Vibrant Planet — which is creating an “operating system for forest restoration” — comes as a pleasant surprise, and not one I expected.
Climate tech, while relatively new, has settled into two camps: hardware and software. And while Vibrant Planet is definitely a software play — from its cloud focus to its per-seat licenses, it’s SaaS through and through — its end goal is different from many others.
The startup, which this week announced a $17 million seed round, isn’t just trading carbon credits or providing carbon accounting software. It’s trying to tackle a very real and very hard problem — how to first save, then restore, the world’s damaged forests.
Having been trained as a landscape ecologist, I’ve grown somewhat cynical that forest conservation and the free market can exist in a mutually beneficial relationship. From a markets-first perspective, forests tend to be either exploited or forgotten.
Yet Vibrant Planet clearly thinks there’s an opportunity in helping the world manage a multitrillion-dollar asset.
A landmark paper from 1997 estimated that forests provide $4.7 trillion worth of annual economic benefits worldwide, including fresh water, lumber, nutrient cycling, erosion control, and climate regulation. While there’s no truly global way to adjust the dollar figure for inflation, it’s basically equivalent to 15% of global GDP.
In theory, carbon credits aren’t a bad idea. In fact, they’re probably one of the least bad ideas we’ve tried when it comes to using free markets to foster forest preservation. It’s just that in practice, they leave a lot to be desired.
Carbon credits are an attempt to bring forests into the economic fold. They’re well intentioned, though I’m skeptical about them. More on that later, though, because while Vibrant Plant has a plan to work with the carbon markets, it’s starting on much firmer ground with fire-adapted forests.
And there are plenty of those. It’s starting in California and, soon, the entire American West, where forest fires have been growing in frequency and intensity. After that, Vibrant Planet could head down under to Australia, where eucalyptus forests, which have long coexisted with fire, burned catastrophically in the 2019-2020 fire season. It could even take its product to Brazil and the Cerrado ecoregion, which was traditionally managed with fire for centuries.
Beginning with fire-adapted forests is a smart move. For one, it lets Vibrant Planet test its product close to home in familiar and well-studied forests. But it also gives it a chance to address climate change in a way that’s more immediate.
Fire and flagstone
Wildfire has become the face of climate change in the American West. There’s no doubt that wildfire season has grown more severe with climate change, and it’s gotten to the point where not only is it threatening people’s lives and property in the wildland-urban interface — also known as the WUI, the point where human habitation butts up against vast landscapes — it’s also causing public health crises as wildfire smoke blankets cities and seeps into homes and businesses.
Wildfire is special in that it’s an ecological process that humans have a long history with. For millennia, people have shaped ecosystems by setting them ablaze. For the last century or more, though, we’ve largely stopped that practice under the false belief that forests would be worse off if they burned frequently. Decades of fire suppression have turned forests in the Western U.S. into stuffed tinderboxes, with fuel for the fires stretching from the ground to the topmost canopies.
But as scientists have studied forests and how they work, they’ve come to appreciate how controlled burns might help keep catastrophic fires at bay. And in places where controlled burning is too dangerous, they’re devising more sophisticated ways of bringing forests back into balance, or at least closer to it.
Managing forests is hard, though, especially in the WUI. People have intense feelings about forests, which isn’t a bad thing at all, but it does complicate decision-making. And because forests offer many ecosystem services, including clean water, erosion control, animal and plant habitat, carbon storage and more, there are a lot of priorities to balance when managing them.
Vibrant Planet’s Land Tender seems to acknowledge that, providing different users different ways to view the data while also showing them ancillary benefits (or drawbacks) of whatever management plan they favor. The optimist’s take is that this sort of feature could help competing visions reach consensus much more quickly. I can see many organizations putting a lot of value on that, certainly enough to pony up the $3,500 per seat that Vibrant Planet is asking.
Giving them credit
The second plank of the startup’s business model is assisting with carbon credits related to forest preservation and restoration. It stands to reason that a company that holds a lot of data on forests and understands how they’re managed would have an advantage in helping other companies develop and manage forest-based carbon credits. If its data and modeling efforts live up to their potential, it might turn into a lucrative business line.
Here’s where I’m hesitant, though. In theory, carbon credits aren’t a bad idea. In fact, they’re probably one of the least bad ideas we’ve tried when it comes to using free markets to foster forest preservation. It’s just that in practice, they leave a lot to be desired.
There’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding carbon credits. Carbon credits are sold in a wide range of countries — that’s part of the appeal, given that they preserve vital forests no matter where they are — but it means that there’s no single legal or regulatory body overseeing them. What happens if a forest goes up in smoke or loses half its trees to an insect infestation? Will companies have to go buy a replacement or pay for its restoration? Currently, companies that have purchased forest-based credits or offsets have no legal or fiduciary reason to do anything about it.
It’s problems like those that I think are holding back the carbon credit market. Markets function best when there’s clarity, transparency and some common rules (usually called laws). At the moment, the market for carbon credits is lacking in all three.
Ecological SaaS
I don’t mean to rain on Vibrant Planet’s parade. Carbon credits are real, and companies are paying real money for them, so there’s no reason it should stay out of the market. And if Vibrant Planet can bring some degree of rigor and transparency to it, then it’ll have done some good.
But I do think it’s telling that that’s the second plank of its business model, not the first. Vibrant Planet was smart to start with forest management as it relates to fire, water and other very tangible and immediate ecosystem services. People in the American West have gotten a taste of how harsh life can be in a landscape where fire is the norm and long droughts aren’t unheard of.
There’s nothing like an existential crisis to focus people on solving their problems, and for a long time, we’ve ignored problems in our forests that are largely of our own making. Vibrant Planet is smart to be ready with a solution, and if it can execute well, I suspect it’ll create a handsome niche for ecological SaaS that I never expected would exist.