Can Forests Save Us? How Tech and Trees Are Scaling Carbon Removal in Europe

How do we scale nature-based carbon removal without greenwashing or over-promising? That’s exactly what I explore in this episode with Lisett Luik, co-founder of Arbonics.

We all know forests are powerful carbon sinks. But turning that into credible, measurable climate action is harder than it sounds. Lisett shares how Arbonics is using satellite data, digital twins, and over 50 layers of land analysis to help landowners across Europe grow new forests or manage existing ones for long-term carbon storage, without defaulting to clear-cutting or monoculture plantations.

We discuss the difference between planting trees and restoring ecosystems, how continuous cover forestry can deliver carbon and timber, and why Europe’s underused farmland holds massive potential for afforestation. Lisett also tackles the big issue of trust in carbon markets - explaining how dynamic baselines, data transparency, and strong EU regulations are helping improve the integrity of nature-based carbon credits.

If you work in sustainability, forestry, or carbon markets, or you just want to understand the real role of nature-based solutions alongside tech like direct air capture, this episode is for you.

Listen now to learn how technology and nature can work together to deliver scalable, high-quality carbon removal.

Find out more at https://arbonics.com, and connect with Lisett on Bluesky here.

Sign up to Climate Confident+ for deep dive analysis of the major climate and energy stories of the day.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

0:03

I like to refer to trees as the original direct air capture machine, right. Refined through, I think it's about 370 million years of natural engineering, making them super effective. It's quite hard to replicate this in a lab, on a short timeline. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode 220 of the Climate Confident Podcast, the go-to show for best practices in climate emission reductions and removals. I'm your host, Tom Raftery, and if you haven't already, be sure to follow the podcast in your podcast app at choice so you never miss an episode. Before we get going, a huge thank you to this podcast's, incredible supporters. Your backing keeps this podcast going and I truly appreciate each and every one of you. If you'd like to join our community, you can support the show for as little as three euros or dollars, which is less than the cost of a cup of coffee. You just click the support link in the show notes or visit tinyurl.com/climate pod. Now you know how people say we need more trees to fight climate change. Well, today's guest is actually doing something about it and not in some vague plant a tree kind of way. Lisett Luik is building what she calls the new forest economy, helping landowners across Europe turn empty or underused land into thriving forests that pull carbon out of the air and pay the landowners to do it. More importantly, she's not doing it with clipboards and gut feeling, she's using data, satellite imagery, and digital twins to make forest carbon projects more transparent, measurable, and trustworthy. If you've ever wondered whether nature-based carbon removal is really a serious solution, or just another feel good headline, stick around. This conversation might change how you think about forests, carbon markets, and the real potential of nature and tech working together. Before we get into that, in the coming weeks, I'll be speaking to Brian Parks, who's head of Innovation Acceleration for Zespri. We'll be talking about their Zag Fund. Angel Hsu, Professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and we'll be talking about generative AI net zero tools. Sangeeta Waldron, author of What Will Your Legacy Be and Ciaran Flanagan, who is the global head of Siemens Data Center Solutions, so some excellent episodes coming up. But as I mentioned, my guest today is Lisett. Lisett,. Welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. Thank you for having me, Tom. So my name is Lisett. I'm the co founder of Arbonics. Arbonics is using data and technology to help bridge the gap between landowners who want to do more to store carbon in their forests and companies who want to support forests to compensate for their CO2 footprint. We can talk more about how exactly that works later. Okay. Superb. And why? As in, give me a little bit of the backstory to Arbonics. You're one of the co founders. So, what made you decide to set up a forestry data company? Absolutely. I think the first thing that put me on this path, which I didn't get to choose is being born in Estonia. So I am Estonian. Estonians, I have heard us described as forest loving pagans. Half of our country is covered in forest. And, you know, in central Europe, when fairy tales, bad things happen in the forest. Hansel and Gretel go to the forest and the witch eats them. In Estonia, forests are where you go for safety and for peace. So that's the first thing is, you know, a love of forest kind of runs in my blood. But then more practically, I was working in investments and investing in forest land, which is also where I met my now co founder. And in the process, we discovered that if you are a forest owner with a strong climate focus, You don't, didn't really have a lot of options on the table because the primary way to get money out of your forest is through cutting it down and selling the timber which might not be what you want to do if you want to protect the natural environment. And so we built Arbonics to solve this problem that we initially had ourselves as investors and landowners in the investment firm we were working in, which was how do I bring more of the other value forests provide? So timber is one layer, then you have carbon, you have biodiversity. How do I bring those other layers of value into the investment equation to drive more what I would call positive behavior or more sort of nature positive behavior, where the answer isn't always just cut the whole thing down. Nice. And what would you say has surprised you most in your journey to where you are today? So my own background is, I guess, quite common for a startup founder, not so common for a forester. You know, I used to work in financial services and then other startups. And so I didn't probably know that much about the actual business of forestry management. And I had perhaps bought a little bit too much into I don't know propaganda is the right word but you often get a lot of press that makes it seem as if forest owners and people who are into environmental protection are necessarily on the opposing sides. That they have opposing interests and they, you know, are due to fight. And one of the biggest surprises I had once we started working with landowners is they care about nature immensely. They're there day in day out, you know, planting trees by hand, measuring trees by hand, assessing the aftermath of wildfires or pest attacks. They truly care about nature and they kind of get a bad rep of like, you know, these are the people with the, with the source that just want to cut everything down. So that was the biggest surprise is actually, I think landowners and forest owners can be big allies in the climate fight rather than someone we need to set ourselves in opposition to. Okay. And you said half of Estonia is forested. So, Is there room for more forestry in Estonia? Are you going beyond the borders of Estonia? You know, talk to me a little bit about what your ultimate aims are and why, if it's already half forested? Yeah. So more broadly for Arbonics, our entire target ultimate target is all of Europe. And we think actually across Europe, there's about 14 million hectares of land that's currently underutilised. So maybe low quality or abandoned farmland or pasture land. And the reason why is historically, if you think, you know, Europe went through a massive population growth in the sort of 17th, 18th centuries, and a lot of land was deforested and converted into farmland to feed the population. Since then, we've learned a lot about how to make farming a lot more efficient. So per hectare yields are significantly up and a lot of the marginal land just doesn't make sense to farm anymore and actually would be serving better as forest. And the same story, but on a smaller scale is very much true in Estonia, not to mention that Estonia and some of the other countries in our initial target, which is all of the Baltics and Scandinavia have some of the lowest population densities. So we have, here in Estonia, we have about the same amount of land as the Netherlands, but less than 10 times fewer people. So we have a ton of empty land per person, and some of that could really be turned into forests. And you're working with landowners who already have forests or who have land, which could be turned into forestry or both? Both. So we started out with empty land and converting that into new forests, which is called afforestation. And I specifically say converting into new forest, planting forest rather than just planting trees. I think there's a difference. The forest is a full ecosystem, and it's more than just sticking a bunch of saplings in the ground. That was our first solution. And then, we have now existed as a company for three years. And as we spoke to more and more landowners, we were realising there is also a need for existing forest land. So often the main solution there is complete clear cut when trees reach harvestable maturity. But actually there are forest management styles such as continuous cover forestry, which basically just means you, you cut some of the trees and leave the others going, which will then naturally regenerate. And those have a lot of benefits in terms of carbon storage and protecting biodiversity and still enable you to bring out timber. And so now we have a second solution aimed at existing forests which we call impact forestry. And impact forestry is all about where suitable, moving forest away from clear cutting towards the selective harvesting with a goal of increasing carbon storage while still maintaining some timber. Because obviously you could also go the path of just say we never cut anything again, just conserve everything. And we don't think that's necessarily good path either because timber is actually a very, you know, carbon positive material continues to store carbon. So you want to have timber because if you don't you're replacing it with materials with a much bigger footprint like steel, concrete. So we do want to maintain timber production. We just want to do it in a sort of way that continues carbon storage and protects biodiversity if possible to do at the same time and impact forestry is about doing those two things at the same time. Nice. And for the land owners, how do they get paid? If you want to, to put it crudely. I think that's a very good question. That's the sort of starting point that I was describing, right? That they had a problem. Their only way of getting paid was harvesting. So we use carbon credits in the voluntary carbon markets which kind of help the landowners out. So if you're traditional kind of cashflow, if you think as a forest owner for a, if you plant a new forest, your cashflow looks like this. You're one and two and three, you have an initial negative cashflow planting, maintenance, making sure that young forest survives. Then you have decades where nothing, maybe you have an occasional thinning, but not really any income. And then at the end, you have a massive payday. But with carbon credits, you can bring some of the income earlier. It's much smaller amounts, but it's annual. And then therefore makes that final payday much less relevant. And the same for this impact forestry, where you used to have just one giant harvest. And then you'd have the replanting costs. Now you have a bunch of small harvests supplemented by carbon credits for that extra storage you're doing. So that's how our landowners earn money is they, we generate carbon credits for them. The majority of which goes to the landowners. Okay. You also mentioned biodiversity. So are farmers able to be paid for increasing biodiversity? And if so, how? How is that measured and how are they paid for it? Yeah. So this is the big challenge in the market is that there are a variety of frameworks out there, but there isn't really agreement on precisely how should we be measuring biodiversity and how do you value, you know, one species here in, boreal Finland versus another species in temperate Germany. Are they equally valued? Are they different? So there isn't really a good answer for that. Today, our focus is on making sure that everything we do is biodiversity neutral or positive. So we, we know what things are damaging. For example, having really like single species, large plantations of single species, that's quite damaging. So you don't want to do that. You want to encourage mixed species, natural regeneration, understory plants like bushes and berries and things coming in. So we do that, but we don't yet have a good way of quantifying that. We're working on that. We have an internal team working on, you know, all the available frameworks and figuring out what makes sense. But I think we're really looking for some. This is maybe where regulation or a kind of standard, a global standard, would be really handy so everyone can get behind. Hey, this is the way we all measure it. And then we can start to quantify it. I'm a big believer in, you know, what gets measured gets done. So if we measure it adequately, we can make sure that biodiversity is prioritised. But we're not quite there yet on a global level of everyone saying, like, this is the one right way to do it. And carbon credits have a bit of a reputational issue. So, how do you assure people that the carbon that your landowners are sucking out of the air, is actually being sucked out of the air? Yeah, I mean, that's another huge reason for why we wanted to do this, coming with a tech background and a sort of data forward view and the way we wanted to do it in Europe. So there's two ways that we do it. One is we, so historically carbon credits issued have really suffered from problems where the baseline is just sort of calculated in an Excel somewhere. And it's based on a lot of assumptions and you can query the assumptions and maybe the baselines are too negative. This is something that the Guardian had identified around tropical avoided deforestation projects particularly. But that is in many ways a data issue, right? Because it was all based on models and assumptions, but now we actually have the technology to just do it based on real world. And so in our projects, we're using the newest standard, which uses something called the dynamic baseline. And basically what that means is rather than trying to guess what would have happened in another scenario, we actually use a control set of land plots. And we measure the difference between them in the real world. So that's one way, and we use that throughout our sort of project generation. So everything from assessing whether land is eligible, we do it in a very data driven way, making sure that we filtering out land where it's not suitable to plant, whether, for example, if it's really high quality soil, that's better for farming, not suitable, or if it's anything with like wetland conditions, you shouldn't be planting trees, which will dry that up and actually release carbon from the soil. So we do a lot of like database land analysis, and we've taken what used to be, I don't know, weeks of emailing Excel back and forth and somebody going on site and kind of doing a guestimate by holding their finger to the wind. Now we're just doing this by aggregate all this data, running it through our internal digital twin and being able to spit out a report. So I think that's one way where we're getting rid of some of those historical issues where you were never able to have transparency into what actually was measured. And then I mentioned that we're in Europe for a reason. So I think the second challenge is regulatory. For a lot of voluntary carbon market, it's in the name, right? It's voluntary. And so there wasn't necessarily any enforcement happening but by choosing to do forest projects in Europe, where there's very strong forestry regulation, and it's pretty strongly enforced as well, we have this extra layer of protection. So for example, if you convert land in Brazil into a forest land, the next president comes in, you have no guarantee that it won't get turned into a giant parking lot or a palm oil plantation. In Europe, once you've converted land, empty land into forest. It's quite hard to deforest it. And the law is pretty strict on this. Again, varies country by country, but we do like legal analysis on a country based level. So those are the two ways. Like we use really data to create more of that transparency, which I think will drive trust. And then we use regulation to further support what we're doing. Which I think both should give the buyer more abilities to trust the credits because it's not just what we say. It's what's actually out there happening. Sure. I grew up in Ireland and, I distinctly remember the Irish forestry, Irish national forestry organization called Coillte. And they were encouraging farmers to plant forests. But what tended to happen was they were planting things like Sitka spruce, grows very quickly but is non native and it's monoculture. You mentioned that you're encouraging your landowners to plant forests as opposed to trees and you made that distinct, you made that distinction of between forests and trees. So talk to me a little bit more about that, about are they planting a variety of trees? What kind of trees are they? Are they old growth trees? Are they, you know, what are they? Yeah. Walk me through that. Mm hmm so yeah, it differs based on the afforestation and and impact forestry, right old growth for example, it's on the impact forestry side. On the afforestation side it's always only native species. No non natives. It's strongly encouraging a mix. There are multiple ways to achieve a mix. It doesn't always mean planting a mixture. For example, if you plant spruce under suitable conditions, you will have birch naturally come and regenerate in between because the two of them work really well in combination with each other. One way in which we really drive landowners towards trying to like plant the right thing in the right place, which is the key to having a successful forest, is we use quite detailed soil analysis. So we break the plots when we're doing this pre planting analysis, we break the plots down to this little five by meters hexagons and for each of those we know what the soil type is and then we run through different scenarios to see what tree would do best on that one. And so often we give them a recommendation where on their parcel we'll say in this corner we recommend pine. Here you should do birch, here you should do spruce. And all of those are native species. There is a limitation, like we would love to do more species. The bottleneck here is the availability of saplings for things that are non commercial. So, you know, we'd love to do more oak and broadleaf in general, but it's very hard to access saplings. And so the best way to go about that, in the absence of sort of that sapling supply chain catching up is to combine planting and natural regeneration. And that basically means that you do your planting and then as you maintain it, you don't go and try and kill the other trees and cut them down, but you let them come even if it's lower quality, like maybe alder because it will make the forest more diverse and therefore more resilient. And then on the impact forestry side, you know, you mentioned old growth forests. And that, that is a key thing for us, which is there are old growth forests out there that are in line to be clear cut. And we really believe shouldn't be. Some of them should just be conserved. You know, that's a, that's a whole different storyline. Some of that should be done on a governmental level, but there's a bunch that are commercial for us today. If we can take some of them, the ones that are best suited for switching from clear cutting to selective harvesting, that is what you're trying to achieve. You're trying to keep some of these really old trees growing so that they can naturally regenerate. If they've made it to that age, they're probably quite resilient. So you want their DNA to spread further. You know, you want lots of little saplings growing up around them with the same sort of strength. So, so there are things that you can do. But yeah, I'd say, you know, some good things to highlight here is there are challenges around the types of saplings that are available. And I really hope we're going to come along in the next couple of years. And that will probably one of the things where, I don't know if it's outside Arbonics or, but more broadly, the industry will start growing more different types of saplings and maybe even we can talk about ones that are more resilient to pests or drought, and challenges like that. And, forests have been quietly doing carbon removal for millions of years long before humans figured out how to profit from it. Why are we only now really turning to them as a kind of a core climate solution? Yeah. Good question. I mean, absolutely true. I like to refer to trees as the original direct air capture machine, right. Refined through, I think it's about 370 million years of natural engineering, making them super effective. It's quite hard to replicate this in a lab, on a short timeline. Absolutely. Nature is a huge part of the carbon cycle more broadly. And I always like to quote these numbers out of an Oxford study, which was looking at carbon removal, which is that currently annually, there's roughly 2 gigatons of carbon removal happening around the planet. So that's 2 billion tons. Of that 99.98 % is done by nature. That's forests, oceans, soils, wetlands, and then the remaining 0.02% is other human ways, you know, whether that's direct air capture or biochar or enhanced weathering. So tiny, tiny proportion. The majority is still done by nature. And I don't know why it's taking them so long to realise. I think maybe we've been taking it for granted. We just assumed it would always be there. But, obviously humans have this tendency of, we need more stuff. We need more space. We need more food. We need more material which we often then turn to nature to take it from there. And we kind of forget that it was maybe already serving a purpose. And in a way, I think that's quite natural and it's very hard to stop. And it's very hard to argue with someone who says, you know, I have to feed my kids. Like, what do you mean? I can't cut down this forest to make farmland. But if you give them the right incentives. When that is not the only choice they face, then I think we can ensure that every plot of land is being used in the most efficient way. And some land should be forest land, some land should be farm land, some land should be empty so that we can build housing for humans, right? We need to live somewhere. There is no one right answer. It's more about how do we get really granular and figure out the right path for each particular plot of land based on what we know about the conditions and the soil and everything, the location, et cetera. Okay. And, I mean, you mentioned incentives. Are there financial instruments or incentives for farmers who are planting forests so that they don't have to wait until year 20 or year 30 to get that big payday? I know in some places you can borrow against future earnings. That kind of thing. Is there anything like that there for landowners? So this varies hugely by country. You mentioned Ireland. Ireland is actually an interesting case study. Ireland had one of the, I think it dropped to like one of the lowest levels of forestation in all of Europe. I think it, at its lowest was it 9%. Less, I think but it's a historical thing where the country was pillaged essentially by the colonisers and the people there had to cut down any kind of forestry at all to make any kind of living on the land. But that's, that's a whole other conversation. Absolutely. But you know, that kind of perfectly illustrates that this isn't a binary black and white story, right? This isn't like forest cutting bad. There were very good and very valid reasons why the Irish needed to feed themselves and they needed fields for to grow food. But that meant that the Irish government has had a massive push for reforestation. So for example, they actually do have subsidies for planting and there is obviously a level at which if you have a subsidy, then the voluntary credits are no longer additional because if the subsidy is high enough, you would just do it for the subsidy. You don't really need the credits on top of it to make you decide to plant. And that is one of the things that goes into the calculations that we do as well. It's called financial additionality, and it's really taking into account these criteria. And it also partially comes out in, I talked earlier about using a baseline to compare. So we're really seeing our effect by comparing to other similar plots that are not in a carbon project and in places where you have a bunch of other financing methods, whether it's subsidies or something else, the difference between those two would be very low and so no credits would be issued. So that's one way in which additionality is enforced in the voluntary carbon markets. In terms of other access to funding. Yeah, absolutely. There are loans. For example, we even partner here in the Baltics with Swedbank on providing forest landowners with the money to help them pay for that initial planting because sometimes that's a barrier that they just don't have even that liquidity for that initial planting, even if they will get carbon credits in a few years. So definitely important that they have those tools available to them as well. And things like nature based carbon removal, sometimes seen as a soft option compared to big, sexy industrial projects like direct air capture. What's the reality? Where where do nature based removal projects excel and where do they struggle? Yeah, I think that's a great question. I personally, I often see this dichotomy, you know, people putting those two in opposition to one another. I don't really get why at all. I think they're actually perfectly complimentary. So a lot of technology based carbon removal is still fairly in the early days in terms of technological advancement. The total volumes are still relatively low. You know, something like direct air capture, I think we're talking in the tens of thousands of tons being done in a year, versus we need billions of tons. And even in the best case scenario, if we can scale that sector to one gigaton, Which would be about an 86,000 x growth. I think from 2023 numbers. I haven't compared to 2024. So maybe it's a slightly, but it's still a huge lift. That's still, that's one gigaton and we need our total carbon removals to go from this two gigatons to like 10 plus to get to net zero on a planetary level. And I just don't see where the rest of that will come if it's, if it doesn't come from nature, because, yeah, there are limits to scaling up DAC. The limits are the availability of suitable green energy in a way that you're not taking energy away from other uses that are decarbonising the economy. The space to build plants, like a lot of this is quite capital intensive, the money needed for that. So it's just really hard to see how we can scale that even faster and even more. Already this one gigaton by 2050 feels like a strong goal. And the rest has to come from somewhere. And I think that's where nature based steps in. And one argument that's often used against nature based is, look, it doesn't last as long, right? How long is your average tree growing? 50 years? 100 years, if we're lucky, if there's no fires. And to me, the point is like, yeah, absolutely true. In an ideal world, we would do all of this thousand year carbon removal. But we're not in an ideal world. We know we can't do all of it with a thousand years. And our most immediate pressing problems are in the next 50 to 100 years, right? So in a way, if we can kick the can down the road a little bit more, buy ourselves a couple more decades, to come up with new technologies that either remove existing carbon out of the air, or remove new emissions much faster than currently projected. If we can buy ourselves that time, that is already a great win. And nature is good for that. Not to mention provides a bunch of other co benefits, you know, whether it's water purification that forests can serve, air purification, even local climatic impacts. You can see this in cities, right? Areas with trees are much cooler than areas without trees because trees basically operate as a little AC unit. And on a larger scale, the exact same effect happens. And so it helps reduce droughts and kind of avoid desertification and things like that. So lots and lots of co benefits. And the bigger counterargument is the durability, but to me that just says we shouldn't be counting only on nature. We should 100% still be investing on technology based removal and pushing the thinking there, pushing the science, trying to make that cheaper, faster to scale, using less energy, etc. But in the meantime, we have this amazing tool in nature. Why not take advantage of it to the maximum that we can? That's, that's how I think about it, at least. No, fair enough. Tech companies obviously like talking about scaling solutions, however, nature based solutions are limited by land and biology. What does scale actually look like for afforestation and improved forestry management? Yeah. So absolutely you cannot make trees grow faster by throwing more servers behind them. Like you can, purely software based solutions, right? So I think what scale looks like is just really catalyzing action faster. So for us, it means I mentioned earlier, we think there's 14 million hectares across Europe. That's quite significant if we can get those covered in the next couple of years, next five years, 10 years, even versus whatever the rate of natural regeneration or natural afforestation would be, which is much slower. That is already a big jump. And the way to do that is to try and use technology to speed up all the parts that are not the literal tree growing. So it's assessing the land for eligibility. Once it's planted, doing all the measurement and monitoring, which, you know, we use satellite imagery, LIDAR, et cetera. So that's the part where you can apply scale. But yeah, the literal saplings themselves, they will, grow at their own speed. Although I would say there's some cool stuff out there. I don't know if you've ever heard of Living Carbon. It's a US company that's genetically modifying trees to store more carbon and grow faster. I think a lot of people might get scared and kind of imagine Day Of The Triffids, but they're doing this in a quite safeguarded way. And I know they're planting their trees in, in Georgia and Alabama, I believe. So there are people also working on that. At Arbonics, we are not. We're still going with the plain old school, regular trees, but I do think scaling means taking away all the other barriers around it so that those trees get in the ground as early as possible and have the longest possible time to grow. And it also means trying to do things like model and predict what the growing conditions might be in 50 years so that we can plant already thinking of the tomorrow. The trees that do well today may not thrive in 50 years in a drier, hotter environment or whatever the local changes, but we can use data and technology to predict that on a more granular level and therefore hopefully avoid losing some of them through you know, if we were to do it in a non forward thinking way. And what does Europe look like when that 14 million hectares are afforested? Greener, hopefully. I guess you're asking what's the next step after that? Mm hmm. I mean, the next step and something we do have to work on in parallel is protecting the existing old growth forests we have, right? And that's where impact forestry comes in, but, but more broadly, even outside of our specific solution. The other thing we need to do is make sure that our existing forests. We have this very careful equation to balance, which is our need for timber and our need to keep the forests growing. And this is an equation we will keep balancing over the coming decades, because again, I don't think there's a scenario in which we just stop using timber. I mean, we could, but we would end up with increasing our emissions, not reducing them. So that is a challenge. And again, we can use data and technology to figure out what forests we really need to protect. Maybe there are some places where, where we essentially say, look, this here is like a tree farm. There's not a particularly biodiverse area. We're just going to focus on getting as much timber cycling through on this particular plots as we can, because that timber is going into long term usage. And this land was not a very valuable forest in the first place. And we need some timber for the market. Here on this plot we're going to keep doing that. Whereas here where we have an old growth forest with a very biodiverse environment around it. This we protect at whatever costs and the cost might be doing some very commercially intensive forestry over here. And I think it's, it's the nuance of those different assessments and calculations. And that gets hard to boil down, especially to people outside of the forestry sector who like to say, like, how about we just say, just stop harvesting or, you know. But it's not, it's never that simple, right? Unfortunately, that's the thing with everything in climate. It's never as simple as the newspaper headline blurb would like to make it seem. Sure. And on your company website, you talk about joyfully data backed solutions. Can you explain what that means and how technology like digital twins that you mentioned and remote sensing can actually increase trust in carbon removal? Yeah, absolutely. So first, the Joyfully Data backed comes from, I don't know if you are familiar with the work of Hans Rosling, the Swedish Yes, yes, yes. I met him a couple of times. Lovely guy. Oh, amazing. I never had the honor of meeting him, but I find his work incredibly inspiring. And so he is the, he is the person we have in mind with that value for, for us as a team, which is really that we believe that data can change the world for better. And it can be a joy to work with it. So that's where it came from. But in practice, really, this is the same idea. Okay, so historically, forest assessments are done in a very analog way. So if you're trying to measure forest growth, oftentimes what happens is your forest assessor identifies some sample plots, drives there, gets out of his car, you know, goes in the middle, picks a spot, stands, and then counts the trees in the circle around him in a certain diameter, and then measures them at eye height, and then plugs all those numbers into this equation that basically tells him this is how much biomass is on this square hectare. So if that sounds like a pretty 19th century way of doing things, that's because it is. It hasn't really changed massively but at the same time we have had these incredible advances in technology, you know, things like LIDAR, things that every iPhone now comes equipped with, with tools that you can use to do on the ground measurement in a much more accurate way, or the way that satellite imagery has gone from a granularity of like 30 metres, to 30 centimeters where you can start to count individual trees. So those are all like we really want to revolutionise the way we do that forest measurement so that we have a higher confidence in the final numbers, but also so that it isn't so, resource and labor intensive. Part of the reason why a lot of forestry is just based on assessments is because it's immensely resource intensive to send someone around doing all these measurements in by hand, right? If you think of the CO2 footprint of that guy driving around alone in his truck in all these remote places, that alone is kind of a disaster. But we have this technology, we can do it much better. And so a big part of what we're building in our internal tool, which we refer to as trunk, like the trunk of a tree, is along those principles. So how do we bring all that data in? How do we take out the measurement uncertainty, some of the analogness of it. It's not perfectly solved, solved yet. There's still, you know, something like soil, carbon in forests, for example, is a, is a big challenge. And we're exploring to see how, you know, what's the cutting edge of science on this one so that we can figure out if there's anything we can bring on board. It is still really hard, but there's already things we can do much better than, than they've been done historically. Yeah, and that's what our digital twin is all about, like really trying to build up this data based view of the same forest so you can make really good decisions without having to go. On site in person necessarily. And there's been a significant pushback on climate in the last six months, probably since the US election. You're building a climate company in 2025, you know, what keeps you optimistic when others are unfortunately retreating? Yeah, great question. I think especially the last six weeks have felt quite intense and changed, you know, the macro situation is changing daily. I think two things one is i'm a big believer that humankind is advanced enough that we can have more than one focus So, you know, even though everyone's saying for example that defense is the new focus and as an estonian 100% agree defense is important geopolitics is important But again, I am, I am a big believer in humankind is pretty capable and that we can have more than one thing on our plate at the same time. We can focus on climate, and on disease eradication, and on reducing poverty in parallel. We don't have to pick and choose. So that's one thing is I think we sort of, we have to, someone has to do the work. I want to be candid. It definitely is harder now. Like it is way harder to raise money for companies in this space. Investors are worried. They tend to focus on whatever is the topic du jour that gets the attention, which tends to be AI recently. And now it's AI and defense. If we can combine the two, I think we're on to a real winner. But I think the answer is, you know, what it is for most entrepreneurs, which is you just kind of have to keep going. So much of entrepreneurship is sort of being kicked on a daily basis and you still get back up. Maybe that's too pessimistic, but that's one way to think about it. On the optimistic side, I do still see a lot of interest. Like, yes, maybe the US on the governmental level is stepping back from climate and banning the mention of climate change in their internal documents. But then you can see the private sector stepping up, right? I think Michael Bloomberg promising to back the US's Paris Agreement commitments personally is, is a good example of that. Like, there are cases where people and organisations with money who care and who are willing to put their money where their mouth is. I think that hasn't changed overnight. So yeah, we, we have to keep going in the meantime, Sure, sure. For, listeners who maybe own land or work in sustainability, what's the most important step they can take today to ensure forests play a bigger role in fighting climate change? If you own land, I think just go out into your forest every once in a while and appreciate it and be grateful for the role it's it's playing, I think. Not to mention has great, great mental and health benefits, spending time in forests But I think for anyone who works in sustainability, I think just being able to, to be open and, you know, not zeroing in on like, what is the one solution? The one solution is technology based carbon removal, or the one solution is electrifying everything, or the one solution is modular nuclear, whatever else might be your particular pet idea. I think it's just maintaining that broadness of perspective that actually we need a lot of different solutions. Nature is a key one, but it is not the silver bullet. I'm not saying only do this. I'm saying absolutely do everything you can and just keep it in mind that I think it's a very valid. Part of the puzzle. It deserves respect in that role. Yeah, I think that's the main idea. Okay. Left field question. If you could have any person or character, alive or dead, real or fictional, as a spokesperson for afforestation, who would it be and why? Oh, Winnie the Pooh. I feel like Winnie the Pooh had a real appreciation for the hundred acre wood. So I feel like he can, he can really, you know, sell the benefits to all ages, all, I feel like in language that speaks to everyone. Yeah. Him or Groot, but the problem with Groot is, his vocabulary is quite limited, no? Yeah. Yeah, I'm sorry if you needed a more serious answer, but I can think of a more serious one as well. no, no. It's fine. That's fine. That's fine. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now, Lisett, is there any question I didn't ask that you wish I did or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to think about? No, I think we've covered it quite well. I mean, obviously this is one of my favorite topics. I could keep going on for hours, but I think I want to spare everyone else from that. I think the one interesting area we didn't get into is, you know, what's happening with the voluntary market and regulation in the future. And there's a lot there and there's a lot of mixed signals, but I do believe we're eventually going to get to a point where what solves the trust issue in the voluntary carbon markets is more standardisation and regulation, and it's kind of already happening in Europe or going to happen. So I think that is a big piece of the puzzle. Sort of to one of your earlier questions. But yeah, I think we, we can't, we don't have time to go into in depth there. But for anyone that's interested, I would look up the European Carbon Removal Certification Framework, and how that might impact the space. Lisett if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them? So you can find out more about Arbonics on our website. Just arbonics. com. That's like Arbo, like Latin for tree. Or you can reach out to me via email. Lizette at arbonics. com or on BlueSky. Where I like to have good debates about nature based solutions. Fantastic. I'll put those links in the show notes as well, Lisett, so everyone has access to them. Cool. Lisett thanks a million for coming on the podcast today. Thank you for having me, Tom. Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.