Newsletter #6: New York Climate Week Reflections

A week out and we’re still buzzing from a busy New York Climate Week.

We hosted our first-ever Climate Week event with Oxygen Conservation and shared what we’ve been building at Stratifyx, our ecological intelligence platform. If you weren’t able to make it, reach out to team@pantheonregen.com to schedule a demo.

After taking some time to recharge, our team reflected on what we saw, learned, and wish we had seen more of.

We have to begin with AI and data centers, the undeniable focus of the week.

Our CEO Tripp Wall was on a panel with the head of Microsoft’s data center team, discussing biomimicry, biodiversity, ecosystem health, species reintroduction, and nature-based solutions for regrowing watersheds and aquifers. As developers face increasing local opposition to their data center buildout, hyperscalers like Microsoft are bringing communities into the process at the onset and thinking about place-based solutions that could benefit people and planet.

There seemed to be an increasing sense that AI has the opportunity to provide not only historically large inflows of capital into restoration, but also a transformational upgrade to nature data capture and analytics. We were excited to share Stratifyx with developers, investors, and academics looking to better understand the ecological value of their land and the potential revenue streams from restoration, made possible by improved data.

AI-powered environmental data has another application: assessing climate risk. As summers get hotter and storms more severe, companies and investors are seriously considering the the supply chain risk of losing ecosystem services. Nature, long taken for granted, is becoming a more material concern showing up in board meetings and higher prices for consumer goods.

Nature is also receiving increased attention in the carbon markets, with nature-based solutions like peatlands, trees, biochar, enhanced rock weathering, mangroves, and grasslands achieving all-time high prices with a widening set of global buyers.

But what happens when the last carbon credit in a project is sold? This was a question asked by the last presenter at the Nature-based Carbon Forum, who fretted that developers were not thinking about this at all. Our COO Beth Richtman wished she’d been on that panel to answer as she sat in the audience. Why? Because permanence is something we think about a lot at Pantheon, and we’re grateful that the developers of a new peatland restoration protocol at Nature’s Registry think about this too. In their new peatland restoration protocol they will require US peatland projects to make an at least 100-year commitment to keep the peatland rewet.

We left Climate Week tired but energized, grateful for the thoughtful conversations and new connections made. If we didn’t get a chance to chat and you’d like to learn more about working with our team, please reach out.