In Today’s Edition…

Welcome to 27 new readers learning about great things that are happening in social impact.

Each week, we cover a UN SDG: news, an exciting startup, and an influential thinker worth knowing.

Our focus is UN SDG 13: Climate Action:

• Current Events: 

  • US Debt bill may favor fossil fuels over renewables

  • Insurers start to turn a blind eye in California

  • Climate change threatens global food supply

  • El Niño increases risk of intense storms

  • Global warming and a cooling upper atmosphere

• UVWC: Nori

• Insights from: Cherry Swayne 

Without further ado, let’s take a SIP!

Current Events

• US Debt bill may favor fossil fuels over renewables: The US’s recent debt ceiling bill has a lesser-known impact on climate change: it created a process that greatly expedites the permit process for energy projects, like the Mountain Valley Pipeline, while not clearly posing any advantages to renewables. Read more here.

• Insurers start to turn a blind eye in California: Climate change, among other factors, has caused California’s #1 insurer State Farm to refuse new applications for property and casualty insurance. Other players in the space have acted similarly recently. Read more here.

• Climate change threatens global food supply: A new study warns that climate change-induced extreme heat waves and droughts could disrupt global food supply and lead to soaring prices. The main regions highlighted were the US Midwest and northeastern China. Read more here.

• El Niño increases risk of intense storms: Unprecedented storm conditions and rapidly intensifying storms caused by warm ocean temperatures in the Atlantic are more likely this year due to a strong El Niño. Read more here.

• Global warming and a cooling upper atmosphere: Impacts on satellites, ozone, and weather. Although we know climate change as “global warming”, the same greenhouse gases are actually resulting in a significant cooling of the upper atmosphere. The potential impacts include altering satellite capabilities and fluctuations in the ozone layer and weather patterns. Read more here.

UVWC: Nori

Below is Unlocking Venture Without Capital (UVWC), a series where I explore social impact startups highlighting their products, industry dynamics, and competition. You can read more about the inspiration here.

Please note that the views and opinions expressed in this post are solely mine, and I have not been sponsored or affiliated with the company in question nor do they represent the views of any employer with whom the author may be affiliated. By highlighting the market opportunity, product overview, and competitive landscape of each company, I hope to highlight exciting products, companies, and industries worth learning about.

📜 Overview

Nori is a carbon dioxide removal marketplace that compensates suppliers of regenerative agriculture practices for removing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They utilize their cryptocurrency, $NORI, as a tradable commodity that can be exchanged for Nori Carbon Removal Tonnes (NRTs), ensuring transparency and preventing double counting or fraud.

💻 Product Offering

Each NRT represents 1 ton of carbon dioxide stored. The process for creating them is as follows:

1. Suppliers register projects, provide historical data, and commit to annual reporting for carbon removal

2. Soil Metrics, a third-party carbon quantification tool, estimates carbon removal impact from regenerative practices

3. Nori then uses a rigorous verification process where they:

   1. Ensure reasonable data

   2. Provide proper carbon accounting

   3. Confirm the legality

4. Nori creates NRTs based on carbon removal estimates, one per tonne of CO2e removed and stored in soils for 10 years

5. Buyers purchase NRTs directly from suppliers in Nori's marketplace, with suppliers receiving the full price while Nori charges a 25% transaction fee to the buyer

The end product of this workflow is a marketplace filled with verified quantifiable credits available for purchase for carbon offsetting measures. These can be purchased direct or through a subscription service.

📈 Market Opportunity

TAM - ✅

Each NRT goes for $20 on the platform with an accompanying $5 marketplace fee. The National Academy of Sciences puts the number of tons of CO2 that can be sequestered annually in the US to 250M.

250M tons sequestered annually x $25/ton = $6.3B 

This yields a bottoms-up TAM of greater than $1B.

Industry CAGR - ✅

According to MarketWatch, the estimated CAGR of the global carbon credits market industry for the next 5 years is 30.01%, which exceeds NYU’s estimated total market CAGR over the next 5 years of ~14%.

Market structure - ✅

According to a report published by McKinsey, the carbon credits market industry is highly fragmented. This is due in part to questionable verification methods and the currently unsustainable unit economics of marketplace models.

🏁 Competitive Landscape

Shortlist of direct competitors

• eAgronom — software product offering greenhouse gas footprint analysis, machinery integration, satellite monitoring, and field visits for verifying crop rotation and soil coverage with user-friendly tools streamline planning, data entry, and mobile access

• Grassroots Carbon — connects ranchers with corporate carbon credit buyers to reward carbon storage by conducting soil sampling, offering education on land management practices, verifying and certifying carbon credits, and facilitating credit sales to buyers.

• ORMEX — blockchain-based digital platform assisting farmers in sequestering carbon in soil and receiving rewards in Europe and Africa

Competitive advantage

Nori’s extensive verification process and the rigor of its quantification gives its offering a greater sense of reliability and trustworthiness. In a fragmented and speculative industry like this, its focus on being a trusted brand is evident. Additionally, Nori’s clear and simple marketplace model could make it a leader in usability.

👋🏽 My Personal Take

• The carbon credits market industry winners may be those whom buyers feel they can trust, as speculative verification has been a major problem. Platforms like Nori that successfully integrate third-party verification could emerge as winners in trustworthiness.

• Although quantification may be a capital and time-intensive process, it will be interesting to see whether buyers feel comfortable purchasing from a platform removed from the estimation process like Nori.

• Many offerings are still focusing on niche audiences or target geographies. Marketplace and software models that can take in and aggregate multiple sources of input may be able to scale faster than existing single-point solutions.

Insights from: Cherry Swayne

⚠️ Key Takeaways

In order to navigate landing a product management role in climate, who better to hear advice from than someone with 14 years of recruiting experience in tech, and a proven track record for landing opportunities in climate over the past three years. Given her extensive knowledge of the unique challenges and opportunities within the field, Cherry Swayne possesses an unmatched perspective that can provide significant insights for those seeking to make a mark within this rapidly-evolving sector.

🛠️ Cherry’s role: Founder/CEO of Above & Beyond Recruitment, a tech recruiting firm focused on climate tech

💡Cherry’s best advice:

• Knowledge gaps don’t matter — you can fix them

• Forget about your carbon footprint, learn about your climate shadow

• Networking is your best friend, especially in climate

🔎 Looking ahead:

• How AI can make our applications more energy efficient

• Recent partnerships promoting diversity in climate tech

• New internship program matching interns from underrepresented backgrounds with climate companies

📜 Background

Cherry Swayne started her career studying modern languages at the University of Manchester — where she graduated from in 2008 — but found herself drawn to recruiting in the technology industry.

Recruiting jobs were everywhere. It seemed like a really great career for someone who didn’t know what they wanted to do.

While being a recruiter at Hays and DP Connect, two recruiting agencies based in the UK, she found her niche in recruiting for startups where she found the experience much more impactful and rewarding. While at DP Connect, she was able to understand people’s motivations in both hiring and recruiting for opportunities in technology.

Despite enjoying her specialization in financial technology spanning almost 14 years, she realized her heart wasn't in it and used the Japanese ikigai framework to intentionally transition to the climate space. She found that the climate tech industry was still a subdivision of the technology industry and that people were interested in accessing the software engineering and software market.

She is now the founder of Above & Beyond Recruitment — a recruiting firm helping companies in climate recruit talent to grow and tackle the world’s biggest climate problems.

🎙️ Highlights

🛠️ Cherry’s role:

As the founder of Above & Beyond Recruitment, Cherry has a broad range of responsibilities that she divides into four main facts:

• Running the business, including the day-to-day operations and the management of her team of three employees

• Business development, which involves identifying potential clients and companies that require funding

• Speaking with founders to gain insight into their challenges and ensure that her team is well-equipped to help their companies grow

• Preparing candidates for interviews and screens them to ensure they are a good fit for her clients

Aside from these core responsibilities, Cherry also places a strong emphasis on maintaining her presence and engaging with her communities both on social media and in person. She creates content that is designed to be engaging and impactful and is frequently active on platforms like LinkedIn. For in-person engagement, she is the Cambridge host for People, Planet, Pint, monthly gatherings to discuss what’s going on in the sustainability/climate space, and runs events for both job seekers and founders in her own personal network.

💡 What is Cherry’s best advice?

Knowledge gaps don’t matter — you can fix them

In Cherry’s experience, most candidates think that they don’t know enough about a problem to be applying to work for a specific job or company.

While it is important to put in the effort to get up to speed, she says that “people are not expecting you to know all the knowledge. It is usually sufficient enough to read up on the space and learn the facts [from what you can find] online.”

She recommends Zopeful as a great resource, a series of email-based learning courses that demystifies climate change. The best part? It’s totally free to sign up for.

Forget about your carbon footprint, learn about your climate shadow

I was first introduced to the concept of a “climate shadow” through my conversation with Cherry but after diving deeper into the concept after our chat, I believe it’s a concept that everyone should learn about.

Your climate shadow is the “sum of your life’s choices influence on the climate emergency”. It can be thought of in 3 parts:

• Consumption — lifestyle expectations and “carbon footprint” which most of us already know about

• Choices — big picture decisions you make to design the environment you live in and the people you’re surrounded by

• Attention — how much focus you give to acting on the climate crisis

As Emma Pattee, a prominent climate journalist, points out in her article where she introduces the term “climate shadow”, the original concept of the carbon footprint was introduced by BP, a massive oil-producing industry polluter. By drawing attention to our carbon footprint, we fail to consider how the sum total of our actions affects the environment and recognize larger, more intentional changes we can make. I highly recommend reading the article as it definitely gave me lots to think about.

Networking is your best friend, especially in climate

Networking is not a new piece of advice by any means, but it is revealing how central it has been to Cherry’s decade-long career in recruiting. Cherry recognizes that there are so many subdivisions in climate that there will most times be a subsector that people are especially passionate about. This is where she believes networking is important.

“[Networking] allows you to be more intentional about your efforts and time.”

To get started, she recommends reaching out to the guests of different podcasts, newsletters (cough cough), and publications. They are fresh off of presenting their point of view and look forward to chatting with people who were interested in what they had to say.

🔎 Looking Ahead

Looking ahead, Cherry is interested in:

1. Exploring how AI can help systems run more efficiently and reduce energy usage for our software-enabled solutions

Read more here and here.

2. Promoting diversity and inclusion in the climate tech industry, and has recently partnered with MotherTree, ColorInTech, and BBStem to further this goal

Read more about MotherTree, ColorInTech, and BBStem.

3. Launching a new internship program matching talent from underrepresented groups with climate companies, landing them their first opportunity in the climate space

‼️ Learn More

If you are interested in climate tech, recruiting for product, or would like to learn more about Cherry Swayne, please reach out to Cherry on LinkedIn. For those interested in Above & Beyond Recruitment, you can read more about it here.