Bionic Planet: Reversing Climate Change by Restoring Nature

The first week of year-end climate talks have wrapped up in Katowice, Poland, where natural climate solutions are finally getting the attention they deserve -- both in negotiations and on the sides. Everyone, it seems, agrees that we need to improve the way we manage our forests, farms, and fields -- which can get us more than a third of the way to meeting the Paris Agreement targets -- but how do you make that happen?

We speak with Chris Meyer of the Environmental Defense Fund, Josefina Brana of WWF, Jason Funk of Carbon 180, Peter Graham of Climate Advisors, and David Burns of the National Wildlife Federation.

Samuel Avaala shakes his head as he dips his fork into a bowl of red-red, a traditional Ghanaian stew that gets its color – and name – in part from red palm oil.

"It doesn't make sense," he says. "Oil palm evolved here. It's in our food; it's in our medicine; but we built an economy on cocoa with little attention to oil palm."

Oil palm is the tree that gives us palm oil, and the people of Western and Central Africa have been cultivating it for millennia – harvesting and processing the fruit for vitamin-rich oil, used in food and soap, tapping the trunks for palm wine that is distilled into medicinal alcohol, and using the biomass for green power generation. Over the past half-century, the rest of the world has discovered palm oil, too, and today it's a $60 billion-per-year market that provides material for everything from fuels to food to face paint.

But that money isn't flowing into Western and Central Africa.

Instead, thanks to a fluke of history, it's flowing into Indonesia and Malaysia, which produce more than 80 percent of the world's palm oil, while the dominant cash crop in palm oil's birthplace, is cacao – a tree that evolved thousands of miles away, in the Amazon forest, where the Incas used it to make cocoa.

It's all part of an inadvertent crop swap that began when a Ghanaian agronomist named Tetteh Quarshie brought cacao beans home with him in the 19th Century, just as Dutch and British traders were bringing African palm trees to South East Asia and migrants from Spain, Portugal, and Japan were bringing Ethiopian coffee and Asian soy to the Amazon. Today, 66 percent of the world's cocoa comes from Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, while Southeast Asia dominates in palm oil, and the Amazon region produces massive amounts of soy and beef.

These lucrative crops have been a double-edged sword, bringing economic wealth to some, economic devastation to others, and environmental degradation to all. Indonesia, for example, lost more than 10 million hectares of forest in just the past 30 years as oil palm plantations spread, becoming the world's fifth-largest (and sometimes third-largest) emitter of greenhouse gasses, and Côte d'Ivoire has lost 80 percent of its forest in roughly the same period to cacao.

Now Indonesian and Malaysian palm oil companies are expanding into Africa, and many environmentalists are worried that could accelerate deforestation if natural vegetation is cleared to plant oil palm.

Avaala, however, says it doesn't have to be that way.

Ilson López is the President of Belgium.

Not the European country, but the indigenous village in the district of Tahuamanu, in the Peruvian state of Madre de Dios, at the western edge of the Amazon forest. He's part of the Yine people, who are scattered from here all the way to Cusco, the capital of the old Incan empire, about 500 kilometers to the southwest. The village gets its name from the alleged homeland of a rubber trader named Justo Bezada, who began working with the people of Belgium – or "Bélgica" in Spanish – in the early 1900s.

Rubber tapping suited them, says López, because it provided a way to earn cash income for schools, food, and health care without destroying the forest.

"Back in the day, we'd roll it into a big ball, which traders would take on a plane to Lima," he says. "But that business started slowing down in the 1970s, and we've been struggling ever since."

As the rubber trade dried up, the people of Bélgica grudgingly turned to logging – sparingly at first, but more and more as roads came, bringing logging trucks and loggers seeking lucrative cedar and mahogany.

In 2002, the people of Bélgica won demarcation of their territory, and with it the legal right to earn income from its products. They divided the territory into zones for commercial activities like rubber tapping and ecotourism, as well as pure conservation areas for traditional hunting and fishing. But logging was something they struggled with – morally and logistically.

"We didn't have any capacity to do the extraction right," says Lopez. "So at first we operated in the black market – basically just letting loggers into the territory and getting paid for it – but the local authorities came to us and said, 'You're not doing this right.' And that's when we learned about certification."

Specifically, certification under the Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC. You know those little labels you see on cabinets and tables and on boxes of paper?

Environmental NGOs like WWF created the Forest Stewardship Council in 1993, together with some forward-thinking timber companies, after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro failed to deliver a real global compact. The idea was to create some sort of standard for sustainably-harvested timber to at least give the good guys a boost.

It's based on ten principles that stakeholders agreed would make it possible to extract valuable trees without destroying the forest, as well as auditing procedures to make sure the practices were being followed, and then labeling, so consumers would know the difference – and, hopefully pay extra for the good stuff.

At this was happening, indigenous people all across the Amazon were creating so-called Life Plans, or Planes de Vida, which are something like indigenous constitutions.

"The Life Plan is a document, or an exercise, that sets out our vision of where we want to go and helps us understand how to get there," says Lopez. "FSC certification became one of the pillars of our Life Plan, because it was a way that we could improve productivity while saving the forest. We also included rubber tapping and conservation."

It helps that Bélgica is located in the district of Tahuamanu, which is something of a sustainability success story, thanks in part to the Cardozo family. Three brothers and a sister, their parents settled here in the 1950s and become major landowners and political leaders, as well as proponents of sustainable development.

Alfonso Cardozo is the mayor of Iñapari, the district capital, and he lobbied to prioritize granting of concessions for groups that embrace FSC certification.

It was he and his brother, Abraham, who persuaded the people of Bélgica to join FSC, and it was one of their companies that helped the Bélgicans create and execute the sustainable logging plan needed to earn FSC certification. That meant meeting the FSC's ten principles – ranging from hiring comuneros, or members of the community, to meeting ever-evolving standards for good land management and equitable community relations.

Lopez, however, says the Cardozos charged too much for their services, so the Bélgica ruling council switched to a second company, and then a third. Today, says Lopez, the people of Bélgica get 80 percent of the income on timber sold from the territory, and the current partner, a company called MADERYJA, has never missed a payment or been late.

Seventy percent of Peru's certified concessions are located in Tahuamanu, and the neighboring concession of Maderacre, in which the Cardozos also held an interest, is also FSC-certified – and more accessible by jeep than Bélgica's.

It spreads out over 220,000 hectares, divided into 20 plots of 11,000 hectares each, and the company works just one plot per year, so there are 20 years between harvests. The concession was cobbled together by a businessman named Erasmo Wong, who made a fortune building up Peru's largest chain of supermarkets before selling the company and devoting his life to philanthropy and sustainable agriculture.

Environmental NGO WWF has been working with Maderacre to monitor the impact of its operations on wildlife, and Josefina Braña, who runs WWF's Forest and Climate Program, says the early indications are promising.

"The jaguar population is thriving, and we've seen monkeys, tapirs, birds, agouti, ant-eaters, and sloths," she says. "Biodiversity is thriving because of the reduced-impact logging they use."

The company uses drones to first identify valuable trees, then it sends out teams to survey the area from the ground.

"We use drones to identify the trees that are tall and thick enough to chop," says Fermin Zapana Pilco, who oversees all extractive activities in the concession. "Then we map out routes to them, and finally we send out teams to see if the tree we want to chop will hurt other trees when it falls."

The trees and patches of forest are separated into different categories: some are classified as high-conservation value (HCV), which is an official designation developed by the Forest Stewardship Council in 1999, meaning they're not to be destroyed.

"Some will also just be immature," says Pilco. "That means they're too small to harvest, so we leave these for when we return to this plot in 20 years."

If there are seedlings or high-conservation trees near a tree they're targeting, they map out a way to cut the tree so it falls where no seedlings or high-conservation trees are, but if that's not possible, they make a note of that and move on to the next tree.

"It costs us about 35 percent more to do FSC certification, as opposed to just doing what the law requires," says Kroll. "But the market doesn't really pay a premium – or, if it does, it's 5 percent at most.

We come to a massive mahogany that's passed all the criteria: it's about 70 years old, two meters in diameter – six and a half meters around, but wider at the base, and 30 meters, or about 10 stories, high. It branches out about 18 meters up, so only the first six stories can be used for wood.

Put another way, it's 40 tons of biomass, which means 20 tons of carbon, which will become 73 tons of carbon dioxide if the tree burns or decays and mixes with oxygen in the air. That's 14-times as much greenhouse gas as the average passenger car emits in a whole year of driving.

About 40 percent of the tree will end up in flooring and furniture, which locks up 30 tons of that carbon dioxide, but what about the other 44 tons? That's almost nine cars' worth.

"Some of it will be used as biofuel for our ovens," says Nelson Kroll, Madeacre's forestry manager. "We use those to dry out the trees, but we're also working on a deal with a local farm, which wants to use it for mulch and compost."

That's good for the climate, because healthy soils absorb carbon, as well as nitrogen and hydrogen, and they reduce levels of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane, three powerful greenhouse gasses. A landmark study published in 2016 showed that we can get 37 percent of the way to meeting the Paris Agreement's 2-degree target just by improving the way we manage forests, farms, and fields.

That study, called "Natural Climate Solutions" identified 20 specific pathways do doing that – one of which is sustainable forest management, which is what FSC is all about, and another of which is improving soils. These natural climate solutions deliver more than one-third of the mitigation needed to meet the climate challenge, but they get just 3 percent of dedicated climate finance and 1 percent of climate-related media coverage.

The tree spreads out at the base, like a duck's foot, and the worker injects his saw into the base vertically, straight up and down, building kind of a wall of wood on three sides of the foot, so these 40 tons will fall where he wants them to.

After it lands, workers begin chopping in and marking it with alphanumeric codes to identify the tree according to the forest inventory, the section of the tree, the date it was chopped, and of course the concession.

The concession began marking the trees to meet FSC traceability requirements, but traceability has become a legal requirement, too, because the European Union and the United States have both banned the import of illegally-harvested timber. As a result, exporters are supposed to trace their timber to legally-sanctioned concessions. That doesn't, however, always happen.

A 2014 analysis by Ecosystem Marketplace publisher Forest Trends, for example, dissected tropical deforestation from 2001 through 2012 and found that roughly 49 percent of all agriculture-related tropical deforestation in that period took place illegally, and roughly half of that illegally-harvested timber was exported.

That same year, a global coalition of governments, corporations, NGOs, and Indigenous Peoples' organizations endorsed the New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF), which is a pledge to end forest loss by 2030. The NYDF is broken into ten goals, with #10 being improved forest governance.

Today, a coalition of environmental think tanks called NYDF Assessment Partners, of which Forest Trends is a member, published updated findings on progress towards Goal #10 and found that not much has changed.

Specifically, the report, called "Improving Governance to Protect Forests", finds that law enforcement has improved slightly since 2014, especially on the demand side, and that traceability has also improved, but that average deforestation rates increased 42 percent since the NYDF was signed.

Countries like Peru, which has a sketchy history on this front, are trying to protect exports by improving enforcement – although the effectiveness of that is limited, too, because countries like China don't put much effort into verifying legality of imports.

"There can be no effective global approach without the support and participation of China, the world's largest importer of timber and exporter of forest products," says Kerstin Canby, Director of the Forest Trends Forest Policy, Trade, and Finance Initiative.

"We are, however, seeing some improvement in enforcement of the European Union Timber Regulation," she added. "By mid-2018, for example, EU Member States have implemented 17,735 checks on domestic timber, and they implemented 2,704 checks on imported timber in 2017, while more than 992 penalties have been assessed, and 21 cases went to court."

If every forestry concession on the planet worked the way these two do, we'd have a fighting chance of meeting the climate challenge, but the district of Tahuamanu is an outlier, with a government willing to promote sustainable forestry and a citizenry willing to embrace it.

In this episode, we speak with the Reverend Dr. Gerald Durley, who says climate change and civil rights are inexorably intertwined, and not just because the destruction of our living ecosystems is robbing us of our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Born in Kansas and raised in California, Rev Durley finished high-school in Oregon and then marched with Martin Luther King Jr while earning his first of may academic degrees -- this one in psychology at Tennessee State. While there, Bobby Kennedy noticed him and persuaded Durley to join the Peace Corp, which he did. That brought him to Nigeria, then to Switzerland before coming home to the United States and becoming a central figure in Atlanta's Civil Rights scene.

He says we can tap the same forces that galvanized the Civil Rights movement to fix the climate mess, but only if we recognize its inherently moral nature.

In this episode, we speak with the Reverend Dr. Gerald Durley, who says climate change and civil rights are inexorably intertwined, and not just because the destruction of our living ecosystems is robbing us of our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Born in Kansas and raised in California, Rev Durley finished high-school in Oregon and then marched with Martin Luther King Jr while earning his first of may academic degrees -- this one in psychology at Tennessee State. While there, Bobby Kennedy noticed him and persuaded Durley to join the Peace Corp, which he did. That brought him to Nigeria, then to Switzerland before coming home to the United States and becoming a central figure in Atlanta's Civil Rights scene.

He says we can tap the same forces that galvanized the Civil Rights movement to fix the climate mess, but only if we recognize its inherently moral nature.

When countries around the world ratified the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016, they pledged to prevent average global temperatures from rising to a level more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels.

They picked that number because 2 degrees Celsius is the point at which climate models start going haywire, but they also asked the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, to review all of the available research and tell us what we'd have to do to keep that rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the point at which feedback loops like melting tundras and increased water vapor make the 2-degree increase all but inevitable.

Scientists from around the world spent the last two years reviewing over 6,000 scientific papers and mapping out different pathways to the 1.5-degree target -- from paths that focus primarily on reducing energy demand to those that focus primarily on expanding carbon sinks that pull greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere.

One of those carbon sinks is the one that I cover on Bionic Planet -- namely, natural climate solutions that work by improving the way we manage our forests, farms and fields.

The other is next-generation carbon capture and storage, involving new technologies that either don't yet exist or exist but cost a fortune to deploy.

On Monday, the IPCC released its report, and the upshot is that we can meet the 1.5-degree target by deploying a blend of these strategies, but it basically requires us to overhaul the industrial and agricultural economies.

Simple, right?

Actually, a lot of it is simple, but it's not easy to implement, because our economy puts more value on fast cars and cheap beef than on clean air or a stable climate. But the report does identify a mechanism for getting beyond that, and it's a mechanism we've covered before: namely, making companies pay for the damages their greenhouse gasses cause -- or, as we say colloquially, "putting a price on carbon".

But how much damage does a ton of carbon dioxide cause, and can we put a number on it?

These are the questions an economist named William Nordhaus spent his life addressing, through economic modeling, first on a desktop computer, and then with more and more sophistication.

n Monday, within hours of the IPCC issuing its report, the Royal Bank of Sweden announced that it was awarding the Nobel Prize for Economics to Nordhaus and another economist, Paul Romer, who focused on the economics of investing in education and in our collective future.

To honor Nordhaus, I'm re-posting parts of two early episodes featuring environmental economist Gernot Wagner, who documented Nordhaus's quest to quantify the social cost of carbon in his 2015 book "Climate Shock".

Hindou Ibrahim grew up in rural Chad, a member of the nomadic Mbororo people. Today, she co-chairs the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change, and she advises -- some would say cajoles -- everyone from major corporations like Asia Pulp and Paper to small indigenous communities from Ecuador to Indonesia to take action on climate change.

This is the fifth in a five-part series. You can find the first installment here.

US Environmental Protection Agency boss Scott Pruitt is gone – not because of his environmental malfeasance, but because his $43,000 phone booth, his $100,000 trip to Disneyland, and his attempts to get his wife a lucrative job were too tacky even for an administration built on bling.

His replacement, Andrew Wheeler, is less embarrassing but more dangerous. A coal lobbyist until last year, Wheeler is also a long-time adviser to climate-science denier James Inhofe and a sure bet to continue Pruitt's policies – albeit with more stealth and fewer attention-grabbing abuses of power.

Pruitt's departure comes just one week after Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his own retirement from the US Supreme Court, and those two departures have overshadowed the publication of a document that Pruitt and Army Public Works boss Ricky James dropped on us last Friday – a document that mentions Kennedy 64 times and illustrates as well as anything the underhanded way Pruitt subverts environmental protections: not through argumentation, but through sabotage in the name of regulatory certainty (and just in time for summer break).

It's a document that will show up on the Federal Register any day now, and that you and any member of the public will then have 30 days to comment on, but which you'll only understand if you know a bit of history, and that's by design. It's part of an effort to torpedo a Supreme Court opinion that Kennedy penned in 2006 – an opinion that builds on decades of precedent and practice, and that provides the foundation for the 2015 Waters of the United States (WOTUS) Rule (also known as the "Clean Water Rule"), which sets the ground rules for determining which of the waters of the United States are protected by the Clean Water Act (CWA).

If Wheeler and James can rescind that rule, they'll manage to undermine the popular Clean Water Act without the voting public knowing until it's too late, and last week's document is part of their effort to do just that.

Specifically, it's a supplemental notice to the Trump Administration's year-old proposal to repeal the WOTUS rule and instead "recodify" the mess that predated it in accordance with an opinion written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia – an opinion mostly ignored by courts and practitioners, for reasons we covered in earlier installments of this series.

Scalia, as we saw in part three, believed the CWA should only protect "relatively permanent, standing or flowing bodies of water" – basically, lakes rivers, and streams, but not the wetlands or creeks that feed them, and not waterbodies that only flow intermittently.

The repeal would leave 80 percent of US waterways unprotected by federal authorities, and it's one part of a multi-pronged attack on WOTUS that includes a two-year delay on its implementation and a more insidious order to ignore the local scientists and specialists who review dredging permits and instead "involve the Administrator's Office early on in the process of developing geographic determinations" – a move that Kyla Bennett, director of science policy for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) described as "a crude Clean Water Act coup d'état."

"This latest move by Pruitt is his Plan B as it is becoming increasingly clear that his Clean Water rewrite plan is illegal and will be tossed out in court," she said.

In this, the fifth, final, and long-overdue installment in a five-part series on the Clean Water Rule, we try to offer a clear and simple explanation of the state of WOTUS in the current administration. You can see the first installment here.

More on the Bionic Planet Podcast

The story continues below, but I'll also be editing audio from the interviews I conducted with Shrader and others for this series into episode 32 of the Bionic Planet podcast, which which I hope to have ready over the weekend. You can access Bionic Planet via iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, and pretty much anywhere you access podcasts, as well as on this device here:

Timeline

The story continues below, but here is a timeline to help you keep key dates in order:

• June 19, 2006: The Supreme Court's Rapanos v United States split decision introduces massive uncertainty over what are and are not protected waters, sparking hundreds of court cases and demands for clarity. Over time, Justice Kennedy's "significant nexus" guidance becomes the rule of the land.
• August 27, 2015: As the Obama Administration prepares to implement the WOTUS Rule, a district court in North Dakota issues a preliminary injunction against the rule until arguments can be heard, essentially freezing the rule in 13 states.
• October 9, 2015: The Sixth Circuit Court issues a nationwide stay, which the Obama Administration begins to fight before the 2016 elections sweep Donald Trump into office.
• February 28, 2017: Donald Trump signs an executive order instructing the EPA to scrap the WOTUS rule and "consider interpreting the term 'navigable waters'…in a manner consistent with the opinion of Justice Antonin Scalia."
• July 27, 2017: Pruitt and acting Army Civil Works boss Douglas Lamont publish their proposal to rescind the 2015 WOTUS Rule – a move that cannot be challenged in court until the rule becomes official.
• January 22, 2018: The Supreme Court rules that challenges to the WOTUS rule must be filed in district courts, forcing the Sixth Circuit Court to vacate its nationwide stay but leaving the North Dakota injunction intact.
• February 6, 2018: With the Sixth Circuit Court's stay vacated, Pruitt and Lamont implement an "applicability date" two years in the future – namely, in February, 2020 – sparking an immediate court challenge.
• March 30, 2018: EPA boss Scott Pruitt directs the agency to ignore local experts and defer instead to his own office when issuing permits.
• June 29, 2018: Pruitt and James issue a supplemental notice to the earlier proposal. The new notice summarizes existing court challenges and argues that their existence introduces more uncertainty than existed before the rule was created.
• July 5, 2018: Scott Pruitt resigns, and former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler is named his replacement.

New Notice, Old Arguments

Last week's supplemental notice will soon be listed in the Federal Register, after which the public has 30 days to comment on it. Some organizations, like the American Farm Bureau, a longstanding WOTUS opponent, have welcomed the notice.

"The issuance of this additional notice shows that EPA listened to public comments that showed confusion over what was being proposed and why," they said in a statement. "This supplemental notice will provide a more meaningful opportunity for public comment by clarifying that EPA's proposal is to permanently repeal the 2015 WOTUS rule because that rule was illegal in multiple respects."

Beyond clarifying the position, however, the notice does little to bolster the Administration's claim that the existing rule should be repealed before the agency can "recodify" the mess that the rule was created to fix. After finding that the previous regime was riddled with uncertainty, the agency has a duty to explain why it must repeal the whole rule rather than leaving the rule in place while working to correct whatever problems the agency claims to have found in the rule.

"It's ironic that they claim they're doing this to provide certainty, considering the fact that before 2015 there was a world of very little certainty," says Bethany Davis-Noll, Litigation Director at New York University's Institute for Policy Integrity. "Getting rid of the 2015 rule doesn't reduce regulatory uncertainty; it creates regulatory uncertainty."

In addition, the administration has yet to explain how returning to the confusing regime in place before the 2015 rule complies with the Clean Water Act or how the agency is justified in imposing forgone wetlands benefits on the public.

"Without that explanation, this could be a pretty good lawsuit for anybody who wants to challenge the agency," says Davis-Noll

That is, in fact, a pillar of the suit currently underway to block the delayed implementation of the rule.

The Lack of Analysis or Reason

This series began back in February, when 11 states sued to block the delay in implementing the WOTUS rule, based in part on their contention that the new applicability date was pulled out of thin air while going through the motions of scientific review and public consultation as required by the Administrative Procedures Act.

A key argument is that the Trump Administration ignored the existing cost/benefit analysis and failed to conduct one of its own. Columbia University Assistant Professor Jeffrey Shrader says the Trump Administration not only overstates the costs of implementing the rule, but ignores the benefits of scenic beauty, resilient agricultural systems, and income from mitigation banking.

"They left out any benefit from mitigation or protection of wetlands," says Shrader, who co-wrote an analysis called "Muddying the Waters: How the Trump administration is obscuring the value of wetlands protection from the Clean Water Rule".

Specifically, he points out, the administration simply ignored all wetland benefit studies published between 1986 and 2000 on the premise that their age makes them untrustworthy, but the administration also took its own cost analysis from the same period – despite the fact that more recent studies focused on coastal wetlands show that valuation benefits have increased since then. At the same time, the rise of mitigation banking has both reduced the cost of compliance and created income for people who restore degraded landscapes.

The End of the Restoration Economy?

Proponents of the repeal argue that states will pick up the slack, but current laws evolved because upstream cities and states had little inclination to do that.

"About half of the states have laws on the books that say they cannot implement stricter protection for wetlands than the federal government, and those are the states where the largest at-risk wetlands are located," says David Groves, a former policy advisor to the Obama Administration who now works as Director of Business Development at The Earth Partners, an environmental consultancy.

"The vast majority of economic activity in the mitigation banking industry is in the southeast, which is made up of states with no state-level protections," he adds. "Significantly reducing the scope of the Clean Water Act would present an existential threat to the mitigation banking industry and would destroy a huge amount of value."

The result, he says, would be more taxpayer spending overall, but the costs would flow to downstream states.

Jos Cozijnsen shakes his tangled black mane and adjusts his leathery blue suit – fashioned, it turns out, from overalls discarded by German railroad workers and available through his sustainable clothing company, Goodfibrations.

"[If you have] an office park, the Building Act says how much energy efficiency you need," he explains. "But if you go to zero energy use, you do much more."

When it comes to fixing the climate mess, he wants everyone to do much more than the law requires, especially his fellow Dutchmen. Indeed, it seems to bother him immensely that here in the Netherlands – the birthplace of wind energy and the headquarters of Greenpeace – the average Dutchman contributes far more to climate change than does the average Swede, Swiss, or Frenchman.

But the Dutch are also notorious penny-pinchers with fervent pride in their local communities and a deep love of games and puzzles – three traits that he thinks will help them drive emissions down dramatically under a nationwide voluntary carbon program called the Green Deal, which he's spearheading along with the Ministry of Environment and several environmental NGOs.

The program has been in the works since mid-2016, and it's slated to go live later this year as a compliment to the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS).

EU ETS is a "compliance" program that legally caps greenhouse-gas emissions on some of Europe's biggest industries – including electricity, paper, and steelmaking. It requires companies in those sectors to either reduce their emissions or buy offsets from projects that do, but it also leaves more than half of all emissions outside the regulatory apparatus.

The Green Deal is a "voluntary" program, he says, and its goal is to dramatically drive down emissions in un-capped sectors like agriculture and automotive, and to do so by encouraging people to develop carbon projects under existing standards like the Verified Carbon Standard, CarbonFix, and the Gold Standard. The project will encourage un-capped companies and individuals to first reduce emissions by reducing energy use and becoming more efficient, but it will couple that by promoting home-grown projects that generate offsets by planting trees or helping farmers reduce their emissions from methane and other greenhouse gasses. It will include a hub so people can see which type of projects are located where, and it will encourage groups to aim for zero net emissions.

"That's the fun," he says. "I can go to zero!"

Like coupon-collectors? I ask.

"Exactly!" he says.

While Cozijnsen publicly emphasizes the "fun" aspect of getting to zero (and becoming, he says, a "carbon hero"), the Green Deal could drive millions into sustainable development projects, and it comes two years after a Dutch court ruled that the government is legally obligated to slash emissions 25 percent before the Paris Climate Agreement comes into effect in 2020.

Cozijnsen, who long represented the Netherlands in global climate talks, sees the Green Deal as a way for the government to meet its pre-2020 obligation, and for companies to prepare for a post-2020 regime, when all sectors will presumably be capped.

Dutch companies and NGOs are already active in both the voluntary and compliance markets. They transact millions of carbon offsets per year, but that money usually goes abroad – to save and restore forests around the world, according to an analysis of European voluntary carbon markets that Ecosystem Marketplace and EcoStar Natual Talents published last year.

Specifically, the report found, companies and NGOs based in the Netherlands transacted 4.4 million carbon offsets in 2015 alone, helping to build wind farms and save or restore forests across nine countries – from Indonesia and Brazil to Turkey and Uganda.

One country missing from the list: the Netherlands itself, and it's not alone. The report also found no active land-based projects in France, Spain, or Switzerland, and only a few in Germany, the UK, and Italy.

The German Ministry of Environment has been supporting efforts to develop voluntary carbon programs domestically, and Cozijnsen says similar efforts are underway across the European Union.