I am excited to play a part — together with communities — in developing landscape conservation and restoration projects that use sustainable funding mechanisms such as carbon credits to generate meaningful impact for people and the ecosystems they protect and depend on.
I’ve been fortunate to work with conservation organisations in a variety of roles. I started out focused on operations, but the onset of COVID-19 created an unexpected opportunity: I shifted to leading the development of carbon projects as a way to help fill the funding gap left by the collapse of tourism and donor flows. One of my first lessons was that at its heart, a carbon project is a nature conservation or restoration project — carbon credits are simply a sustainable financing mechanism to support it.
Most recently, I led the development of a landscape restoration project spanning both private and community conservancies in Northern Kenya, financed through carbon credits. This gave me the chance to work closely with two pastoral communities and to learn that, in the context of community-owned land, a carbon project can only succeed if it reflects the needs, aspirations, and values of the people who depend on that landscape.
Although imperfect, I believe nature-based carbon projects can offer sustainable, long-term funding for both conservation and the communities who care for these ecosystems — while also prompting carbon buyers to think more critically about their environmental impact.
I’m interested in helping improve the credibility, transparency, and impact of carbon and nature-based funding mechanisms — whether carbon credits, biodiversity credits, or payments for ecosystem services. I’m particularly excited to see how these can be applied across very different social and ecological contexts. And — at the risk of sounding sanctimonious — I’ll be reminding myself to listen more than I talk, and to ask questions rather than assume I have the answers.