 from sunny Hawaii Monday, May 23rd, 2022, my name is Howard Wig, very honored to be your host and very honored to represent the state of Hawaii with the Hawaii State Energy Office because we were the first state to declare a goal of 100% clean energy and then we've expanded that goal from just electricity to transportation and ultimately to the ultimate decarbonization where we will be absorbing more carbon than we are producing. Rather ambitious goal. Now there are many ways to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and certainly maybe the best beloved by all of us is by planting more and more and more or a station so that all those nice leaves can absorb all that carbon from the carbon dioxide which is the blanket that's heating our earth and providing beauty and shade and comfort. A little side story before I introduce our honored guest. I was in El Paso, Texas some years ago. It was winter and the friend I was staying with was on top of a hill that overlooked all of El Paso and then across the Rio Grande at Juarez, Mexico and something I saw was that a lot of El Paso was green green green trees and you looked across the river at Juarez and there was this this this gray brown smudge and it was the barrio the slum area of Juarez and since it was winter people were heating and they were heating with kerosene lamps in their own homes causing a heck of a lot of smoke so there was this big brown smudge and a lot of greenery and red roofs in El Paso and that gave me one more lesson about the fact that the more trees there are in an urban area generally speaking the more prosperous the more clean the more desirable the more valuable everything is thanks to the presence of trees which is an excellent way into my guests all of whom represent Terra Formation an international profit company that is aiming to maybe not green the globe but certainly green as much as possible and absorb as much carbon as possible and cool down the planet in the process which gives me great pleasure to introduce Mr. Jason Prebble and if you recognize the name Prebble he does come from a distinguished family and take it away Jason Terra Formation Hawaii. Hello everybody yeah my name is Jason Prebble I'm representing Terra Formation with my colleagues Emily and Christian I'm from Kahaluu on Oahu and my background is in biodiversity conservation so all three of us actually started in plants and then I did my graduate studies in birds in New Zealand and then bats in Japan and then coming home to Hawaii really wanted to figure out you know what I could do to help conservation here and was thinking about community restoration groups and trying to promote those and started thinking about the bottlenecks that slow down restoration work and terra formation it turns out is trying to tackle those exact bottlenecks so very happy to now work for terra formation I'll pass it on to Emily. Hi Aloha everyone thank you my name is Emily and I am on a team with Christian and Jason we're the Forestry Partnerships team and I represent North America and the Pacific but I'm coming to you today from East Honolulu. I actually grew up on a farm in rural northern Minnesota so I saw my parents work themselves to the bone with very little to show for it they were more traditional farmers with more rotating crops and using manure fertilizer and they just couldn't keep up with the chemical farmers so eventually we had to sell a farm and I always wondered what you know thinking this can't be right this you know constant battle between chemicals and weeds and insects and like what are we doing so I just remember thinking why are we fighting the natural world like this but still growing up on a farm fostered my intrigue with the natural world led to me studying plant taxonomy and physiology and anatomy and then I became absolutely fascinated with Hawaiian ethnobotany so that's when I really discovered the deep rich lasting connections between people and plants and I realized that's what I was missing and really what I was longing for that enduring connection so I ended up getting my bachelor of science in ethnobotany and then I got my master's in botany in 2018 both at University of Hawaii at Manoa I heard to get much more of a difference between northern Minnesota and sunny Hawaii but yes you do make that connection there yeah um so I guess I what drew me to terra formation was really um you know throwing back to what I was saying about chemical western agriculture it was you know why do we need to fight earth on these processes um earth's been you know been successful at these processes for millennia so how does earth solve these challenges and that's really where nature-based solutions come into play and it's basically looking more closely at how earth solves challenges and then replicating that whether it's through biomimicry or artificial selection um you know not genetically modifying crops but um selecting for certain genetics over long periods of time and then velcro right is the classic biomimicry example so from school um I started coordinating for a lot local nonprofit that's Hawaii um Laokaki Hawaii's plant conservation network kind of a multiple um but the combined weights I guess of you know climate impacts and island systems and then I had my second child our daughter really you know instilled the urgency in me and the immediate need to do something um so that's how I made the switch from the nonprofit over to terra formation um because it you know using the nature-based solutions that sustain and enhance biodiversity even all world supporting you know human well-being that was really the driver and the connection that I needed um between conservation and climate action I think I will turn it over to Christian hi Christian all the way from Puerto Rico hi everybody and greetings from Puerto Rico uh I'm also glad to be joining this this excellent team of experts and we share many similarities including that I'm also a UH Manoa graduate in Botany so we didn't study together but we all went through the same school and and gather a lot of this similar learning approaches that Hawaii has for conservation and coming from an island in Puerto Rico I decided to move to Hawaii for almost a third of my career to study and also learn about endangered plants and the rare flora of Hawaii for which I uh I worked with it for about five years but I was working for Fish and Wildlife Service in Honolulu and the Pacific Islands and through this connection was how I learned about the importance of plants and how key is to use plants as a priority in conservation because for example most animals all of most animals do use plants most animals use forests and if we don't have a forest and we don't have animals to protect as well so uh I always put plants as a pivotal in in biodiversity conservation and that's how I created my my connection and one day while I'm in the you know uh on the on the home for a job I learn about this company which is doing great things in Hawaii under reforesting areas on the big island and learn about that they're tackling some uh some of the main bottlenecks in conservation and myself have been planting trees for almost 15 years and the main problems that we face in Puerto Rico and in the Caribbean are almost the same as in Hawaii and in many other places in the world with exception of a few uh minor things but we all share this problem of not having enough seeds uh not having enough terrain people having understaff unfunded and not having enough technology to to scale and fast enough the work that we have to do planting trees it's not only you know digging a hole and planting a tree right there is the whole process of collecting and and how the reformation is putting all these together from developing apps to uh working with partners helping create the projects with partners helping assess the seeds for for understanding which one of them can be stored for the long term and use seed banks and nurseries to continuously grow plants and and protect and help scale projects in the long term it all starts from a seed and that's how terra formation uh is focusing on focusing on the seeds and we hope to in the future see millions of uh acres around the world of forest being developed that's a great introduction to terra formation christian thank you does anybody want to take the ball from christian and run further and deeper with it so maybe maybe i'll give some context for the listeners about terra formation as a company so terra formation uh we were founded by yixiang wang as our ceo and starting from around 2017 he was really trying to think about you know people are getting more and more worried about climate change how do we solve this this you know existential level problem and he was so he was going through the numbers checking out different possible solutions that people have raised for climate change mitigation or solution and he he came to the conclusion that reforesting native forest is actually the cheapest and the most political politically feasible and most scalable solution that we currently have and it won't fix everything but if you if we could reforest about three billion acres of the planet which is a lot but is doable that's the estimated amount that the scientists think is available for this type of work if we could do that it would give us the biggest um sort of runway of time where we could maybe then develop other solutions it wouldn't it wouldn't be the complete story but it would be the best way to get carbon drawdown so of course we need to limit our carbon emissions as well as part of the solution but this would be the most scalable solution for drawdown so based on that um conclusion he found a terra formation and in 2019 we started our our first restoration project on the big island so that's a little bit north of kawaii high on the big island in the yishan's property about 45 acres and that was the pilot that is the pilot project for the that we're building and so based on that and this analysis of you know what are the bottlenecks that christian touched on that limit restoration work terra formation is trying to as a company help restoration partners around the world scale up their work and so the sort of the background that we bring into it is we have a forestry team like ourselves who our background is all all trees conservation and a lot of NGO work um and that side of things and then another big portion of our company has sort of business marketing silicon valley roots and um that the benefit of the silicon valley side or that what what that kind of background brings to the table is this idea of scaling right we hear about it a lot with really big companies out of the valley and so they're trying to we're trying to basically scale restoration work which of course is a completely different animal from like a app or software but that's what we're trying to tackle and that's sort of how we operate i'll pass it on to emily and she can go into a little bit of those bottlenecks thanks jason yeah really good introduction to the bottlenecks so like jason and christian we're talking about we've identified major bottlenecks incurred in restoration mainly in seed availability tools and equipment financing and then in training so that's why we provide solutions in the form of either you know seed banks or nurseries or small amounts of financing and then of course we have the terra formation academy courses in seed banking seed collection and then nursery management all online for free right now the major bottleneck though that we noticed in our projects to date was in seed availability so while every project is different and unique that was the one consistent factor and that's why we took a sharp pivot to address it last year by starting a seed bank program so we're hoping to establish the world's first decentralized network of seed banks because the current model of seed banking is really geared around rare species conservation so we want to get more native seeds into the hands of those doing the work and you know seed crops are really variable from year to year they're dependent on abiotic and biotic factors that we have absolutely no control over and sometimes seeds just don't set in abundance and now you know we're starting to see the exacerbated effects of climate change and the outlook is grim at best the recent IPCC report that just came out says we're going to have more fire more storms longer periods of drought so let's face it the trees that we see out there today they might not be there tomorrow that's why we need to start collecting from every tree we can today right now so we have something for the next generation otherwise what is the next generation going to be planting with you know and when you can't find the right amount of seedlings needed from each species to make a complete and resilient forest when that happens the restorationist is usually forced to compromise on biodiversity by planting just a handful of species and compromised forests are incomplete and therefore weak and less resilient to climate's effects so really we're empowering our partners to perfect their supply chain with their own seed bank which will in turn support more restoration projects around the world so we're not only solving for the dearth of native seeds but we're hoping that this decentralized network is the catalyst for a global restoration movement that's unmuted you are you're the Hawaii contingent and the Puerto Rico contingent of a worldwide effort here you describe that a little bit okay I think I can take that one so basically yeah we started in Hawaii a lot of our staff around maybe a fourth to a third of our staff actually is in Hawaii and then we have other projects worldwide or other both partners and staff spread out around the world thankfully now you know we have this option of remote work and what we figured is if we can do it in Hawaii which is one of the most expensive places and unfortunately we have some of the most degraded habitats so if we could do it here we figure we can we can export that process should serve as an example to partners around the world help them speed up and so having staff around the world is also helps us get the best talent but helps us also be a little closer to where our partners might be so like time zone we we everyone in the company is very used to working in a lot of different time zones and it helps to have people around the world but since the problem is global we're not just thinking about locally in Hawaii but the whole world and then we see Hawaii as sort of the laboratory or hopefully the leader and an example for other places and then I think I can pass it on to Christian to touch on a little bit why we focus on restoring biodiversity for us rather than just like any old forest because that's kind of a big issue that terra formation elects to emphasize. Very important thank you Christian. Yes so I wanted to highlight also to follow up on your question one of the reasons I'm based in Puerto Rico is because I'm in Latin America technically and we think they're working within U.S. but I have the same time zone and the same language that most of our partners speak in Latin America so I lead the partnerships for Latin America for terra formation and to answer the question following up on the biodiversity topic by diversity it is defined by the United Nations as all variety of life on earth and natural patterns that it forms when you plant trees you're not only planting trees for wood or for fuel or for whatever reason you're planting trees because the trees bring a value to the ecosystem they help restore the forest the trees help restore the understory and and and and help a lot of organisms like pollinators survive so we think about when we do a reforestation uh forestation projects we think about biodiversity because uh we want the the reforestations to be as diverse as possible so we can not only focus on the more common species but not only on the endangered ones to do all of them and if we can help the the endangered and the rare species that would be a great approach for it and I wanted to give you an example in terms of biodiversity and in lack of having access to resources I live in Puerto Rico where we are very prone to hurricanes and we were hit by not by one but by two hurricanes in 2017 and while the state department of natural resources and other partners were talking about let's go to plant trees right after the hurricanes the hurricane took down a lot of trees a lot of them still but the the island is susceptible to hurricanes and a lot of trees evolved with them so they didn't die they knocked them down but for two years there were no seeds out in the field there were no access to go out in the field and when we wanted to start restoring the the forest we have no resources because we don't have a seed bank in Puerto Rico if we would have had a seed bank in Puerto Rico with diversity of seeds stored in it we can go right away uh and restore the forest this totally happens in in biodiversity but also in agriculture we suffer from the same problem in agriculture but in terms of of addressing biodiversity having a place where you can store your biodiversity in a genetically you know in a genetically approach that you can serve as much as possible in a small space like in a seed bank is what we could it could have helped us to restore Puerto Rico's forest back right after the hurricane it's still the working song going and we still have a lot of things that nature does on its own but we didn't have the opportunity to help speed up the process and that's one of the things that I wanted to to mention as a as a comparison you know and and something that that we live through in a in a life experience and I wanted to also address the issue of lack of diversity because right now there was a big study that came up from by botanical garden conservation international where they say that one out of uh three trees are in danger including Hawaii which I actually had some numbers in here Hawaii has about 163 trees and and sorry 284 trees and 163 are threatened with extinction according to Matt Kierf as a state botanist so that's a big number and if we look at how much biodiversity is being lost throughout the world through reasons like unsustainable farming, agriculture, development and many other reasons in basic species we have to work together and not only address planting trees we have to plant diverse trees so we can restore ecosystem functions which are the ones that are absorbing carbon not only trees absorb carbon the entire biodiversity sequesters carbon in a different way all plants on life use CO2 which is one of the gases emitted by by the global climate change and all plants on earth are capable of sequestering it so to a certain degree they're all important in the restoration process it's not only the trees it's all about the forest and the forms and life that are part of it yeah let me take that into the urban sphere for a minute one of the areas that I work on is urban heat island defect and they there are very very hot areas of cities and guess what those are the areas without trees so there are at least two organizations here locally whose function it is to get as many trees and do as many urban areas as possible so that that's just a little sideline from what you folks are doing yeah there's a lot of like carbon is the big sort of the hot topic but there's a lot of other values in forest and the biodiversity crisis is actually just as major as the carbon crisis in terms of you know the potential damage and potential knock-on effects that we can't predict or have already started to see if anybody listening went to google terra formation you can see on our website there's links to some of our sites on the big island and they might give you more and some of our partner sites as well so that'll give you more of an idea of what this work looks like what our seed banks look like and basically we have these seed banks that have solar panels on them so that they can power themselves in the tropics in places that might not have easy access to electricity and so those seed banks which can be used to store seed for several years can then service nurseries where the seeds are grown which people might be familiar with that what that looks like and then those are eventually out planted and then maintained so there's a there's this focus on tree planting and people might have heard of a lot of tree planting projects but of course tree planting is not the end of restoration work and you don't you don't just put christian mentioned this before but you don't just put a tree in the ground and then you get a forest you have to make sure that those trees grow up and any issues that you know rise in that process are taken care of so it is it is a long process oh yes this is our this is our website it is a long process from seed to carbon or whatever other values you want out of a forest and there is some you know we humans think on short terms a lot of the time but we're tackling a problem like climate change that is massive and is very different from any other problems humans have tackled before and so there's we're trying to do our best to remove bottlenecks at every step of this process and our big island our big island pilot projects are us you know working through those and then taking our learnings and applying them elsewhere so if folks if folks are interested if you're on the big island for example you can reach out to us there's there's a email that's tours just the word tours at terra formation dot com or you could email me if you have a question just jason at terra formation dot com so those two are tours at terra formation dot com or jason at terra formation dot com and yeah if you're on the big island we do take tours we have a KLLE is one of our staff members who does community relations does this whole job and we think that's very important to do not just in Hawaii but also all our partner projects because you need that community support to make sure the trees you know become a forest if you don't want people cutting them down you might lose funding it's a very long-term thing um so yeah i just wanted to put that out there before we run out of time very very good and we have a couple of minutes maybe give some examples of what's going on on the big island um so on the big island we have three sites that are really like putting trees in the ground um we have one site is a little bit above above kauai high that's yishon's property we call it pacific flight it's along the coast very very dry like two inches of rain a year so basically a desert unfortunately denuded over a long period of land misuse and so that project has a desalination plant watering the plants and then we have a site above kailua kona that is we call future forest that has a nursery and a seed bank and then we also have a site uh a little east of wimea that's our only wet forest site that's just starting to get uh get going and they also um have a nursery nearby in wimea wow that would make for some great ecotourism i bet a lot of people visiting Hawaii they just don't want to you know see the hula dancers or go shopping they want to do something meaningful well hopefully if we can build up the um the visibility of this type of work that would be great yeah i i bet you would get a lot of uh interested interested tourists and maybe they can then spread the word plant more more seeds for you i would strongly encourage that all of which brings us unfortunately to and into this wonderful program and the wonderful work you folks are doing thank you jason emily christian so much and i know that everybody watching this wishes you well and you did get the uh the link up there if they want to uh contact you so howard wigg cold green think tec hawaii thank you so much again to all you wonderful people and see you next time thank you so much for watching think tec hawaii if you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on youtube and the follow button on vimeo you can also follow us on facebook instagram twitter and linked in and donate to us at thinktec hawaii.com mahalo