Listeners:

Top listeners:

00:00 00:00

114 | Michael Greene: Carbon Cowboy or Lone Ranger? Part 1
113 | The Future of Environmental Finance: Strategies for Biodiversity and Climate Solutions, with David Hill and George Kelly
112 | Fantasy Football and Dynamic Baselines: New Tools for Impact Assessment
111 | The False Dichotomy Between Reductions and Removals (Rerun)
110| Ecological Economics, Systems Thinking, and the Limits to Growth
109 | How Brazil's Quilombola Communities are Planting the Seeds of Sustainability for Small Farms Around the World, with Vasco van Roosmalen of ReSeed
108 | The Washington Post’s Head Scratcher of a Carbon Story
107 | Francis Bacon and the Prehistory of Climate Finance. Second in an intermittent series on the Untold Story of the Voluntary Carbon Market
106 | Steve Discusses the "Tribes of the Climate Realm" on the Smarter Markets Podcast
105 | The Role of Carbon Credits in Conservation: A Case Study from Guatemala

018 | Why Zoologist Andrew Mitchell Left the Forest to Save the Forest

Episode July 13, 2017

PLAY EPISODE

Today we speak with Andrew Mitchell, founder and director of the Global Canopy Programme (GCP). A zoologist by training, Andrew realized that to save the forest, he had to leave the forest and enter the economic system that was impacting it. So he founded and runs GCP in Oxford and recently became a Senior Adviser to Ecosphere Plus, which is an impact investment group that funnels money into sustainable land-use. I caught up to him in May at the Innovate4Climate conference in Barcelona. I first met Andrew at the 2007 climate talks in Bali, Indonesia, when I was just starting to learn about the impact that forestry and farming had on climate change and how our consumption patterns fit into that. I’d done some research on my own and then plunged into the deep end — jumping from technical panel to technical panel, and sleeping just four hours per night for two weeks.Andrew stood out from most of the other science guys because of his ability to communicate complex issues in simple ways — which is a rare skill. More importantly, his ideas have stood the test of time, while a lot of the simple communicators are oversimplifying or speaking from a position of ideology instead of science.As I mentioned, we spoke at the Innovate4Climate conference in Barcelona.