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Climate Now Episode 107

July 24, 2023

What happens after forests burn?

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Featured Experts

Grant Canary
Founder and CEO, Mast Reforestation

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Grant Canary

Founder and CEO, Mast Reforestation

Grant Canary is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mast Reforestation which was established by the team as a parent company to DroneSeed. The company is provides no upfront cost reforestation after wildfire and supplies seed and seedlings through its subsidiaries Silvaseed and Cal Forest, manages planting crews, and is able to provide financing by utilizing carbon offsets. Grant has focused his entire career on sustainability—working at Vestas wind energy in China, the US and Denmark, and for the US Green Building Council in its infancy. He founded Biosystems Co., in Bogotá, Colombia that utilized food waste to feed insect larvae for use as industrial fish feed— alleviating overfishing pressure and utilizing food waste. He worked with the acquirer to scale that company to a 60k square feet insect protein factory.

In this Episode

2020 was a record breaking season for forest fires in California. Over 4 million acres burned, releasing enough CO2 into the atmosphere to wipe out the prior 18 years of emissions reductions progress in the state. Effective forest restoration and management can make forests more resilient to the increasing threats of climate change: drought, fire and insects, and help ensure that the carbon trapped in those forests stays there. But who should pay the cost of restoring and maintaining those forests?

Mast Reforestation is a company that replants and stewards the regrowth of fire-ravaged forests of the western U.S., many of which cannot grow back without intervention. Their work is paid for by forest carbon credits, a contentious practice of offsetting corporate or personal emissions by paying to grow and/or protect forests that sequester atmospheric carbon via photosynthesis. We sat down with CEO Grant Canary to discuss why active forest regeneration is necessary, whether forest carbon credits are an effective way to pay for that work, and what the alternatives could be.

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