Watch: Terraformation Hosts Global Climate Action Summit for Earth Day
Terraformation partnered with We Don’t Have Time to host a virtual Exponential Climate Action Summit for Earth Day. Featuring our CEO Yishan Wong, Chief of Growth Yee Lee, and Head of Seed Banking Dr. Marian Chau, alongside experts including Ivo Mulder of UNEP’s Climate Finance Unit, Kirsty Shaw of Botanic Gardens Conservation International, and Dr. Kate Hardwick of Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the event highlighted natural climate solutions for halving global emissions by 2030.
As Yishan noted in his opening remarks, forests are one of the most effective and scalable climate solutions today — because unlike other forms of carbon capture technology, trees begin to sequester carbon immediately. “What matters is solutions we can implement now,” he explained. Native, biodiverse forests are especially valuable because they can absorb more carbon than monoculture tree plantations.
Scaling our best climate solution
Yee highlighted the advantages of bringing Silicon Valley thinking to the climate crisis. “The world has a misconception about what Silicon Valley does,” he said. “They think Silicon Valley creates brand new ideas.” In reality, companies like Apple and Google have succeeded by figuring out how to scale technologies that already exist. That’s what Terraformation aims to do with forests.
Overcoming bottlenecks
To accelerate reforestation rapidly enough to reverse our climate crisis, Yee said, we’ll need to address several key bottlenecks:
- We need better access to capital for early-stage forestry projects, which are essential to solving climate change but grossly underfunded.
- We need exponentially more trained foresters to plant and grow healthy, biodiverse forests around the world.
- Most importantly, we need to overcome a global shortage of native seeds that threatens to derail ecosystem restoration efforts.
Starting with seeds
“Restoration of native forests is our brightest hope for reversing climate change, but it does face the major bottleneck of seed supply,” Marian noted. Many foresters around the world lack access to the seeds they need to plant the biodiverse, carbon-thirsty forests necessary to help solve climate change.
To address this obstacle, we're supporting communities by developing localized seed collection and storage solutions, including off-grid containerized seed banks. Equipped with solar panels, Terraformation’s seed banks allow foresters in the most remote locations to gather and store the seeds they need to grow native forests — and unlock the co-benefits of reforestation. Read more about how seed banking is a key component of natural climate solutions here.
