Stan Alcorn
speaker
46 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Stan Alcorn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
A few months ago, freelance reporter Stan Alcorn was in a crowded hotel lobby in Cali, Colombia. Test, test, test.
The plan is to talk to clients. Mauricio Serna says the plan is to talk to clients. He's got long curly hair, an untucked green shirt, and on his phone, a list of these potential buyers. They're standing all around the hotel lobby in lanyards and business casuals.
Who's like top of the list? Top of my list for me, there's the head of sustainability of Unilever. Unilever, the massive conglomerate that makes everything from Vaseline to Ben & Jerry's ice cream to Axe Body Spray.
I know that you've been doing... Mauricio is still pretty new to being a salesman. But in a nutshell, his pitch is Unilever. You get oil from palm tree plantations in Colombia, which aren't exactly great for native plants and animals. What if I told you there was an easy way to do something good for those ecosystems?
Then, all of a sudden, Mauricio spots his white whale walking across the room. It's him.
This is the moment every budding entrepreneur, like, fever dreams about. Mauricio is about to be able to give a literal elevator pitch.
I'll get it when you run it. Mauricio didn't want to run. Doesn't quite have that killer sales instinct yet.
Today on the show, we follow budding salesman Mauricio Serna on his quest to make a market for this newish financial instrument, the biodiversity credit. And we peek under the hood to try to figure out how these credits actually work. Is the hype around them a bunch of hot air? Or could they be a critical tool for saving thousands of species around the world?
Bust out the marmalade sandwiches. As any Planet Money listener will know, the way we often try to understand some obscure, newfangled financial instrument is to just buy one, get some skin in the game.
For listeners who haven't watched the Paddington movies, first, I'm sorry for your loss. What you need to know is that these bears are the only ones in South America. They are dangerously cute with little white circles around their eyes, hence the name. And some ecologists argue they're kind of an umbrella species. If you protect them, you know you're protecting a bunch of other species.
A whole tropical Andean ecosystem.
It's a plot of land owned by Mauricio's family high up in the tropical Andes of Colombia. They call the place El Globo, or the balloon, because, they like to joke, it was so remote that for a long time the only way to get there was by hot air balloon.
He says a couple centuries ago, this whole area was mature forest, full of yellow-eared parrots and these super rare alma negra trees that translates to black soul trees, kind of metal. And of course, plenty of Paddington's bear.
For a while, they were some of the biggest landowners in the area. And apparently, they were super good at cutting down trees.
But one problem with that logic is that it's driven thousands of species to the brink of extinction. Because every acre cleared for cattle is one less for the Paddingtons of the world. They've been forced into smaller and smaller tracts of remaining land, and their numbers have dwindled, along with a bunch of other threatened species.
And this problem isn't just happening at El Globo, it's happening all over the world.
Mauricio started thinking about how his family land might actually hold the key to start pushing back against biodiversity loss. Because even though they'd cleared the land for cattle, even though they'd diminished the habitat for a bunch of vulnerable species, that was not irreversible.
Mauricio realized that he and his family could be sitting on a biodiversity goldmine if he could just figure out a way to turn the cattle farm back into forest, back into nature.
Still, Mauricio's family is okay with it taking a few years to figure out how to restore the forest and find a way to monetize it along the way.
But we all know what they say about good intentions. And the results here were kind of a disaster. They planted the wrong trees in the wrong places. 70% of them died. And among the ones that lived is an invasive species, a shrub that is notorious for crowding out native vegetation.
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