Earthshot Labs

Earthshot Labs develops and finances nature-based carbon projects, using ecosystem forecasting to model what a forest will actually sequester. Developing a carbon project the conventional way takes years and over a million dollars before anyone knows whether it works, and the projections it produces have been unreliable enough that serious capital keeps its distance.

That distrust is the bottleneck. There is more demand for high-integrity nature-based credits than there is supply, and the gap persists because nobody can underwrite a project the way they would underwrite anything else: no standard risk framework, no consistent diligence, no way to compare two forests. Getting the ecology right is what makes the finance possible, and the finance is what puts land under protection. Nature-based carbon has a credibility problem that will be solved by better measurement or not at all.