackle the same problem from the private sector. And that's where I met up again with Mauricio Serna. He was in that hotel lobby, trying to pitch corporate executives on Terrazzo's biodiversity credits. I think they care because they're here and they're willing to listen.

23:27Over the course of the last few years, Mauricio has gone from a biology student to a sort of evangelist for this new kind of financial instrument. One that he hopes might turn his family cattle ranch into a permanent refuge for threatened species like the spectacled bear. And he showed up at the COP16 this year with a mission. So my target was, okay, you need to go and sell these biodiversity credits, mostly to anyone. But Mauricio is not the only guy selling biodiversity credits at this conference. It's kind of the hot new idea at the COP for how to incentivize the private sector to help protect the environment.

24:04The World Economic Forum projected a couple billion dollar market by 2030. And here at the conference, you can taste the hype. There's a tequila company giving out free shots in honor of a jaguar-based biodiversity credit. There's a 20-foot Jenga tower of terrariums that turns out to be a promotional sculpture for a biodiversity credit to save the ocean. Thank you so much. You're beautiful. And there are, of course, several biodiversity credit products touting themselves as compatible with the blockchain. Including Mauricio's, in fact. Now, it isn't totally clear whether all of this is just a circus of hot air or maybe the start of a new gold rush.

24:51But Mauricio is hoping that all this marketing hype could mean more people will be willing to buy what he is selling. For the first couple days of the conference, Mauricio's getting his bearings, going to panel discussions. But by day three, he's starting to make some sales, one credit at a time. That night, at a networking event at a bar, we get to see him in action. He's talking to a guy with a website startup, and Mauricio gives him the pitch. You can click a few buttons, pay$25, and save 10 square meters of cloud forest.

25:29He likes how Mauricio has made it so easy to do something good.

25:38He says yes, almost immediately.

25:49Mauricio later tells us that Terrazos' goal is to sell 10 ,000 biodiversity credits by the end of the year. There'll eventually be more than 300 ,000 credits. That's a big inventory. That's why you need buyers that aren't just individuals you talk to. Yeah, so we need corporate buyers who can buy a big bunch of these credits. Later that week, a corporate buyer makes an announcement. ESA, one of the largest electric transmission companies in Latin America, says they've bought over 1 ,000 of Mauricio's credits. And when I talk to the guy who directs their main corporate sustainability program, Juan Fernando Patino, he tells me they're interested in biodiversity credits for a couple of reasons.