Every startup is trying to fix something but Terraformation is tackling the only problem that must matter to all of us: Climate change.<\/p>\n
This is why it\u2019s in such a big huge hurry. Its mission \u2014 as a \u2018forest tech\u2019 startup \u2014 is to accelerate tree planting by applying a startup-y operational philosophy of scalability to the pressing task of rapidly, sustainably reforesting denuded landscapes \u2014 bringing back native trees species to revive former wastelands and shrinking our carbon emissions in the process.<\/p>\n
Forests are natural carbon sinks. The problem is we just don\u2019t have enough trees with roots in the ground to offset our emissions. So that at least means the mission is simple: Plant more trees, and plant more trees fast<\/em>.<\/p>\n Terraformation\u2019s goal is to restore three billion acres of global native forest ecosystems by scaling tree replanting projects in parallel, scaling the use of existing techniques, and working with all the partners it can. (For a little context, the U.S. contains some 2.27BN acres of total land area, per Wikipedia<\/a>).<\/p>\n So far it says it\u2019s planted \u201cthousands\u201d of trees \u2014 with live projects in North America, South America, Africa and Europe which it hopes will yield up to 20,000 replanted acres. It\u2019s also in talks with partners about more projects that could clad hundreds of thousands of acres with carbon-consuming (and biodiversity-prompting) trees, if they come to full fruition.<\/p>\n That\u2019s still a long way off the 3BN-acre-wooded moonshot, of course. But Terraformation claims it\u2019s been able to achieve a forestry restoration work-rate that\u2019s 5x the average already. And that\u2019s definitely the kind of \u2018gas stepping\u2019 that climate change needs.<\/p>\n Its elevator pitch is also punchy: \u201cOur mission is explicitly to solve climate change through mass reforestation,\u201d says founder Yishan Wong \u2014 whose name may be familiar as the ex-Reddit CEO (and also a former early-stage engineer at PayPal\/Facebook). <\/span>\u201c<\/span>So it\u2019s getting trees in the ground and getting faster at getting trees in the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not going it alone, either. It\u2019s just announced a first closing of a $30 million Series A funding round, <\/span>led by Sam Max Altman at Apollo Projects, the brothers\u2019 \u2018moonshot\u2019 fund; plus several high-profile institutional investors (whose names aren\u2019t being disclosed); along with nearly 100 angel investors, including Sundeep Ahuja, Lachy Groom, Sahil Lavingia, Joe Lonsdale, Susan Wu, and OVN Cap.<\/p>\n \u201cThe [Series A] was a bit larger than we anticipated and the idea is to get us to the next stage of planting orders of magnitude more trees every year,\u201d says Wong. \u201c<\/span>So it\u2019ll be used both for supporting forestry projects directly, as well as for the development and deployment of forestry acceleration products and technology.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe very, very nice thing about mass reforestation or mass restoration as a solution to climate change is that it\u2019s extremely parallelizable,\u201d he adds. \u201cYou can plant any tree at the same time as your planting some other tree. This is the primary reason why this solution can potentially be implemented within the timetable that we have left. But in order to do so we have to start and drive an enormous, decentralized reforestation campaign across multiple continents and countries.\u201d<\/p>\n The funding follows a $5M seed last year, as the young startup worked to hone its approach.<\/p>\n Terraformation is targeting the main barriers to successful reforesting: Through early research and pilots it says it\u2019s identified three key bottlenecks to large-scale forest restoration \u2014 namely, land availability, freshwater, and seed. It then seeks to address each of these pinch-points to viable reforesting \u2014 identifying and fashioning modular, sharable solutions (tools, techniques, training etc) that can help shave off friction and build leafy, branching success.<\/p>\n These products include a seed bank unit it\u2019s devised, housed in a standard shipping container and kitted out with all the equipment (plus solar off-grip capability, if required) to take care of on-site storage for the thousands of native seeds each projects needs to replant a whole forest.<\/p>\n It also offers a nursery kit which also ships in a shipping container \u2014 a flat-packed greenhouse that it says a couple of people can put together, and where thousands of seedlings can then be tended and irrigated in pots until they\u2019re ready to plant out.<\/p>\n A third support it offers to the replanting projects it wants to work with is expertise in building solar-powered desalination rigs so young trees can be supplied with adequate water to survive in locations where poor land management may have made conditions for growth difficult and harsh.<\/p>\n It goes without saying that planted trees which fail because of poor processes won\u2019t help cut carbon emissions. Badly managed replanting is at best wasteful \u2014 and may be closer to cynical greenwashing in some cases. (Poor quality projects can be a known problem where claims of corporate carbon offsetting are being made, for example.)<\/p>\n Terraformation is thus zeroing in on repeatable ways to scale and accelerate the successful planting and nurturing of trees, from seed to sapling and beyond, to accelerate sustainable reforesting.<\/p>\n Ultimately, it\u2019s the only kind of tree planting that will really count in the fight against climate change.<\/p>\n Its first pilot restoration projects begun in Hawai\u2019i in 2019 \u2014 where it\u2019s been able to plant thousands of trees at a site called Pacific Flight, reviving a native tropical sandalwood forest that had been logged unsustainably. To enable the young trees to grow in land which had also become arid as a result of cattle grazing, the team built the world\u2019s largest fully off-grid, solar-powered desalination system to supply sustainable freshwater to the baby forest.<\/p>\n \u201cThe arid environment, high winds, and degraded soils meant that if a team could restore a forest there, they could do it anywhere,\u201d is the pitch on its website<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Series A will go toward spinning up lots more such native species forest restoration projects \u2014 working via partnerships, with organizations such as Environmental Defenders in Uganda, and other groups in Ecuador, Haiti and Tanzania \u2014 as well as on more RD (additional products are in the pipeline, we\u2019re told); and on expanding headcount so its team has the legs to run faster.<\/p>\n Interestingly, for a startup with Silicon Valley engineering pedigree at its core, the team\u2019s approach is intentionally light on technology \u2014 leaning only on vital tech (like solar and desalination), rather than experimental bells and whistles (drones, robotics etc) to ensure the processes it\u2019s packaging up for massive replanting parallelism remain as simple, accessible and reliable as possible. So they are able<\/span>\u00a0to scale all over the globe. <\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s clear that sci-fi<\/span> robotic gadgetry isn\u2019t the answer here. <\/span>It\u2019s sweating toil plus tried and tested horticulture processes, done systematically and repeatedly, in mass parallelism all over the world that\u2019s required, argues Wong, whose years in tech have given him a healthy scepticism on the issue of over-engineering. (<\/span>\u201cThe biggest lesson I learned was, you want to solve a big problem? You want to use as little technology as possible\u2026 Technology\u2019s always breaking, it\u2019s always got flaws. The biggest problem with technology is technology.\u201d)<\/p>\n That night, a forest flew<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n \u201cI would say that the key contribution that \u2018tech\u2019 \u2014 if you think of a monolith or a culture or whatever \u2014 will make to climate change, is not in fact some new invention or some gadget or some sort of special magical technology\u2026 I think it really is the practice of scalability,\u201d he goes on.\u00a0\u201cWhich is an organizational end. A management way of thinking. Because that is actually something that has been carefully and painfully developed\u2026 over the past 20 years in Silicon Valley. How to take small working solutions, how to solve very big problems, how to scale them. And it isn\u2019t a very glamorous thing \u2014 which is why I think it\u2019s one of the more pure disciplines.<\/p>\n \u201cIt just has been less corrupt\u2026 Scalability is just people thinking hard and grinding it out to address really hard big problems. And I think that practice and all the little tips and rules that we have to doing that is the real contribution that tech is going to make \u2014 with one of those principles being use as little tech as you can.\u201d<\/p>\n Elon Musk is donating $100M to find the best carbon capture technology<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n Terraformation is building software tools too \u2014 such as a mobile app to help with cataloguing and monitoring seeds. But the really critical technologies involved, solar and desalination, are very much at the \u2018tried and tested\u2019 end of the tech scale (\u201cvery, very reliable and refined\u201d.).<\/p>\n Wong points out that a key development for solar and desalination is related to the unit economics \u2014 with falling costs allowing for scalability and thus speed.<\/p>\n Asked whether Terraformation is a business in the typical startup sense, Wong says it\u2019s been set up in a familiar way \u2014 as a Delaware C Corp \u2014 but purely because he says that\u2019s just the quickest way to be able to operate. Doing stuff as a non-profit would be way too slow, he says, describing it thusly as a \u201cnon non-profit\u201d (rather than a business with a for-profit mission).<\/p>\n Aka: \u201cIt\u2019s a corporate with investors but primarily the aim is to solve climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n Startup investors are of course often betting their money on the chance of a quick and meaty return. But not here, confirms Wong. <\/span>\u201cWhen we raised funding all of our investors invested primarily because they wanted to see climate change solved,\u201d he tells TechCrunch. \u201cTo many of them this was the first time that a plausible, full-scale solution to solving climate change had been presented.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s still very, very hard. It\u2019s very, very large. It\u2019s really daunting. But it\u2019s the first time someone has mapped out a path that could actually get us there. And so all of our investors invested because they want to see that happen.\u201d<\/p>\n So how will a \u2018non non-profit\u2019 startup (even with $30M just banked) get its hands on enough land to plant enough trees? A variety of ways, per Wong. (Perhaps even, in some instances, landowners could end up paying it to turn their dirt into beautiful woodland.)<\/p>\n \u201cThe short answer is anywhere we can!\u201d he adds. \u201cThe solution is structured to give us maximum flexibility, given that we can use a large variety of land. We don\u2019t want to count on any particular land owning entity \u2014 and I use that very broad term to mean like people, communities, governments, municipalities \u2014 we don\u2019t want to rely on any one particular land-owning entity wanting to work with us or allowing us to reforest the land, because you can\u2019t guarantee that.\u201d<\/p>\n He also notes that Terraformation\u2019s plan to fix climate change is based on \u201cworse case scenarios\u201d \u2014 where \u201cno one who owns any land that gets enough natural rainfall for forest restoration will allow it to reforest it\u201d. \u201cWe use the least valuable land \u2014 basically desertified, degraded land,\u201d he adds. \u201cIs there enough of that? And it turns out there is.\u201d<\/p>\n Even though personal financial upside clearly isn\u2019t front of mind for Terraformation\u2019s investors, Wong still believes there\u2019s plenty of \u2018value\u2019 to be unlocked as a byproduct of spreading leafy-green goodness all over the planet vs funding more extractive exploitation.<\/p>\n \u201cIt turns out that solving climate change is actually a huge value creating act,\u201d he argues. \u201cMy experience in Silicon Valley is if you have people who believe in you and believe in the thing that you\u2019re creating is ultimately value-creating then it\u2019s actually also wealth creating. If you do something that is fundamentally very, very valuable and you\u2019re right next to it, you will be able to monetize it in some way. You will capture some of that value for your shareholders.\u00a0So it\u2019s a bet that if you really can solve climate change, that\u2019s super valuable, both for the world and to the entity that\u2019s [investing].\u201d<\/p>\n Of course climate change is more than just a problem; it\u2019s an existential threat to all life on Earth \u2014 one which affect humans and every other living creature and thing on the planet.<\/p>\n Given such terminal stakes, reversing climate change should be the highest global priority. Instead, humans have procrastinated \u2014 putting dealing with rises in atmospheric CO2 on the back-burner and worse (cutting down existing forests like the Amazon Rainforest, for one).<\/p>\n Set against that backdrop, Terraformation\u2019s answer to humanity\u2019s greatest crisis looks compellingly simple. <\/span>Its bet is that climate change can be fixed by scaling the most proven technology possible (trees) to capture carbon emissions. Who can argue with that?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But it does also seem clear that reforesting will need to go hand in hand with a mainstreaming of conservation, as a prevailing societal attitude, if the mission is to be pulled off \u2014 otherwise all these beautiful baby trees could just meet the same sad fate as all the Earth\u2019s already lost forests. <\/span><\/p>\n Nonetheless, <\/span>c<\/span>onservation is something Wong\u2019s team is deliberately not focusing on. <\/span><\/p>\n Not because they don\u2019t care. Rather their hope is that by building the baby forests, the protective partners will come \u2014 to watch over and get value from the trees as they grow.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want to make it seem like we don\u2019t care about [forestry conservation] but one of the things that I try to do is figure out where people are already doing work and things are already moving in the right direction \u2014 and then go work on the thing that other people are not working on,\u201d he says when we ask about this. \u201cWhen I talk to people in the forestry world many, many people are working on avoiding deforestation, helping solve the broader socioeconomic issues that result in deforestation. And so I feel like there is momentum moving in that direction \u2014 so we have to work on this other issue that other people aren\u2019t working on.\u201d<\/p>\n Wong also argues that forests are naturally more valuable than the denuded waste\/scrub ground they\u2019re replanting \u2014 implying that pure economic interest should help these baby forests survive and thrive far into the future.<\/p>\n However the history of humanity shows that unequal wealth distribution can wreak all sorts of havoc on a resource-rich natural environment. And people who live in poverty may well be disproportionately more likely to like in a rural location, on or near land that Terraformation hopes to target for replanting. So if these forests can\u2019t provide \u2014 in crude terms \u2014 \u2018value\u2019 for their local communities the risk is the same cycle of short-term economic harm will rip all this hard work (and hope) out of the ground once again.<\/p>\n Wealth inequality lies at the core of much of humanity\u2019s counterproductive destruction of the environment. So, seen from that angle, reforesting the planet may require just as much effort toward tackling \u2014 root and branch \u2014 the wider socioeconomic fault-lines of our world, as it will washing, sorting and storing seed, watering seedlings and nurturing and planting saplings.<\/p>\n And that further dials up an already massive climate challenge. But, again, Wong is quietly hopeful.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople aren\u2019t cutting down trees because they\u2019re evil, they\u2019re cutting down trees because they need to make a living. So we have to provide them with ways to make a living that is more valuable than cutting down the trees. I think that recognition is moving in the correct direction \u2014 so I\u2019m hopeful there,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Asked what keeps him up at night, he also has a straightforward answer to hand \u2014 one we\u2019ve heard many times already from a new generation of climate campaigners, like Greta Thunberg, whose futures will be irrevocably stamped by the effects of climate change: Humanity simply isn\u2019t moving fast enough.<\/p>\n \u201cIn order to do this we have to make order of magnitude improvements in both speed and scale \u2014 which is technically a thing that we know how to do but is among the most daunting things that you ever try to undertake. So\u2026 are we moving fast enough? Are we doing enough? Because time is running out,\u201d warns Wong.<\/p>\n \u201cThe timeframe that we have left is very small when compared to the planetary scale of the problem. And so I think the only way that we\u2019re going to get there is with proven solutions, moving, growing at exponential speed.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI am [hopeful],\u201d he adds. \u201cI\u2019m a big fan of humans working together. People can really do it. I\u2019m very I guess what you\u2019d call pro-human. We have a lot of flaws, we fight amongst ourselves a lot, but I really think that when people work together they can really do amazing, amazing things\u2026 Trees gave us life and so now it\u2019s our time to repay that debt.\u201d<\/p>\n 2020 was one of the warmest years in history and indicates mounting risks of climate change<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n
\n
\n
\n