Ten years ago, I left my job at a major tech company. He spent more than a decade in Silicon Valley, first at PayPal, then at Facebook as an engineering director, and finally as CEO at Reddit. Working in Big Tech can be exciting and exhilarating, building products that are seen and used by millions or even billions of people. The challenges we have to tackle are often smaller in scale than those encountered in most other industries, and as a result, technology industry veterans have unique skills and perspectives on big problems.
But there is one area where an even bigger problem looms than what hyperscale technology envisions: global climate change. When it comes to climate, there are still too many variables for even our best computers to simulate. The number of stakeholders is literally everyone on the planet, the largest possible number of his TAM, or total addressable market. What this means in practice is that global climate action ultimately depends on cultures and communities everywhere, and the ways in which people engage with it are myriad and diverse. Even the simplest-looking solutions hide surprising complexities that are as much social as they are scientific.
When I began my first humble attempt to restore a dryland forest on an acquired plot of land, I learned much more about land, air, biology, energy, and the Earth's systems than I had ever thought possible. I started a journey of learning. Although it was exciting to immerse myself in multiple new areas of research, one key area for him during the Big Tech era proved to be uniquely valuable and a consistent source of useful insights. That discipline is scalability.
ready to expand
Years of experience in the technology industry has taught me to think in terms of scale. A social media site or payment platform will not succeed if it stops working 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 interested in the impact of restoring all forests. I realized that large-scale global tree planting could have a significant impact on climate change, reducing carbon in the atmosphere by 30%. It was soon discovered that scientists on the other side of the world had completed studies that appeared to point to the same conclusion.
This number becomes even more important when you realize that carbon removal technologies such as direct air capture are not ready for scale. Years or even decades have passed since then. New technology almost always comes with bugs and reliability issues. And there's no time to wait. Meanwhile, new seedlings begin removing carbon from the air from the first day they are planted.
I love new technology just like everyone else. But here are the most counterintuitive and important lessons I learned the hard way, through sweat and tears, working at a hyperscale technology company: Solving hyperscale problems always requires avoiding new technologies. It's best to use older, reliable equipment, which requires minimal troubleshooting and minimizes surprises.
That's why trees are a great solution for sequestering carbon. We know the benefits and risks, and they are available to everyone, not just the richest countries. Anyone can participate. There are many unknowns and many mistakes, but all of these problems are easier to explore and solve if we start with an easy-to-understand basic idea: the tree.
forestry accelerator
Planting lots of trees sounds like a simple thing, but large-scale tree planting is a completely different type of project and requires a high degree of expertise and resources. Funding is a major bottleneck. Seeds of dozens of different species must be collected and prepared. Water must be available. Teams must be trained and ready to overcome unique challenges. And since forests are highly interdependent systems, all of them need to be solved comprehensively.
In 2022, my company Terraformation launched the Seed to Carbon Forest Accelerator, a program modeled after startup accelerators like Y Combinator. We provide comprehensive support to early-stage forestry teams and help investors access high-quality carbon credits. For over a year, we have launched three groups of forestry teams aimed at reforesting land in some of the world's most biodiverse and climate-critical regions, and soon… He plans to launch his fourth group. We take approximately 12 to 18 months from conception to carbon project registration, making it one of the fastest such projects. More to come.
Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time. The need to take meaningful action grows every year. We want to do work that our grandchildren and their children can be proud of. That's why at Terraformation, one of our company values is a daily reminder of why we do this work: “We are our ancestors.”
Yishan Wong is the founder and CEO of Terraformation, a global reforestation company.
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