Startup Series: Vibrant Planet
Today's guest is Allison Wolff, Founder and CEO at Vibrant Planet.
This year, wildfires have raged across the Western US, the Mediterranean, Australia, and parts of Canada. While many worry that the intensity and frequency of these blazes will only get worse, Vibrant Planet is on a mission to create a cloud-based planning and monitoring tool for agile, adaptive land management at scale. The company harnesses data-driven science and cloud-based technology to help community stakeholders create resiliency plans for forests that take multiple factors into account. Their goal is to help planners and policy makers save lives, avoid trillions of dollars in infrastructure loss, and restore the ability of natural systems to store carbon, deliver clean water, and support biodiversity, local economies, and recreational habits.
We have a great discussion about the state of forests across the globe, why wildfire severity is increasing, the roadblocks that have slowed progress on forest management, and the role that software and technology can play in unlocking collaboration. If you're curious about wildfires and their relationship to climate change, both in terms of how climate change is resulting in increased wildfire severity and how increased wildfire activity is creating feedback loops that reinforce global warming, you'll appreciate this conversation. And lastly, even in the face of some pretty dire numbers, we appreciate Allison’s optimism about what our forests could look like in the coming centuries, given proper care and maintenance today.
Enjoy the show!
You can find me on Twitter @codysimms (me), @mcjpod (podcast) or @mcjcollective (company). You can reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded July 15, 2022.
In today's episode, we cover:
The state of forests in the US and across the globe
Why wildfires are increasing
Intersection between land management and climate change
How some forests need fires to regenerate themselves
Effective forest management by Indigenous Peoples
What we can learn from tribes
How state and federal governments are approaching the issue
Roadblocks that have slowed progress on forest management
Allison's background in tech and transition to climate
Role of software and tech in unlocking collaboration
Stakeholders involved in planning projects
Carbon methodology for fire adapted forests
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Jason Jacobs:
Hey, everyone. Jason here. I am the My Climate Journey show host. Before we get going, I wanted to take a minute and tell you about the My Climate Journey, or MCJ, as we call it, membership option. Membership came to be because there were a bunch of people that were listening to the show that weren't just looking for education, but they were longing for a peer group as well. So we set up a Slack community for those people that's now mushroomed into more than 1300 members. There is an application to become a member. It's not an exclusive thing. There's four criteria we screen for: determination to tackle the problem of climate change, ambition to work on the most impactful solution areas, optimism that we can make a dent and we're not wasting our time for trying, and a collaborative spirit. Beyond that, the more diversity, the better. There's a bunch of great things that have come out of that community, a number of founding teams that have met in there, a number of nonprofits that have been established, a bunch of hiring that's been done, a bunch of companies that have raised capital in there, a bunch of funds that have gotten limited partners or investors for their funds in there, as well as a bunch of events and programming by members and for members, and some open source projects that are getting actively worked on that hatched in there, as well. At any rate, if you want to learn more, you can go to myclimatejourney.co, the website, and click the become a member tab at the top. Enjoy the show.
Jason Jacobs:
Hello, everyone. This is Jason Jacobs, and welcome to My Climate Journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and try to figure out how people like you and I can help.
Cody Simms:
Today's guest is Allison Wolff, CEO and founder at Vibrant Planet. They develop software to help improve forest management, or adaptive land management, as I learned it's called in this conversation. Also, you might notice that I'm not Jason. This is Cody Simms, Jason's partner at MCJ. I did today's interview with Allison at Vibrant Planet, and you'll hear me take on episodes here and there going forward. As a Californian and resident of the Western United States, wildfires have become something I think about regularly. I personally had to evacuate my home multiple times due to severely poor air quality from nearby wildfires, luckily not due to immediate burn risk, though too many folks have unfortunately experienced that too. And I have friends who've had their homes burned. In climate circles, we talk a lot about nature-based solutions and forestry credits. This conversation mostly revolves around preserving forests, and yet in the Western United States, we not only need to preserve our forests, we need to heal them. Allison and I have a great discussion about the state of forests in the Western United States, why wildfire severity is increasing, the roadblocks that have slowed progress on forest management, and the role that software and technology can play in unlocking collaboration. If you're curious about wildfires and their relationship to climate change, both in terms of how climate change is resulting in increased wildfire severity and how increased wildfire activity is creating feedback loops that reinforce global warming, you'll appreciate this conversation. And lastly, even in the face of some pretty dire numbers, I can't help but hear the optimism in Allison's voice about what our forests could look like in the coming centuries, given proper care and maintenance today. Allison, welcome to the show.
Allison Wolff:
Thank you for having me, Cody. Excited to be here.
Cody Simms:
Well, I am so excited to learn from you. As you know, and many others know, I mostly live in California, in Southern California, and have been lucky enough to spend some of my summers up in Colorado, up in the mountains. And so knowing what's going on with our forests, particularly in the Western United States, is very personal to me and very personal to millions, tens of millions of people across the United States, obviously. And so would love to maybe just start, we're going to dive into your background, and boy, you've been working in this space for a long time and have tons of great experience that I want to learn about, and I know others do too, but I want to start by understanding generally what's going on with the state of our forests in both the United States and broadly across the world, if there's context you want to add there too.
Allison Wolff:
Depending on where you are in the world, the story differs. In California and Western US forests, and a lot of Mediterranean Europe, we're seeing obviously this huge fire in France, I mean the 25, 30,000 acre fire in France is a very big fire for them. It's sort of peanuts here in the US, but that's a big deal in Europe. Australia obviously has these issues. So in these fire adapted ecosystems, so these are ecosystems that grew with fire, and they've always had fire from lightning and had a fire interval of somewhere between five and 30 years, depending on where you are. In places like the Rockies, where it sounds like you are right now, in the high Rockies, you have more dense, lush forests. Boreal is like that. Those are more like 100 year fire intervals. And when they burn, there's a lot of fuels because they've grown and they go real big.
Allison Wolff:
And so in these fire adapted forests, the situation is really that Europeans and then European Americans clear cut everything. In North America, we really did play out the Lorax story and clear cut all but about four percent of forest. So we really only have four percent old growth. And it's hard to understand that because we don't really know what old growth looks like. Like, we get excited about the sequoias, but that's really what a lot of this year looked like. We have these massive trees with very little ground cover, and there's stories of John Muir riding three horses wide through them.
Allison Wolff:
And now you can barely walk in most forests. If you drive up I-80 to Tahoe, if you're a Bay Area person, or up to Mammoth, if you're an LA person, you can barely get in there, they're so thick. And so we've got these really unresilient forests who are fighting for resources because we clear cut everything and then they all grew up at the same time. So instead of having different ages, different species, and clumps and gaps and kind of families of trees, as we read about in some of these popular books the last few years, we have these really thick forests and they're unnaturally structured and they're fighting for resources. So we're seeing disease take over, and they're just not healthy.
Allison Wolff:
Then you add fire suppression to the mix and you get more fuels. So we've had 100% fire suppression policy. It feels like there's tons of fires, but there's thousands of fires that we never hear about because they're put out within a few feet of run. There's only a few percentage of them that actually get out of control, and that's happening more and more because of fuels being so heavy in places where there didn't used to be fuels, because fire used to roll through in that five to 30 year interval and clear out fuels and downed branches and cull down the forest, killed off the babies, some of them, to get to this kind of natural heterogeneity and structure. So we've basically, we're responsible for messing up the structure of the forest fundamentally for all these reasons.
Allison Wolff:
Then you add climate change to the mix, also human caused, of course, and you've got these tinder dry fuels. You've got over fueled forests, tinder dry, unhealthy, because they don't have enough water and it's hotter. And you've got climate fueled winds, where you've got these pressure gradients that are bigger off deserts and driving these really crazy wind events that picks fire up. Fuels ladder it up to the canopy. And then these fires move in a wall and hit towns, like we've seen in Paradise and the Dixie Fire, the Caldor Fire that almost took out South Lake. So that's just sort of the new way things are happening in these fire adapted forests.
Allison Wolff:
In the Amazon, it's a different story, where humans are clear cutting. So we're deforesting there now like we did in North America. There really isn't fire in the Amazon. It's like every 500 years, you might have a little fire, and it's just kind of a wet, smoldering fire. So down there, it's clear cutting and burning the forest to create farmland, graze land. Cattle feed for a global cattle industry is really the big driver, and then illegal logging still. So that's a very different dynamic for why we're seeing forest cover loss.
Cody Simms:
In the Western forests, back before humans did all this damage, when you had old growth forests and a fire broke out, what happened then versus what happens now, when you have these dense, dry forests and diseased forests that exist today?
Allison Wolff:
Yeah. So you can imagine, so if you can picture a sequoia grove or a redwood grove, maybe, where you've got these really big giant trees, and the fire adapted species do all these cool things. So they self limb. So you won't see any branches down at the ground. Fir trees have that. And fir is an advantaged species that has taken over a lot of Western US forests. So that creates ladder fuels because the branches go to the ground. But a lot of the pine species and sequoias, it's really just a giant tree trunk with really thick bark. So they grow this very thick armor to handle fire. They want fire.
Allison Wolff:
So some of the species, their seeds only pop from pine cones if you have this sort of Goldilock temperature. You have to have this good temperature, not too high, because it'll sterilize the seed, but this just right temperature actually allows the seed to plant. And so they really were built to handle fire. The pine cones are around to roll down the hill and spread low intensity fire. So fire is also how carbon cycles. It's very different than a tropical forest. It's how nutrients cycle through the forests. And again, it's how the forest actually regenerates itself. It needs fire to plant its seeds.
Cody Simms:
Due to the type of trees that are now in the forests and the makeup of their branch structure and the density of them, when fire hits a forest today, it spreads like crazy. Whereas before, when you're in a grove of sequoias or redwoods, you see these sort of fire licked bark, but the forest, maybe the fires wouldn't have gone as wild and crazy and wouldn't have been as destructive. They were just natural parts of the life cycle of these forests.
Allison Wolff:
Exactly. And you might see a lightning strike in a big sequoia with one of those big carve outs, right? That's supposed to happen. That's normal. Yeah, what's happening because we have so many fuels. I mean, think about when you start a campfire. If you've got a bunch of kindling and you've got a bunch of wind and you blow on the fire, that's what we're doing in our forest. We have so much kindling in downed branches and duff, needles, et cetera, that hasn't been cleaned from low intensity, healthy fire for 130 years. You've got all this kindling and winds and dry fuels, and they're literally exploding on us.
Cody Simms:
So we know what we need to do now. Where are we in the process of starting to do the right things in terms of forest management going forward? I presume the age of runaway capitalism that's just clear cutting entire forest for the logging industry has been basically regulated away for the most part. And so now we're left with the aftermath of that and how to clean that up. What does that roadmap look like?
Allison Wolff:
One of the things that coming into this, so I've done a lot of work on climate change in my past work. Coming into this space, this is a climate driven, climate related problem, but it really is a big land management problem. So even if the climate wasn't changing, we'd still have severe fire. Climate change is just speeding it up. And so there is a solution, so having worked on climate change for a long time, where sometimes the solution is ambiguous or it's policy and it's hard for individual people to really understand what do we do, this is a situation where we do know exactly what to do.
Cody Simms:
I want to underscore what you just said, because what I heard was a bit of a yes and, that it's a climate change problem and a land management problem. We've heard political circles saying it's one or the other, but it's clearly both. And there need to be solutions across both sides of the issue here.
Allison Wolff:
Absolutely. Yes. And they're really exacerbating each other. So on the land management side, which is what we're focused on at Vibrant Planet, we need to accelerate the planning and implementation of forest treatments. And really what that looks like is we have to play the role that fire would have played over the last 130 years of fire suppression to do everything we just talked about, cull down the forest so that we've got the right amount of trees, spacing of trees, different ages of trees and species, and clear out the [inaudible 00:12:29] so that the seeds can plant, and get rid of that kindling for the wildfire. And so there's a lot of work to do to remove fuels and really plan for forest resilience. How do we actually get in there and get back to a resilient structure? Because we've really ruined the structure of forest that would be natural.
Allison Wolff:
And so unfortunately that means a lot of mechanical thinning. So we've got to go in with chainsaws and limb up trees. We have to go masticate biomass. Sometimes we have to cut trees. Mostly we need to cut small trees. And so a lot of the timber wars, and culminating with Luna, and Julia Butterfly Hill sitting in Luna, the environmentalists were absolutely right that we were focused too much on an economy that was built back in the 1800s. The American economy was built on trees, and those trees went into mines, and all of our towns were built from wood. I mean, everything was built from wood.
Cody Simms:
Isn't it amazing? The American economy built on trees in the 1900s, built on oil in the 20th century, and hopefully built on a clean, renewable economy in the 21st century.
Allison Wolff:
Yeah. So those big juicy trees where we played out the Lorax, we have those historic photos of like a hundred men sitting on a giant sequoia, which just makes our skin crawl. You know, the environmentalists shut down the industry for good reason. And we did put environmental regulations, like the National Environmental Protection Act, to keep that kind of cutting from happening.
Allison Wolff:
But we do need to pull biomass out now because the forests are over fueled, and if we don't pull some trees out and some of that duff and downed branches, we're going to lose the forests. And so it's a little bit of a mind twist, and it's very different because we've got our heads knocked against the wall on deforestation in a place like the Amazon or Indonesia, where cutting trees really is bad. We need to leave those forests alone, and they regenerate by themselves. We have to be more active in dry forests, in these temperate forests, and actually go in and we owe it to them and the other species in there to get that resilient structure back so that they can make it through climate change and then ultimately help us make it through climate change. Because they're playing a huge role in sucking down carbon for us.
Cody Simms:
Do you envision 200 years from now that we have wild sequoia and redwood groves growing all up and down the coast of California and Oregon again?
Allison Wolff:
Yeah. The hope is, and it's so fun walking with a forest supervisor from the forest service. I mean, their mandate is resilience, and all the ecosystem benefits of resilience, carbon sequestration, water delivery. 70% of water in the world originates in forests, and forests are playing this incredible role with just water, cycling water, filtering water before it goes to ag lands and drinking water in cities like San Francisco or LA. And then they regulate global weather. I mean, half of the snow pack some years in the Sierra Nevada originates in the Amazon, in the atmospheric river that the forest creates itself. And then it moves up to California and rains on us and snows on us. Forests are playing this incredible role. And so I do envision, it's so fun walking through a forest with a forest supervisor and talk about what could we envision 500 years from now? What should this look like? What did it used to look like? And what might it look like with climate change now? And how do we help them along? I mean, now everybody knows we're in the adaptation realm of climate change now. So how do we do that without over-engineering forests? You go to Europe and sometimes the forests feel unnatural there because they've done so much heavy management. What is the sweet spot between wild land and tending the wild?
Cody Simms:
I often hear that you look at all of the different practices of forest management all over the world. And it's often forests that are managed by Indigenous peoples that have managed to treat these forests the most effectively, I guess, presumably because capitalism hasn't come in and sort of dictated poor practices escalating. I'm curious if you have examples of forests anywhere in the world that you feel have been managed well.
Allison Wolff:
Yeah, good question. One really good example is what's happening in Australia, where again, fire adapted Mediterranean forest type, climate type generally, and Aboriginal fire, where Aboriginals are managing with fire, just as Indigenous peoples here in the US did for 20,000 years. So an interesting story that I learned from Mike Sweeney at The Nature Conservancy, he's the head of the California chapter, in North America, Indigenous people and trees arrived at the same time, after the Ice Age. And from the get go, we have evidence that tribes managed with fire. And likely, the hypothesis is they were trying to remove ground coverage so they could hunt more effectively between these giant trees. And so they were a big part of the fire adaptivity in how these species evolved. In addition to lightning fires, natural fires happening and creating that fire cycle that we talked about in five to 30 years, that is how our forests were managed. And there there's a great book called Tending the Wild that talks about this, where Native tribes everywhere in the world, in the Amazon, it is more of a protective thing, but tribes, Indigenous people, we have a lot to learn from them, how we relate to nature and to think about ourselves as part of nature. The Europeans have separated ourselves. It's us versus nature. We're always trying to control it. It's there for our use, right? Instead of having a relationship with it.
Allison Wolff:
So there's a big movement here in the US, and Australia is way ahead of us, where there's a lot of tribal empowerment. Tribes are training people to use prescribed fire in an effective way. And they are looking for more and more burn days themselves on their lands to bring back species that they need for their cultural lives and for their livelihoods. So grasses that they still weave baskets out of, berries that only sprout with low intensity fire, lots of wood products that they use for building all kinds of things. And so there's a big movement to really empower tribes and learn from tribes. And for us in the planning world, we really want to bring a non-European perspective on land management into the system, and tribes are always, of course, a part of the planning process where we're working, too.
Cody Simms:
You talked a little bit about the positive feedback loops that we could see in 300, 500 years, as we help the forests that we've damaged regain their strength, even in the face of climate change, as we help them sort of deal with living in an adapted environment. There are also unfortunately quite a few negative feedback loops that are happening because of the damage that we have brought onto our forests. And I'm wondering, the one that scares me the most, there are so many, whether it's water feedback loops or human health in particulate matter. But I think the one that scares me the most is, at least in the Western US, seeing our forests in some cases actually turn from a carbon sink into a net emitter of carbon. And I wonder if there's something you could share there about the actual CO2 that gets released from wildfires and how that is unfortunately potentially fueling greater climate change.
Allison Wolff:
Yes, we are creating a new positive feedback loop in climate change with these massive releases. And you can imagine, in low intensity fire where the forest is being regenerated and cleaned, there's very little release in that kind of good fire. In these big fires where the canopy goes, where the whole tree is dying, and then the soil where most of the carbon is stored underground, especially in dry forests, most of the tree is underground. They have these deep root systems because we don't have as much water here. So it's massive root systems. And we're turning that soil where all that carbon is held into dust that blows away. And then snow and rain comes and we have these big landslides that happen afterwards where we're losing that soil carbon. The emissions are massive, and we're losing that permanent carbon storage because what's happening is with severe fire and frying the seed stock and killing off trees, we don't have the mother trees to reseed an area. And I can get into a little bit about how hard reforestation efforts are right now. We're trying to help improve that.
Allison Wolff:
So we're losing forests. So forests are converting. In 2020's fires, about 1.3 million of the six million acres that burned will not come back unless we actively intervene. And so they're converting to shrub and grass, which does not store as much carbon as these giant root systems. So it is a big problem and it is a self-reinforcing spiral. And just to give you a sense, in California, between 1985 and 2021, California lost almost seven percent of its tree cover, and that's becoming exponential. So within the next 10 to 20 years, California won't have many forests left, and a big percentage of that will not grow back because of this really unnaturally high severity due to the fuel loads and climate change. So it is catastrophic. It's what propelled me into this space. Somebody had to do something about this, to speed and scale restoration. It's so frustrating to watch this happen when we know what to do. We just have to do it faster and with more information.
Cody Simms:
Maybe hitting on California, I know in the last few years, primarily I think due to settlements from PG&E from some of the fires that broke out at the end of the last decade, there is now quite a bit of state funding going into forestry management, significant, billions of dollars in a way that wasn't there previously. Maybe start to talk about how are both state governments and federal governments starting to go on the offensive here to fund appropriate measures, and how much more do we need beyond what's been committed so far?
Allison Wolff:
So to give you a sense of scale, Blue Forest Conservation, who's one of our partners, amazing, they created the Forest Resilience Bond, where we were a partner with them and Nature Conservancy in the north Yuba, which is a key tributary to the Sacrament of Delta, to do a sort of exemplary new workflow for forest management planning. They estimate that the state of California needs $58 billion deployed within the next decade to restore forests at the pace and scale that is needed to keep us from losing them. California is sort of the canary in the coal mine. It is this kind of perfect storm of land management and over fueled forests, and climate change is happening faster here than anywhere else. But the rest of the West is right behind California, and having the same trends, Europe and the other places we talked about. So there's a huge need to do these restoration treatments faster.
Cody Simms:
And what amount of funding has currently been committed?
Allison Wolff:
They passed 1.5 billion a few months ago that is being deployed. There's another 1.2 billion in California from Newsom's budget that's proposed this year. We expect that to go through. Then the National Forest Service has allocated about 50 billion out of the infrastructure bill to put towards building wildfire resilience in Western states. So there is a lot of money moving, but that's not enough. So California is getting, I'm not sure what budget they're getting yet from the infrastructure bill allotment, but let's say they get maybe a billion or two. So we're at four billion. And restoring right now, because of how hard the planning and implementation is, we're only restoring about 100,000 acres a year. And we only have 10 years to restore about 22 million acres. So the math isn't working.
Cody Simms:
And does most of this go to reforestation efforts or does most of it go to thinning and land management efforts?
Allison Wolff:
Most of it goes to what they call shovel ready projects. So already planned, ready for implementation, and implementation is that mechanical thinning, prescribed fire, where we can do it safely. In those kinds of treatments, there is a little bit of an allotment for reforestation efforts.
Cody Simms:
Given that, maybe let's talk about how forests are maintained today. So there's this money coming in, state money, federal money. Who are the stakeholders in choosing what projects should happen? How do projects get to become shovel ready? And what does that whole process entail?
Allison Wolff:
Yeah, so that has changed a lot in the last several years, where it used to work for the forest service, which is about on average 60% of Western land and other federal lands, BLM, federal parks, than state lands, state parks, and private land owners to do their own thing. And so we've worked sort of in a siloed way, where everybody's got their own data sets and scientists and foresters that serve them. What's changed is because we're in this new era of mega fire, fires are burning across jurisdictions in a way that they didn't before. And we can't get them out. And so that is forcing a new era of collaborative planning. That's really hard if people have different interests in the land, timber versus maybe carbon value, versus water benefits, those kinds of things, and so it's very hard to get to consensus. So we've been shoved into a consensus driven process with no tools to do it well. And part of the problem too, is the planning process for a large landscape. So now everyone's moved to, okay, we have to do collaborative planning, we have to have a shared vision and objectives for a large area, and we have to together fundamentally change fire behavior and tree mortality behavior. So we have to work together. There's no way to get to agreement. It's hard to see each other's perspectives if you don't have really good data turned into useful information to help people see different perspectives.
Allison Wolff:
That planning process right now is really consultant driven, sometimes internal forest service people or labs act as consultants. NGOs act as consultants. There's private companies that get hired to work on the behalf of a what's called a collaborative, which is a group of jurisdictions and other stakeholders that are looking out for owl, spotted owl habitat, or other habitat water issues, other key issues coming together to get to this consensus driven plan. And that can take two to 10 years. Half of that timeframe is collecting and aggregating and normalizing data to create just one scenario versus a no action scenario, where in California, in 10 years, everything burns. That's always the no action scenario. And then often the person that has been hired by the forest service or whoever else isn't trusted by an NGO looking out for a spotted owl habitat, for example. And so they just sort of wait until the plan comes out, goes into the environmental reg process, and then they sue and stop the project, and then nothing happens. So it's an incredibly broken system right now. And while we're in these 10 year planning processes, places are burning up. So then you've spent two million dollars on consultants to create a plan that is no longer relevant. That was really the impetus, is I saw an opportunity to modernize how this happens and really bring sophisticated data engineering, data visualization, user-friendly design of a product to help different groups with different perspectives actually collaborate effectively and get to consensus faster with better science, better information, to make sure they're making more informed decisions.
Cody Simms:
A simplistic question that probably does not have a simple answer, but if I am, I mean, obviously biodiversity is incredibly important for thriving for us, but if I am focused on maintaining the habitat of a certain animal species, and it's obvious that if forest practices aren't dealt with, regardless of restoring that, maintaining the habitat, the habitat's going to burn up in the next decade, how do I continue to justify blocking a project?
Allison Wolff:
Yeah, it's a good question. And it's happening less and less because of that. I have, just in the few years I've been in this space, I've watched a congealing of perspective in an agreement that we have to remove these blocks. But there is still fear of big timber coming back. And you can imagine under the Trump administration, there was a lot of fear where there was talk of removing the National Environmental Protection Act and all the things that safeguard things like biodiversity, and just in a blanket way open forests up to big logging that we can pave for us. We can mow down the forest, and sure there will be less fire, but then we lose all of those services of water delivery, biodiversity habitat, which people forget, we're dependent on having other species in the world for our own survival. And carbon sequestration. And so we lose all the services if we pave the forest, and under different administrations, that's proposed sometimes without any regard to the ecosystem services side of things.
Cody Simms:
Alison, you have an extensive background working in both environmental and sustainability issues and just general impact areas for many large companies. And if I understand correctly, Vibrant Planet, which is this current business you're building for forest land management, kind of morphed out of a consulting business, also called Vibrant Planet, that you ran for many years, working with large companies on their sustainability initiatives.
Cody Simms:
Maybe give us a bit on your background, the path you took. I find it fascinating. You were at Netflix back when Netflix was mailing DVDs around, right? So you started in the early tech world and then have moved into sustainability, spent a good chunk of your career there, and now have taken that knowledge and turned it, or are turning it into a software platform. Maybe walk us through that journey, so we can get a sense of how you've arrived at this problem that you're solving today.
Allison Wolff:
I really started my career in tech as a young one at Netflix. And I had been in some branding and design firms before that. So I was hired as a marketing manager at Netflix to run branded marketing, and then got really involved in user experience design of the product and started to get into weekly product testing to figure out how do you get people to click on what you want them to click on. Launched the first personalization platform that preceded Amazon and some of those things. So it was really fun and lots of good learning. And that has stayed with me. Design has become a very big part of my life all along, like on the rest of my journey. After Netflix, I went to a consulting firm called SY Partners that works with CEOs and leadership teams on vision, setting vision, big companies, 300,000 employees worldwide kind of situation, where a CEO needs to set a new vision and then really culture change around how do you enable everybody to see their role in that new direction? While I was there, I got very passionate about climate change, mostly from reading books, going to hear people like Bill McDonough and Paul Hawken speak at TED or other conferences like that. And I got to the point where I couldn't help companies in retail when their vision was really selling more shit in the world. I couldn't help them anymore. And I had sort of a calling to go help the Bill McDonoughs and Paul Hawkens of the world scale like crazy and help the world see where we need to head and really do culture change around that. And then also started to think about how can we help these big global platforms like eBay, Google, Facebook, how do we tilt them towards good? How do we make them forces for good in the world? So that was really what I set my sights on, and for 20 years, that was my consulting business. It was called Vibrant Planet. And I'm very lucky to have worked on a lot of different leaders, on a lot of different problems, and a lot of climate change work. So I helped with some of the foundational sustainability strategies and partnerships and implementation at all three of those companies. And a lot of that has spawned net zero programs and things like that, helped with data for good launches and that kind of thing.
Allison Wolff:
I also then got pulled into philanthropic and impact investing strategy work with some of the founding families. One of those families lives in Truckee and wanted to maybe think about a center like a Rocky Mountain Institute that could take on something important. And we looked at a lot of different topics, a lot of them climate focused, and then the big 2018 fires hit when I was doing that work. And as I was on a listening tour, over and over again in the community, and then globally, we had Australian fires and others. Portugal burned. I started to just ask a lot about, tell me about this fire problem. What is the actual intersection between land management and climate change, and what can be done about this, if anything? And at the same time I was working with Paul Hawken to help launch Drawdown when the book came out, and was learning a lot about nature-based climate solutions in the mix. And I had been part of renewable energy and the kind of tipping point we had reached there, and I was getting increasingly passionate about, okay, how are we going to pull all this carbon down now? And got really excited about the role nature-based solutions are going to play both across ag and forests. So I was doing work in that space, and as these fires are hitting and I was starting to see how bad we are at looking at whole systems and how the regenerative ag movement and ag in general doesn't realize what's coming towards them from up the hill with forest burning.
Allison Wolff:
If we don't have any forest, California does not have the ability to produce 13% of global ag. And the regenerative ag movement, if they don't have water, like problem, right? So I just started to see this really big systems problem and catastrophic failure as I started to learn about the fire problem and then saw this need for a tech platform to speed and scale the planning side and to consistently, and also standardized planning so that we can weigh trade offs more effectively in an apples to apples way, and then monitor, are we winning? Are we actually moving communities and landscapes to resilience so that they can store carbon, deliver clean water, clean up the air? We all choked on 600 PPM smoke for a long time last summer. So anyway, just providing all the services, biodiversity left the family to create sort of conversation space. And I just had another calling in my life and just said, I've got to go build a solution, and had a lot of people along the way in the natural resource management and science world say, how do you get the people that are building ad platforms like Facebook to focus on climate solutions? Can you go rally some of those people? Because it became really clear that the data engineering to actually get a tree and house level view of the world and aggregating all this biodiversity water and other data, carbon data, that's really, really sophisticated data engineering that can't really, it's really not possible inside some of the agencies that have historically done this kind of science work. And so we really needed to pair science and the hard work of land management planning and implementation, that knowledge with tech and ground really rocks our people in the tech sector in what needs to happen on the ground to build a solution, which is what we've done.
Cody Simms:
Fantastic. And so you went out and sort of did this customer discovery and decided you needed to build a tech solution. What problems did you uncover that tech needed to solve?
Allison Wolff:
From a data perspective, so like I said, the planning process can take up to 10 years for these larger landscapes where we've got multiple stakeholders working together. We don't have 10 years to get to a plan that might get sued. So there was a big need for collaboration. The data, and like I said, half of that timeframe is aggregating data that's all siloed. There is no standardizations. You can't actually weigh trade offs of different types of treatments or intensities of treatments in an apples to apples way. So that was a problem. The data that was available for vegetation doesn't downscale. So we only had like USGS data that's 30 meters. You can't downscale that to make tree and house level decisions. So there was this massive data gap that ideally government would be filling, but they haven't yet. And the need to normalize that kind of tree level view of the world with carbon, water, and other types of data that can then be put into a collaborative management system, and the ability, using the power of tech and the cloud, to be able to run as many treatment scenarios as you want. So like I said, in the kind of paper based planning process that happens today, you might have one or two alternative treatment types and a do nothing scenario that shows everything burned, and that's all you've got. So with our system, I saw real need to be able to weigh lots of different trade offs of lots of different options, model them out 30 years. How might this treatment fare in fire probability and climate change 30 years from now? What could this look like to inform the decisions we make today? And none of that existed. So really, tech data engineering, you have to have exemplary product management and product design. That's where the design ethos comes in for me to make it accessible. We're basically democratizing data for lots and lots and lots of users.
Cody Simms:
And where do you get the tree and property level data if USGS doesn't provide it?
Allison Wolff:
So we are building it. So we have an incredible data engineering team. And the way we do that is we have an algorithm that we have tuned to map trees. We pull in publicly available LIDAR. That is basically a picture. It's a snapshot in time. So a state like California has relatively spotty LIDAR that's been taken at different points in time, and lots of fire and tree mortality has happened since then. So what we do is pull in that LIDAR, train our algorithms, and that LIDAR gives you a needle level view, and lots of other pieces of topography and other parameters. And then we create what we call synthetic LIDAR using satellite data, pushing that into the algorithm. And then the algorithm allows us to get to a quite, it's basically a tree level view where you can see tree crowns where there wasn't LIDAR. And so that gives us this tree level view.
Allison Wolff:
So one of our first projects was in the Tahoe Basin where the Caldor Fire burned last summer. We had just started that project and we were tuning our data building machine to get that synthetic LIDAR. We were able to point our data development machine at that burn scar and get a tree level view of the burn scar. So that helps with the planning now in the basin, because that's a bit of a reset button. So now we get to envision, what do we want to have grow back there and get some of the original species of Tahoe back, sugar pines, et cetera. And then how does that change priority around South Lake Tahoe, Tahoe City, Incline Village? So how do we prioritize treatment plans around the other areas? So that capability of current data is really, really critical and was one of the big gaps in the space.
Cody Simms:
So in that Caldor Fire burn scar project, that becomes a bit more of a get the land cleared so that you can start to do a reforestation project, but in a project where you're taking an existing dense, diseased forest that is at high fire risk for the future, what I'm hearing you say is the software allows the consultants that work for each of these agencies, whether it's the National Forest Service, whether it's a state owned agency, whether it's a local landowner, there may be overlap over an at risk area. It allows them to collaborate together on what the planning process for that plot of land ought to be and then allows them to bring in stakeholders that may bring risk to their projects in terms of getting them certified and permitted around biodiversity stakeholders, water rights stakeholders, et cetera, so that they can all see, if we pursued this forest in X way or in Y way, here's what the future land would look like and here's what this might do to some of these other considerations. Am I loosely understanding this?
Allison Wolff:
Spot on. So just to back that up, the Tahoe Basin project, for example, is a community wildfire protection plan update. So the fire districts, every two years in California, have to do an updated risk mitigation plan for wildfire. So we are in support of that, helping with making sure power lines aren't hitting trees and those kinds of defensible space. And then it's that on steroids, because we are helping the other stakeholders, the forest service that runs the Tahoe Basin, the state parks, and the folks that look after the lake health and watershed health, all of those other stakeholders can think about broader forest resilience to change fire behavior around all the towns around Tahoe effectively, and really put those strategic acres where the walls of fire can start on the table because the system values the ecosystem services that the wild land around these towns is providing. So it really puts those acres on the table strategically, and that's where they can envision 30 years out with our modeling, what do we want this place to look like? And share those plans and really see where do we have consensus? Where does the group that's looking out for the species habitat in the area actually agree with a CAL FIRE unit chief? And they've never been able to see that before. So they can overlay plans, say, oh, we actually agree on 60% of this 300,000 acre landscape. Let's get to permit. And the folks looking out for [inaudible 00:42:29] habitat won't sue, because they're like, yeah, I'm on board. So the whole platform is like, how do we get to plan and implementation fast? And then it turns into a monitoring system because we have current conditions data that monitors treatment progress, calculates the ecosystem benefit of that progress, and also unplanned disturbances and other fire will likely burn in while this treatment is happening. So just really understanding current conditions and then being able to adaptively reprioritize, based on what we're learning from treatments and answering this question, are we winning, or unplanned fire or mortality?
Cody Simms:
From a product perspective, are each of these stakeholders logging in and actors in your product, and are each of them paying you as paid customers? Or do you have some kind of uber project manager who is getting their inputs on clipboard and then inputting them into the software and is also the one paying you for the product?
Allison Wolff:
Little bit of both. So right now there are sort of block grant type grant systems coming out of Natural Resources Agency, Department of Conservation, CAL FIRE, that go to this collaborative planning process. So an NGO or a state conservancy will apply for that money. And then the way we sell is basically a landscape subscription. So it's a software as a service model annual subscription to do initial data development. And then the initial scenario building get to plan, and then it becomes their monitoring and adaptive planning system. So that's really how it works, but we've had some one off, like a forest supervisor and a fuels team being a customer for a whole forest, a million acres. We've had small groups grab licenses, like along the Truckee Watershed, which is the outlet of Lake Tahoe down to Reno and the [inaudible 00:44:16] Tribe land, who is just running a bunch of little collaboratives using licenses, sort of one off licenses, to look at small areas along that watershed. So we're really early. We launched last September. So it hasn't really been out for a year, and we're in learn and adapt mode ourselves to figure out how do people want to use this? How do we package it? How do we price it? So we're very much in super fast learning mode right now.
Cody Simms:
Are there market incentives as well at play here, whether it's around the voluntary carbon markets or the like that also are pushing more actors to want to follow these practices? I mean, it sounds like we're in crisis mode more than keep everything in harmony mode, but I'm curious how the evolution of forestry carbon credits and whatnot also factors into wildfire resiliency.
Allison Wolff:
Good tee up. Big push for us is to build out tools now. We have a design for a tool set that will help automate what is also a PDF, Excel spreadsheet driven process to plan forest carbon projects. We have recently brought on board a scientist named Dr. Catherine Duffy, who was hired 10 years ago by National Forest Foundation, which is the nonprofit arm of the forest service that does a lot of work moving private capital for water, like Coca-Cola, beer companies, to forest restoration projects. In fact, they were a big part of the North Yuba project that I mentioned earlier, moving water money to the ground for forest treatments. And so they commissioned Catherine to create a carbon methodology for fire adapted forests, which just got submitted last week to [inaudible 00:46:04] to become a [inaudible 00:46:05] standard. And then Vibrant Planet is building a tool set for project developers that want to optimize their land management plans for carbon finance, all in the name of what we talked about earlier. We know California needs about $58 billion of finance to actually increase the pace and scale of restoration and get that restoration done in time. We've got a few billion dollars. We have no choice but to unlock private markets to get this work done. And you don't tend to forest once. These forests have to be tended like the Native tribes did for 20,000 years. Over time, we can move to more prescribed fire. Once we get the forest back into a resilient state where it can take fire again, we'll be managing more and more with prescribed fire, like the tribes did. But it's costly. And so we have to have an ongoing massive budget for forest tending. So we have to unlock private finance. We come to the carbon market with a lot of skepticism, as I'm sure you do too. Forest carbon has been very difficult and wrought with politics, and it can create a lot of bad incentives to keep polluting. We come in eyes wide open, but we feel like it is sort of a necessary evil, if you will. And so we're working very hard to do it right, and really facilitate that in these fire adapted forests.
Cody Simms:
And I'd love to hear for your business as well, been building this as a software company for a couple years now, you've funded it most recently with a sizable seed round. Maybe share a little bit about how you're capitalizing the company and what your plans are on that side of things going forward, too.
Allison Wolff:
Yeah. So we have raised about 17 million to date. We did an announcement that bundled a sort of round last summer, a round we just did, which was an equity round, into one big announcement. We have some really interesting funders behind us that we're very proud of, folks like Earthshot, that have John Doerr, and [inaudible 00:48:02] and some other great people behind them. [inaudible 00:48:05] Foundation, which is one of the biggest climate funders in the world. New folks like Daily Adventures that funded things like Thrive Market, and Ecosystem Integrity Fund. One of the partners is a forester trained in Yale and operated as a forester. And it's been very validating to have him say, "I've been looking for this for 15 years." So we're really proud of the funders. We've got a really supportive group behind us of climate tech and natural resource oriented folks. And so yes, we are a venture funded SaaS company right now. In the future, we've got a lot of downstream market opportunities, like unlocking carbon markets. So if we can get the project supply built through our SaaS model, and then we can help facilitate carbon finance through a platform that we will build once there is enough supply and take a piece of that transaction revenue, that becomes a really interesting business. There's also downstream biomass markets. There's a lot of water money. Biodiversity money is coming. Workforce, like can we help match projects to qualified workforce and create sort of a gig economy for restoration? So there's all kinds of downstream market plays for us that investors are excited about.
Allison Wolff:
In the meantime, we're in a very hard business. We're mostly B2G, or selling to customers that get government funding to do restoration work. That's a very hard, slow flywheel. And it is like we're turning the crank. We're getting the proofs of concept landscape by landscape and telling the stories of impact. And the good news is the flywheel is turning and we have a shot at becoming the standard system for land management and monitoring, and really standardizing how that happens with standardized data and trade off weighing and resilience frameworks. And what I get excited about is ultimately we can help answer the question of is this community, is this landscape resilient? And what does that mean in terms of carbon water biodiversity benefit and avoided losses for insurance companies and all kinds of things? So we can really start shaping this idea of resilience.
Cody Simms:
And I know for many people, wildfires is their personal trigger for why they start to care about climate change. For many of us who live in the Western United States, it's become a very unfortunate reality every year that is in our face and makes living harder. It makes all of us question, do we want to keep living here? It makes all of us question what's going to happen to our property values? What are my children going to experience in terms of air quality? And so I have to imagine there are a lot of people listening to this today that are personally triggered. And a lot of listeners at MCJ are very talented people in the technology industry or other parts of the climate ecosystem that are wanting to come in and contribute their personal skills. So for anyone listening today who is interested in what you're building at Vibrant Planet, where are you looking for help right now?
Allison Wolff:
Yeah, so we are hiring a head of sales. So really to help us systematize a bunch of our trusted former insiders from forest service, BLM. EPA have done a great job getting us to where we are in proving ourselves and getting the platform seeded. Now we have to systematize that and think about customer success and operationalizing sales. So if anyone's interested, I am all ears and looking for someone really great, ideally that has some government background. The other thing, too, is we're also looking for non-dilutive capital opportunities. In fact, I listened to your podcast with Joel, from Climate Finance Solutions. I had a call with him this morning. He's mapping the non-dilutive space for us. So thank you for that, MCJ. Really excited about where can we get. We're in a high risk, hard business. And so where can we get capital to help us build out an MVP product for the MRV system for carbon, the measurement reporting verification system. And can we make that a public good through a grant, as well? And so we're looking for those kind of non-dilutive capital opportunities. So that's another area. If the community has ideas for us, pockets of government funding, private foundation funding that is looking for high risk solutions to climate and nature based climate solutions, we're all ears.
Cody Simms:
Allison, anything I should have asked that I didn't ask?
Allison Wolff:
A million things. This is a complex, big, hairy, audacious thing we've taken on. I think the thing I want to leave people with, fire is personally affecting so many of us. And I want people to know that there's hope. Again, that we can do something about this, but we as a company and others in this space that are thinking about biomass industries and doing the work of getting fuels out of these forests and helping to restructure them, like Earth Force IO and others, we need a fast, focused set of funders and help funding pilots to prove that this stuff works. We don't have time for the slow, prove yourself over time. We don't have time for that. So this is a high risk, like jump in with both feet, all hands on deck moment, or we really do face catastrophic failure. But we know what to do. We just have to do it at speed and scale. John Doerr is right. This is one area where we've got to go very, very fast.
Cody Simms:
Well, I admire and appreciate the spirit of optimism that we can do this, we just have to decide we want to do it collectively. Certainly that's something MCJ stands for, is trying to help shine a light on what these solutions can be. So Alison, I super appreciate you coming on today and sharing more about what you're building and the impact it can have on not just those of us in California, but all of us, due to the importance of the Western forests and Mediterranean style forests across the world to food, water, and livelihood, both of humans and all of the biodiversity that lives within them. So thanks for your time today.
Allison Wolff:
Yeah, thanks for having me. And it is true, forests are a big part of sustaining us, so we've got to get after it.
Cody Simms:
Fantastic. Thanks, Allison.
Allison Wolff:
Thank you for having me. Fun conversation.
Jason Jacobs:
Hey, everyone. Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on My Climate Journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.co. Note that is .co, not .com. Someday we'll get the .com, but right now, .co. You can also find me on Twitter at JJacobs22, where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear. And before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers made me say that. Thank you.
