The NatureBacked Podcast

Making potatoes and other crops more resistant to climate change and growing them faster using gene-editing techniques is the challenge ClimateCrop is looking to solve over coming years, said Yehuda Borenstein, founder of ClimateCrop.“We have an opportunity to upgrade plants and give them more resilience without a lot of investment in capex which is quite rare when you fight climate. Usually, you fight climate with capex,” Borenstein said.For many listeners, this surely raises ethical concerns, but Borenstein said the company works outside the GMO sphere. “We are only cutting a certain area in the DNA. So we don’t introduce any foreign DNA,” Borenstein said.Learn more about: How to tweak photosynthesis  Which crops ClimateCrop can fix?  Which are the first in line?  In the NatureBacked podcast of Single.Earth, we are talking with investors and entrepreneurs about their vision of the new green world.Subscribe to the NatureBacked newsletter on LinkedIn. Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A trip to a refugee camp in Bangladesh led to a documentary and sowed the seeds for a material startup, which promises to cut plastics production costs and emissions using cellulose, said Alex Blum, founder of Applied Bioplastics.“What we’ve done by mixing cellulose with regular plastic in a way that is inexpensive to accomplish is that we’ve created a replacement for durable plastics that cost less than the original plastic while cutting the carbon footprint in half,” Blum said.Learn more about: Details of one of the weirdest founding stories Why is the adoption of bioplastics limited so far? How to scale material innovation globally fast  Should you be proud when you staff $3 a day? Applied Bioplastics team of 20 has so far raised $1.2 million and seeks to raise a further $1.24 million. You can check their campaign on Raise Green platform through this LINK.Blum’s “Blossoms From Ash” documentary about the Rohingya genocide won several awards and is available on Amazon.In the NatureBacked podcast of Single.Earth, we talk with our guests about their vision of the new green economy.Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

United Nations’ biodiversity summit COP15 finished with a historic deal earlier this week in Montreal. At NatureBacked, we discussed the essence of the agreement and how protecting biodiversity will become common.Nations agreed to protect 30% of the planet by 2030 and to protect vital ecosystems such as rainforests and wetlands and the rights of indigenous peoples. The Montreal Summit was seen as a last chance for nature’s biodiversity.“We have this global agreement that this is the thing - biodiversity needs to be protected. And action needs to be taken on this,” Merit Valdsalu, chief executive and co-founder of Estonian greentech startup Single.Earth, said in the podcast.“As a startup founder, it is now, I think, the craziest time where we can say that the United Nations just validated our utopian startup idea,” she said.Single.Earth is building a nature-backed currency of the future, minted from nature’s work in keeping our planet livable.The Montreal agreement can change the world for the better, said Katherine von Stackelberg, a scientist working at Harvard and Single.Earth.“Everyone agrees we want to be nature positive. Make disclosures mandatory piece; everyone’s moving in the right direction. But again, the devil is in the details,” said von Stackelberg.“There’s still this idea: we’re going to get nature into the economic system instead of thinking, how can we make the economic system more like nature? Because that’s not that difficult. If you’re going to be successful, you have to commit to something like a nature-backed currency. Nature is the only asset that has any value fundamentally and from which all else comes.”Von Stackelberg and Valdsalu said Single.Earth has the solution ready for turning the UN’s biodiversity targets into tangible actions.“The crazy utopian idea that we had - we have this, it’s working, we are creating a new currency based on nature; we have the first tokens dispersed, many tokens minted, it’s there, it can be used. It’s no longer about whether we are going to become nature-positive or net zero by 2030. We can do that today,” Valdsalu said.Subscribe to the NatureBacked newsletter on LinkedIn. Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are numerous opportunities for a revolution in the coffee industry, said guests at Naturebacked’s holiday-season coffee episode.We talked first with Josh Ziegelbaum from Miami-based private equity firm and asset manager Legacy Group, the key investor behind Green Coffee Company, the largest coffee producer in Colombia, which it built from the ground up starting in 2017.The Green Coffee Company is raising $100 million to expand its offering into roasting and distilling spirits from coffee waste.Learn more about: How to build a coffee unicorn in 10 years The opportunity to use the coffee industry leftovers How to change the industry’s social, and environmental standards Innovator’s dilemma in an old industry Later, we talked with Miroslav Kovac from Coffee Cloud in Croatia. He has turned the startup, which was born as a hardware company, into a data analytics firm for the coffee industry to reduce waste and slack from the process.“It’s not easy to go to the coffee virtually. In some countries, it’s not always takeaway coffee. Coffee is a social situation. Let’s say in the Balkans, where people are sitting and having coffee, it’s some kind of state of mind to sit and join the coffee for one or two hours and talk about everything,” Kovac said.In the NatureBacked podcast of Single.Earth, we talk with our guests about their vision of the new green economy.Advertisers in this episode:Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pressure from consumers will likely be the key driver pushing climate tech towards the mainstream over the coming years, said James Vincent, co-founder of brand advisory and investment firm FNDR.“We’re a few years off from that because we haven’t done the homework yet. We haven’t shock-absorbed the need for culture to absorb the new metrics of what’s important in the world,” Vincent said.James Vincent worked as a brand agency executive with Steve Jobs for 11 years through the launches of iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad, before launching FNDR in 2017.Learn more about: Essentials of starting your brand development Why do electric airplanes need fuel engines? Why a typical AirBNB review is so positive Why the iPhone is called iPhone At Slush 2022, FNDR launched its first investment fund, but Vincent stressed the company was not a VC firm.“We take founders through our processes to pull the genius out of the founder. So we think the founders often almost always have the genius somewhere, they’re just not quite saying it right, or they’re not segmenting it or sequencing it correctly,” Vincent said.In the NatureBacked podcast of Single.Earth, we talk with our guests about their vision of the new green economy.Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Surging growth in distributed energy production, driven by innovations in solar and battery technologies, is helping the energy sector to cope with climate change, said Tim Hade, COO and co-founder of Scale Microgrid Solutions.“We’re getting to the point right now where distributed energy is starting to displace coal and gas - that’s going to be sort of a choppy road over the next decade or two,” Hade said. “Our current energy infrastructure has way too many single points of failure. We need to figure out a way to make it more reliable and more resilient in the face of ever-changing climate catastrophes,” Hade said.“On-site solar generation and batteries can provide 80% of the facility’s power need today. And then figuring out the other 20% is where we spend a lot of engineering R&D time, trying to figure out how to get a zero or low-carbon solution.”Learn more about: Innovations unleashing distributed energy production Challenges of hydrogen distribution The continuing surge in distributed energy production in the U.S. Fast-evolving battery technologies “When you look at the ramp rate when it comes to battery technology, we’re accomplishing a lot of things in months that people thought would take decades,” Hade said.“We’re experimenting with all sorts of cool technologies in that space, different battery chemistries, and longer-duration storage, as well as alternative sustainable fuels like green hydrogen, is an example."In the NatureBacked podcast of Single.Earth, we talk with our guests about their vision of the new green economy.Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Industries have too often left the control over the end of the product lifecycle to individuals at a time when it could open many opportunities for the reuse of materials, said Joe Macleod, founder of andend, the world’s first customer-ending business. “There’s a massive gap at the end of the consumer lifecycle that holds circularity,” Macleod said.Learn more about: Solutions for better off-boarding experiences Concept of Death and the world’s largest graveyard Business opportunities around death When will Facebook have more dead customers than live ones Joe Macleod is the author of:Ends.: Why we overlook endings for humans, products, services and digital. And why we shouldn’tEndineering: Designing consumption lifecycles that end as well as they beginIn the NatureBacked podcast of Single.Earth, we talk with our guests about their vision of the new green economy.Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Climate investing and the climate, in general, is the biggest opportunity we’ve ever had, said Matt Ward from early-stage climate investment syndicate 4WARD.VC.“Either we pull it off and succeed or pretty much we all effing die and go to war, and the world goes to absolute s-h-i-t. So what would you rather bet on? Would you rather bet on humanity being creative, coming up with solutions, and doing the hard thing? Or would you rather bet against humanity?”“Will we stop climate change? No. Will we fight climate change and try to make the best of worlds that we can and still have something livable? Yes,” Ward said. “My goal with this is, I’m going to make as big of a dent as I can. Whether that is enough or not, I don’t know. But I’m going to aim towards it being enough and being positive on a climate from a world perspective.” In the NatureBacked podcast of Single.Earth, we talk with our guests about their vision of the new green economy.Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A universal basic dividend that would distribute some of the profits generated by corporates in industrialized countries to the citizens in low-income countries would be a step forward in the current troubled situation, said Anders Wijkman, Honorary President of the global think tank Club of Rome.“If you look at the world at large, we are moving in the wrong direction. Almost every possible environment indicator is pointing downwards, not upwards. So I’m not happy. I am quite pessimistic,” Wijkman said in the episode recorded at the GreenEST Summit in Tallinn.Learn more about: The Limits of Growth: looking back at the 1972 report What kind of carrots do European farmers need for change? How to change course for the world’s energy systems ”If you look at history, major transformations were always happening in the context of crises, wars, pandemics. We are not good at changing course, we are resistant to change as long as we think life is relatively good,” Wijkman said.Anders Wijkman is a former Member of the European Parliament, Assistant Secretary-General of the UN, and Policy Director of UNDP, among many other climate-linked tasks over his long career.In the NatureBacked podcast of Single.Earth, we talk with our guests about their vision of the new green economy.Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Action and information sharing are keys for fighting climate anxiety, said Itamar Weizman, the head of climate investments at Israeli investment firm Firstime who suffers from self-diagnosed climate anxiety. He said the five stages of climate anxiety are similar to the five stages of grief."A lot of people are stuck in denial, especially in America, right? People are just: I don’t want to hear about it. There is nothing going on. I can continue business as usual. Everything is fine. The world isn’t burning, the world isn’t dying, and the world isn’t crashing,” he said.“My goal is to bring as many people as I can through these stages to acceptance, so they can restart with action. If we don’t go through all of these stages, from denial to anger to bargaining, depression, and acceptance, we don’t go into action,” Weizman said.Learn more about: How to travel to COP27, and what to expect Language requirements for Firstime investments Beehero's unique insight into hives How First Airborne drones inspect wind farms autonomously Recommended documentaries:  David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet John Chester: The Biggest Little Farm In the NatureBacked podcast of Single.Earth, we talk with investors and entrepreneurs about their vision of the new green economy.Follow NatureBacked across platforms:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsTwitter | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices