foreign I'm speaking with James tansy CEO of climatex a carbon credit project developer based in Vancouver hello James hello hi great great to have you so let's start a conversation with just an overview of how carbon offsetting works or how carbon credits work for those viewers who may not be familiar with the concept okay so there's two elements to carbon credits that are important the first is the driver that's coming from corporate uh commitments to Net Zero so companies around the world that are worth about 33


percent of global market cap now have committed to go net zero and going Net Zero means that you reduce your emissions where you can within your operations within your eye chain um to get towards that goal for most companies they can make small changes and there are machines but to get to Net Zero which means balancing the rest of their emissions they have to buy carbon credits so one big driver for us has been that the number of companies that have made that commitment in the last three or four years uh is is now huge


and the volume of credits they're going to demand and go to need by 2030 is going to result in about a 15x increase in the size of the market to about a 30 billion dollar market by 2030. so that's half of the story from our perspective there's there's a sector that's underdeveloped it's small scale it's not juristic National doesn't have quality control and we're coming into that sector to say if you're going to meet your commitments through carbon credits


you need to do it to the highest possible standards and you need to do it uh with as many benefits as possible flying to communities we're really an impact in the SG company from that perspective the second driver is the 20 of global emissions comes from deforestation and land degradation um people tend to forget that or ignore that fact but but deforestation land jobs land use change has been a massive driver of climate change as people burned out forests in the dirt land to Agriculture and so we also see our role


as being reversing those trends of deforestation and man degradation and in the most optimistic scenarios we stopped all Global deforestation in tropical regions and replanted we could reduce Global emissions by between 25 and 40 percent so we're taking funds from companies that are trying to meet their Net Zero commitments who are investing them in what we call nature-based Solutions and that's restoring and protecting mangroves storing and protecting tropical forest areas where the trees


grow really fast and looking at investing and changing the way agriculture works so that it reduces emissions we take some of that money from voluntary markets but we'll also always look at where there's ways we can fund this effort uh just directly through through other sources so I guess this is a good point it gets a good area to you know for you to talk about some of those projects that you're doing in terms of building these carbon credits yeah for sure so we we've taken the


approach that will focus on tropical areas of the world because that's where the trees grow fast just roughly three times faster than in Canada for instance um we focused on areas where we can get carbon rights and title and and show we have secure ownership uh our biggest jurisdiction at the moment is Sierra Leone as part of the entry into all of West Africa um the reason that we're there is one of our Founders spent 15 years building sustainable agriculture in Sierra Leone and has a very strong track record there


we have initially about 57 000 hectares so 57 000 soccer fields of land that we're going to be restoring with Native species so uh Native tropical species revamped and as they grow they draw in all of the rest of the species from from tropical forests we're also looking on the coastline at Mangrove protection for at least 3 000 hectares of mangroves each hectare of Mangrove stools four to 500 tons of carbon so just protecting that first 3000 hectares could store an additional 1.2 million to 1.4 million


tons of carbon just within the first couple of years and then um we've been planting we planted 400 hectares of forest and cereal liquid Sierra Leone and we planted about 15 hectares of mangroves in the country to test uh the the methodologies so very very big play there potentially another 2 million hectares of land that could go into conservation and they were extending out into the countries around Sierra Leone surprises like Ghana and Liberia and guinea um in Central and South America in York


state of Yucatan we have an agreement with the governor of state of Yucatan to protect up to 100 000 hectares mangroves we have a big presence in Guyana um uh just below Venezuela where we have coconut water operation that also protects and restores Forest cover and then in Suriname to the South which was a Dutch Colony independent country now we've got an agreement with the president's office there to restore and protect huge areas of mangroves along the coastline and then we're in


active exploration and then a number of other jurisdictions so we go in we secure agreements with governments we do Fair Revenue sharing and engagement with communities and then we look at how we can use our funds to do restoration and conservation of you know the systems that nature has built to take carbon out of the atmosphere right so I'm curious between all these projects that you have so what are your uh sort of expectations and your calculations and how much of these are carbon credits are you going


to be uh producing and you know because I guess all these is you know with the ultimate objective uh you know helping which set Net Zero goals so how does that against that backdrop of where we need to be in terms of that zero emissions Target so we started on these projects actually launched initiated them uh less than 12 months ago I've been in that carbon sector for 16 years and my Founders have been very active but from a standing start uh less than 12 months ago we've already secured 44 million tons of carbon credit


pipeline um and that's without including all the potential from Suriname so we expect to be in the one to two hundred million tonne range within the next 12 to 24 months just based on projects that we're already qualifying and looking at from a revenue perspective which you know as an investor you need to know about we're looking at irrs so returns 2015 and 30 depending on the project the conservation projects they're much higher even than that um the 44 million tons as we we currently model it under current


assumptions will generate gross revenues of about two billion dollars uh from the sale of those credits over the lifespan which is which is at 30 to 50 year lifespan um so you know where we've shown leadership and been able to move very quickly has just been in getting dirt under our fingernails and securing the land and starting the planting and our momentum suggests very strongly that we're going to be you know in the one to two hundred million ton range in 2024 which is you know considering Canada's


emissions are just over 700 million tons now that's a significant contribution to towards climate Solutions what are you seeing in terms of the commitment from organizations or I guess key trends in in ESG investing that you're seeing on the market and that the types of commitment from organizations in terms of um you know achieving Net Zero or helping achieve Net Zero goals you know on that with the back you know Under Pressure uh we're from the right wing in the U.S or from you know uh people that you need to


support it yeah I mean I the the trends around ESG are absolutely clear more than 50 percent of listed companies already have some kind of BSG policy in screening um you know if you look at the total value of the market cap of companies that have already made commitments you know it's one-third of the global market cap of all companies um if you look at the geekance alliance which is in the finance sector somewhere organizations that have somewhere around 65 trillion dollars of assets under


management committed to Net Zero so the underlying Trends are extremely strong big oil and gas companies like BP and shell have made huge commitments to Net Zero um you know companies like Netflix companies like Nestle companies like uh apple and Amazon have all are all going down this path because their customers require it because their employees want to because they're investors Pension funds in particularly are demanding it so again it's that sort of tsunami of uh demand that's coming what we hear and


and the naysayers around climate from the US is really just at the market it's just across um and you know the idea that that any interest is going to derail the level of momentum out of Europe and Canada and most of the US is just it's it's overestimating the influences a lot of it's just noise um so we think it's a very powerful force now um and it reflects the underlying Trends in ESG investing you know 65 percent of Millennials will will select stocks on the basis of their ESG performance


um you know Millennials are going to inherit between 30 and 40 trillion dollars over the next three decades from their parents and grandparents so the value shift here is driving you know people to choose funds choose Investments that reflect the way they want to live in the world and the influence they'll have to have more and that's an irreversible trend note and following up on that so you know organizations as well even those that are not necessarily you know big emitters like the resource sector the


oil and gas certain you know universities for example with big uh Investment Portfolio they committed towards you know sustainable investing and do well by investing their investments from large emitters at this point in time how realistic is it like uh for these organizations to really truly be um you know able to achieve their strategies or their goals for sustainable Investments yeah I mean there's a there's a supply problem in terms of the number of companies that are going to meet the


criteria there was some green washing in the early days of sustainable investing and and now between SEC reviews and the EU regulations around you know the support you need to have for playing sustainable investing you can't get away with just superficial cosmetic approaches you've got a you've got to sort of have ESG and impact in your bones and in your old strategies so you know for companies like ours um you know we took the box of both being responsibly LED and diverse and and impactful Company but also the


product that we produce is something that's making a huge difference um in the world so we we think that as we get to the kind of scale where some of the institutions will look more at us we're going to be a very easy uh shout out to those organizations you know the trend in general is that ESG used to be you know more cosmetic more superficial but more and more companies now are realizing there has to be real desks to the way that they approach the RSG strategies they have to think about


their value chain they have to think about their supply chain and employment strategies and diversity they have to think about the whole life cycle of their impact and uh and that's driving Innovation that's driving change you know in a world in which people have become pretty skeptical about corporations and the profit motives you know you're seeing companies that are just making massive commitments to to do things different to be that so looking to November where uh cop 28 the next uh climb up some of this is


going to be held what progress are you seeing that's being made towards that next uh Planet Summit the the progress under the UN process has been incredibly slow I mean the the every year every Summit they talk about releasing 100 billion dollars uh you know reforestation and Forest conservation projects and every year there's a big pronouncement about it in every year very little of that money actually appears so you know a lot of us in the private sector and many of the companies that are made Net Zero


commitments I think you're doing that because they're not seeing leadership but progress in government um the the meeting in Germany and Bonn a couple of weeks ago is a sort of pre-qualter uh car and it didn't indicate any massive changes in policy and in approaches and the key thing here is for all the pronouncements that occur um you know ultimately countries don't live up to their financial commitments to support um investment in conservation investment and restoration uh there have been very


few checks really transferred Auto through that government process whereas we're starting to see hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars flying from from um funds and to corporates directly into supporting conservation and restoration so I'm always much more optimistic about corporate progress so remember that at the UN process there isn't really a seat to business you know the uh companies sit at the at the shoulder events around the uh the corporate events but it's really a government-to-government event


and you know businesses work in other forums to advance the agenda do you think it's gonna be all this uh work towards uh our emissions targets will be driven mostly by the private sector like is to be really effective like how how the what we see as a role of the private sector is that is that going to be significant to drag this more than the government well I think 10 years ago when I started 10 14 years ago when I started in the space we all felt the private sector would innovate at the


edges and get things going and then ultimately government would have to make decisions that would take this to scale I think we're probably seeing that inverted now where the scale of demand from the biggest emitters the amount of capital that applying you know single companies with a 500 million dollar sign for allocating into carbon credits the carbon credit production um I think it's inverted all of that and now we I expect in the next decade we'll see far more progress in corporations


than cities and governments and I think that's a good thing I think you know companies can be more agile companies like ours could be answered to the specific requirements of investors um and while you know people are shuffling papers around the table that you add and it can actually just get on and and make incredible progress ourselves towards reducing 20 to 25 of omissions from avoided deforestation okay very interesting conversation when it comes to climate change uh thank you again James for sharing your insights


today that's a pleasure thanks so much for your time and thanks everyone for watching join us again next time for another engaging conversation I'm CEO insights if you like this video subscribe to our YouTube channel and leave a comment below thanks for watching [Music]