October, 2023.

We’ve spent the past four hours riding on horseback through the rugged, beautiful landscapes of Antioquia, Colombia. I’m stiff in the saddle, a bit out of practice - but distracted by the breathtaking scenes before me.

My hosts from NatureRe — a group that’s restoring nature across the region to fight climate change and reverse biodiversity loss — have led us to an area where they've recently applied their methods. In a matter of months, a landscape yellowed from decades of degradation is turning green again.

I can see it. The land is starting to heal.

In 2014, NatureRe launched a pilot project in Colombia's Chocó region to test an idea: by applying techniques of Assisted Natural Regeneration (ANR) — planting native species at various densities, weeding, excluding grazing animals, fencing boundaries, controlling invasive grasses — lands that have been abandoned or badly degraded might be restored.

Regrowth and rewilding on this land, they believed, could usher in a return of natural ecosystems and native biodiversity. (Colombia was chosen in part because it hosts close to 10% of the planet’s biodiversity.) Crucially, restoring nature here and reviving that biodiversity could also remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere.

And it worked:

The pilot was a major success, and provided the spark that has led to a major expansion of NatureRe’s Colombian operations. The goal is audacious: restoring thousands of hectares and removing millions of tonnes of CO2 from the air.

Now it’s 2023, and I’m on site to evaluate this larger project for possible inclusion in our portfolio. These site visits are a critical part of our comprehensive due diligence process. I’ll be assessing and reporting on project design and methodology, initial ANR results, expansion plans, baseline calculations, monitoring and risk mitigation strategies, among many other critical indicators of quality.

Fundamentally, I want to determine how this project fares against our exacting standards, in particular across our three core impact pillars: climate, environment, and community.

NatureRe’s approach is to identify pasture lands that have been degraded by decades of cattle ranching, but exhibit enough soil health and clusters of secondary forest to enable ANR and allow for ecosystem connectivity. Due to the duration and degree to which the land has been degraded, it is not enough to simply relocate the cattle; tree seedlings require a helping hand to overcome the non-native grasses that have spread across the region. This is demonstrated by reference plots that have been left idle for years, but exhibit only grasses and shrubs for vegetation.

Essentially, ANR is a way to enable natural regrowth processes. It starts by removing what stops nature from restoring itself — invasive species, regular field burns, improper use of agrochemicals, traditional forms of cattle ranching — then it lets nature do most of the work. Light-touch human interventions are added to help the regeneration of native forests: targeted plantings, fire protection, weeding, fencing. The result is a biodiverse, multilayered vegetative cover that enhances habitat quality for local wildlife and improves ecosystem services.

It’s one of the most efficient nature-based solutions to mitigate climate change and restore biodiversity. And it’s scalable, with climate financing potentially allowing larger and more remote areas to be restored more quickly. NatureRe’s vision is to acquire enough lands in proximity to begin connecting the properties to create an intact biodiversity corridor. The benefit of purchasing the land is that it guarantees its permanent protection. Further, the ultimate goal is to register the project areas as a natural reserve.

One active restoration area I visit was planted in May 2023, and the implementation team is in the process of weeding the areas around the seedlings, pruning them, and replacing any that haven’t survived.

It’s profound to look at these little seedlings, each one individually tagged (physically with a label and digitally via geo-reference software), and ponder their awesome potential. Tropical forests are among the most affordable and scalable nature-based solutions available to us. There exists an immense capacity for large-scale carbon removal and storage here by removing pressures on remnant forests and conducting strategic planting to drive new growth.

The mix of native tree species to be planted is determined by carefully weighing various characteristics, like growth rates that help shade-out invasive weeds, provision of fruits for fauna that in turn disperse seeds farther afield, or durability in the face of drought or fire. As nature works her magic, this approach can deliver a vibrant ecosystem that eventually sequesters more than 400 tonnes of CO2e per hectare. At that rate, this first project instance could remove over a million tonnes of carbon over its 40 year crediting period.

Squinting as we ride from canopy shade to tropical sunlight, I think how this is just the beginning of something much bigger. With millions of hectares of land suitable for restoration in the region, there’s a huge opportunity for greater investment into nature within Colombia through the NatureRe model.

With the tree growth comes a mosaic of habitats and natural resources, allowing a wider range of native species to return and flourish.

Along the trail we visit some of the 21 monitoring stations NatureRe has installed to see how many species of fauna are reemerging. These strategically placed camera traps help us see how these areas are getting greener, and furrier.

(I wonder if this place might also be a good candidate for bioacoustic monitoring. Something to chat about with my colleagues back home.)

I consider other potential environmental benefits: improved water quality, enhanced climate resilience against drought, reduction of soil runoff from integrated water and soil conservation, reduced fire threats to existing forests through prevention tactics.

From a social standpoint, I learn how the project is providing local jobs for activities like planting and monitoring. We also discuss opportunities to invest in local nursery infrastructure to create more employment opportunities, in particular for women, and to better engage the local community.

NatureRe actively consults with local stakeholders to shape the project design and refine operations, integrating the interests of the broader community into the project. They organize workshops with locals to better understand needs and priorities, and give local communities access to information at every stage of the project’s development.

At lunch, while unwrapping the banana-leaf packaging of our tamales, we find ourselves in agreement on a key point: for a project like this to succeed, it is critical that the project prioritize local capacity-building, knowledge-sharing, and raising awareness of the benefits that sustainable forest management and biodiversity protection can bring.

As our truck bumps along the road back to Medellin, I’m reeling from it all: what I’ve seen, the people I’ve met, the bold plans and big ideas about what this type of project could mean for our planet — its plants, its animals, its climate, its future … and ours.

July, 2024.

As unforgettably reassuring as my Antioquia visit was, it represents just one part of our evaluation process — alongside detailed research and information-gathering from publicly available sources, independent third-party assessments, comprehensive proprietary screening tools, and geospatial data analysis.

We were thorough. We were diligent. And everything pointed us toward one conclusion: we’re in.