Perspectives
Insights at the intersection of nature, capital and sustainability.
Written for sustainability leaders, frontline practitioners, and everyone working between the two. We publish primary-source digests and field-derived arguments — not commentary on other people's commentary.
-
The 39-Hectare Answer
A hydrology-first screen for mangrove restoration, published as an ordered test rather than a checklist — tidal connectivity at low water, inundation against a reference stand, dike-breach feasibility, propagule source, soil and sulfidic layer, upstream freshwater, competing tenure. The order is the design: the cheap test disqualifies the site before the expensive one is paid for. Almost no pre-investment process budgets for the walk.
-
Carbon Rights on Ancestral Domain
A community says yes, the MOA is signed and notarised, and a scan of the signature page reaches an investment committee. It is not carbon title, not authority to operate, and not registration. DENR Administrative Order 2026-05 read against IPRA, the 2012 FPIC guidelines and VCS v5.0 — the one-year feasibility clock, the fifty-year ceiling on a non-member’s participation, and what to diligence instead of the signature.
-
The Cost of Knowing
The stage before a project exists has no project to charge to, which is why nobody publishes what it costs. VCS v5.0 specifies the pre-start work in detail, sets a clock that begins at the crediting period start date, and says nothing about who finances the years before it. The six workstreams, what actually drives each one, and why consent is a calendar cost rather than a day rate.
-
The Polygon Problem
From 30 December 2026 the EU Deforestation Regulation applies to large and medium operators. It turns on plot-level geolocation, and the tooling for that is free. Filings will fail on what happened on the ground three harvests earlier — the definition of a plot that quietly imports the host country’s land law, an error taxonomy for farm polygons on land without title, and why the forest edge is the expensive metre.
-
The Crop-Switching Problem
Every forest carbon project on smallholder land carries an option it has not priced: the household can put the land to a different use on a price signal that arrives years before the first credit does. The risk tool asks the question and stops one step short. What to model instead of the baseline, why loss aversion rather than risk aversion is the binding parameter, and why maintenance is the leading indicator.
-
Nineteen Years With One Organisation
Permanence is audited as a carbon-stock question. What fails first is rarely the trees — it is the organisation that was meant to keep them standing. The variables that predict whether benefit-sharing actually arrives are institutional, observable only across a decade, and almost nothing in a standard pre-investment process is positioned to see them. A pricing question, not a values question.
-
SBTi Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0 — full digest
A plain-language walk through the whole standard: what it requires, what changed from V1, and where carbon credits, removals and durability actually land. Criteria references point to the exact clauses in the source. Published 11 June 2026; effective 1 February 2027, with validation opening Q1 2027 and V1 closing end-2027.
-
Restore first, procure later: the business case for pre-supply-chain sustainability
Most companies begin their sustainability strategy at procurement — and by then it is too late. Why investing upstream in feasibility, restoration and community engagement is what makes agricultural supply chains stable, resilient and traceable in a climate-stressed world.
Working through one of these questions?
We would rather have the conversation early than review the decision afterwards.