A storm that has been lurking all morning finally breaks as Win Maung steps off his puttering motor launch into ankle-deep mud that gives off a heavy stink of ammonia. It is August 2018, the middle of the monsoon season, and under the downpour, the silver-grey channels of Myanmar’s coastal wetlands fade into a murk of spray and low mist. On the bankside, spindly mangroves dip their roots into water.
When Win Maung, head of mangrove restoration projects at the Worldview International Foundation (WIF), a Norwegian nonprofit, first came to this stretch of Myanmar’s Ayeyarwady coastline in the 1990s, the area was still thickly forested. “The trees were so big I couldn’t get my arms around them,” he says. “Now…” he gestures at the sparse tree cover. There is barely a single trunk more than ten centimetres in diameter.
Mangrove forests used to stretch in an almost uninterrupted arc around the Bay of Bengal, from Bangladesh in the north to Thailand in the south, forming a natural line of defence against cyclones that batter the coast every few years. Over the past few decades they have been stripped away to be turned into charcoal, or to make space for shrimp farms, rice fields and tourist resorts. In Myanmar alone, a million hectares of mangroves have been lost since 1980.
The loss of the forest has left the country exposed to extreme weather. In 2008, Cyclone Nargis made landfall in Ayeyarwady, sending storm surges 40km up the river’s delta. More than 138,000 people died.
For the past four monsoon seasons, Win Maung has been overseeing an attempt to rebuild the barrier. It is dirty, difficult work, and slow. People from local communities are employed to plant seedlings by hand, crouching in the sucking mud for hours at a time. Since 2015, they have planted five million trees, covering just over 2,000 hectares of land.
It's back-breaking work, and progress can be slow. However, over the past 18 months a more radical solution has been trialled. Drones, operated by the Oxfordshire-based startup BioCarbon Engineering, have been flying sorties over the devastated mangroves.
White quadcopters, a metre across, fly at altitude, making high-resolution SK.AI maps of the terrain, feeding the data back into an algorithm that can analyse the topology, slope, soil type and moisture to determine the optimum position of each seed; and collecting granular information about the seedlings as they grow.
Other UAVs fly two metres above the ground, strafing the bare mud with air guns, leaving puckered lines in the ground. Each shot deposits a white, marble-sized seed pod buried a few centimetres below the surface. Working at full capacity, BioCarbon’s drones, flying in six-strong autonomous swarms, can plant 400,000 trees in a day, according to BioCarbon’s co-founder Irina Fedorenko. “Of course, the WIF had large hopes that we would be able to plant a million trees,” Fedorenko says. “We did our best to find the best time [to plant]. And then the rain doesn’t come, or the tide carries the seeds away. It’s scary that there is no normal weather any more. We cannot rely on anything being normal and like it used to be."
In October 2018, a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that to keep global warming from reaching 2°C above pre-industrial levels – a threshold level to avoid catastrophic and irreversible climate change – would require a 25 per cent net reduction of man-made carbon emissions by 2030, and net zero emissions by 2070. Global emissions have actually increased in recent years, however, rising nearly thee per cent in 2018, according to the Global Carbon Budget.
The global failure to bring down emissions has focused attention on the other half of the carbon equation: taking it out of the atmosphere. Trees are an obvious part of the answer. Forests already remove a quarter of all the carbon dioxide that humans emit into the atmosphere. According to the IPCC’s assessment, there is no realistic pathway to 2°C that does not involve reforestation on a huge scale.
As an ecosystem restoration project, Win Maung and Fedorenko’s efforts in Myanmar have been highly successful; however, in the context of the mass destruction of tropical forests around the world it is going far too slowly – in 2017 alone, nearly 16 million hectares of tropical forests were destroyed.
“A few years ago, governments around the word committed to restore 350 million hectares by 2050,” Fedorenko says. “To actually execute this goal would take 200 years [at the current rate]. The WIF do an excellent job, but they don’t have the capacity to execute on the number of trees. That’s where we can come in.”
Fedorenko, an environmental activist from Vladivostok, first began working on forestry projects in the Russian far east as a teenager. While still a student, she started Green Light, an NGO that attracted funding from WWF and awards from the United Nations. On the back of the charity’s success she won several academic scholarships, pinging her back and forth between Moscow and Oxford. By 2014, working on her PhD in environmental governance at Oxford University, she had started to feel bogged down in academia, and was looking for an opportunity to do something with a practical impact.
That year she attended an entrepreneurship session organised by the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford, where she pitched an idea for a crowdfunding and monitoring platform for forestry. There she met Lauren Fletcher, who had been an engineer at Nasa for 20 years, working on projects to understand the viability of life on Mars. He had become disillusioned by the amount of money being thrown at this research, to the detriment of environmental research on Earth. At the Skoll meeting, Fletcher pitched what he saw as a potential solution to the problem of reforestation: firing saplings from drones. “We just looked at each other and thought: ‘Well, that’s rather complementary’,” Fedorenko recalls.
Fedorenko and Fletcher spent the next six months pitching early iterations of Fletcher’s idea at entrepreneurship competitions and accelerators. Their first break came in February 2015 when their concept was selected as a finalist for Drones for Good, a competition organised by the Emirate of Dubai with a $1 million first prize.
“At that time, we didn’t even have a drone,” Fedorenko says. Using a small grant from the Skoll Foundation, and some money provided by the competition itself, they hired their first employee – an engineer – and cobbled together a prototype. They finished third, competing against huge teams from global tech companies. “That was how we started rolling,” Fedorenko says. “That was when we thought: ‘It’s real’.”
A few months later, the prototype won the €100,000 top prize at the Hello Tomorrow conference in Paris. Executives from the French drone-maker Parrot were in the audience, and told Fedorenko that they wanted to invest in the company.
"That was our first million.” Fedorenko says. “We still worked from a garage for the first two years, but at least it was a rented garage. It wasn’t someone’s mum’s garage.”
They hired South African business school student Matthew Ritchie, an accountant who is now the company’s CFO, and Susan Graham, an Australian biomedical engineer who joined as CTO. They also employed remote sensing experts to fit out drones with the equipment to measure and analyse landscapes, and a machine-learning and data team who developed the back-end systems that turn the sensor data into planting patterns. Much of the early research and development focused on the UAV payloads: over time, the team's thinking evolved from planting whole seedlings to using marble-sized, biodegradable seed pods.
Their first project came in early 2017. An Australian coal company hired them to restore a decommissioned open-cut mine, seeding it with grasses, bushes and trees. Next, a commission came in from an owner of private woodland in Herefordshire.
In 2017, an old contact from Fedorenko’s time as an activist in Russia approached her, and together they secured a $240,000 grant from the GHR Foundation, a US philanthropic organisation, to set up trials in Ayeyarwady Region. “I knew that it was going to be tough,” Fedorenko says. “Environmental restoration is always a question of governance and management. It’s never a question of technology. We were ready for that.”
The Thor Heyerdahl Climate Park, which spreads over 2,200 hectares of coastal wetlands in Ayeyarwady, is named after the Norwegian adventurer who, in 1947, sailed a wooden raft 7,000km across the Pacific from Peru to Polynesia. When the WIF arrived seven years ago, the park had been almost entirely stripped of its mangrove forests.
Arne Fjørtoft, an 81-year-old former politician and journalist from Norway, co-founded WIF in 1979. He was invited into Myanmar just after elections in 2012 triggered its still incomplete transition from military rule. His previous involvement in the country had been somewhat less welcome. In the 1990s, he helped to found the Radio Democratic Voice of Burma with exiled opposition leaders, broadcasting pro-democracy messages into the country over shortwave radio.
Myanmar is still a difficult country to operate in, riven with internal conflicts and financially unstable. Ayeyarwady Region is contiguous with the state of Rakhine, where the government has been accused by the UN of committing genocide against the Muslim Rohingya minority.
The area around the climate park is economically underdeveloped, and lacks even basic infrastructure. The road from Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, deteriorates steadily the further it gets from the capital, and by the time it reaches the coast it is barely more than a cracked and battered track. The power is only on for a few hours per day. All along the seafront, buildings carry the scars of previous years’ storms; some have fallen down and never been rebuilt – WIF’s headquarters borders on an abandoned marine research facility, smashed by Cyclone Mala in 2006. Employment opportunities are sparse outside the regional capital of Pathein, largely limited to fishing, small-scale farming and seasonal work at a few down-at-heel hotels and beach resorts that are still clinging on to service dwindling numbers of tourists from Yangon.
That poverty contributed to the destruction of the landscape in the first place, so to ensure that their work endures, Fjørtoft and WIF have had to create a direct link between economic development and the survival of the mangroves. Some of that comes from direct employment in the planting operations and in the nurseries where WIF prepares seedlings; some from more sustainable crab and shrimp farming in the roots of the mangroves. They sponsor education and entrepreneurship initiatives, teaching school-leavers English and IT skills. It took three years of working with local communities and getting their buy-in before they could even start the planting work.
“We are not in the tree-planting business, we are not even in the mangrove restoration business – but we are in the business of working with people,” Fjørtoft says. “If we forget the people in the communities – and most of them are very poor, over 60 per cent are under the poverty line – of course they will cut the trees after five or six years, when they can make charcoal out of them, and other things. It’s a complicated socio-economic operation where you help to put all the components together and do it right.” Poverty, society and environmental challenges are deeply intertwined, and anyone coming in from the outside has to be able to balance and manage the local dynamics, he says.
Fedorenko knew that the Ayeyarwady projects was an opportunity to put BioCarbon’s technology to the test. The previous trials in the UK and Australia had been smaller projects, in more controlled environments. Myanmar presented the kind of complex economic and social forces that can frequently derail well-intentioned environmental projects. It was something of a baptism of fire for a young company from the other side of the world.
Fedorenko and her team arrived in July 2017. Logistics proved difficult from the start. At one stage in the early trials, the BioCarbon team had to charge the drone batteries in a monastery, the only building with a reliable generator. Getting batteries for the larger drones through customs was a perennial challenge, and just mentioning it causes a shadow to cross the faces of the field team members. At one stage, a local partner even proposed smuggling the batteries in on one of the small boats that ply the coast, moving people and contraband across borders by night.
Although the Burmese government is vocal in its support of environmental initiatives, it is often inconsistent and arbitrary in its policies. There is no official rule on the use of drones in Myanmar, but in October 2017, after a crew working for a Turkish TV station flew a small camera drone over a restricted military site, the government imposed a sudden and arbitrary ban on all drones coming into the country. The prohibition, since ended, left BioCarbon’s UAVs stranded in transit.
Climate change, already having an impact on equatorial countries like Myanmar, proved to be both a challenge and a demonstration of the value of the company’s mapping capabilities. When it began trials, BioCarbon relied on local knowledge of weather patterns and tides. Those, however, are no longer reliable, leading to seedlings being destroyed by unexpected areas of drought, or washed away by unusually high tides. With the climate and the landscape changing, the ability to dynamically plot planting conditions becomes ever more relevant.
There were also engineering challenges. Mangrove seeds proved too large and too fragile for BioCarbon’s earlier prototypes, while the firing mechanism had to be re-worked to cope with the wet, heavy soils in the swamps.
After a year and a half of testing, however, Fedorenko says that the team proved that the uptake rate of the planted seeds is comparable to those planted by hand. This was enough for WIF to invite BioCarbon back as part of the restoration plans for a large area of mudflats. “We can go to the areas where nobody wants to go. Mudflats that are dangerous, or mountains where no one can climb with a bag of saplings on their back,” Fedorenko says. “It would take [traditional methods] weeks to do what we can do in days, maybe even hours. And it’s a fraction of the cost.”
In April 2018, BioCarbon raised a seed round of $2.5 million last year from Parrot and Systemiq, an investment firm. Fletcher left the company last summer and returned to the US. Graham took over as chief executive. A few months later, they finally moved out of the garage that served as their headquarters into a larger space, in an industrial estate outside Oxford.
The workshop, divided lengthways by a thin screen, is jammed with prototypes built from the gutted pieces of paintball guns, tubs of wiring and circuit boards, and a 3D printer. A garden shed has been co-opted as part of a small biology lab, where researchers tend to soil samples and seedlings growing under UV lights. “These guys in engineering are trying to design cooler, faster [systems] to deliver the seeds," says Elena Fernández-Miranda, who joined BioCarbon as head of plant science in 2016. "What I want is to make sure my baby seeds land safely.”
This means managing the mechanical stresses on the seeds as they are fired from the muzzle of the planting drone. The pods need to hit the ground with enough penetrating force that the seeds reach a viable depth, without being damaged.
The firing mechanism for the seed pods is powered by compressed air canisters, with a design that borrows heavily from paintball guns. Within the pods, the seeds are cushioned in soil, which is formulated to match that of the planting area, to optimise the chances of the seed growing.
Recently, BioCarbon has been commissioned to plant trees on former mining sites in New South Wales. This has spurred Fernández-Miranda to explore how seed pods could be modified to include bacteria and fungus that could actually decontaminate and restore badly degraded soils.
Even before the next Myanmar project begins, the company is reaching its capacity to execute on contracts. It has opened an office in Australia, and is looking for a site in south-east Asia so it can be closer to Myanmar and to other potentially lucrative markets in the region.
There is no more grant money, so BioCarbon will have to prove that there is a commercial appetite for tree planting on-demand. And there are already compelling reasons to believe that will be the case.
As the challenge of bringing down net emissions becomes ever more urgent and acute, some governments are already attaching a financial price to carbon emissions, a “carbon tax”. In January, an open letter signed by 27 Nobel laureates and four former chairs of the US Federal Reserve proposed a levy on corporate emissions.
A high, compulsory price for carbon will force private companies with large carbon emissions – particularly those in energy or carbon-intensive businesses, such as oil majors or steelmakers – to buy into carbon credits to offset their emissions and reduce their tax bills.
Graham’s pitch to venture capitalists is that if the market develops as it needs to, there will be an almost inexhaustible supply of work.
“There is a very large swell of increase in demand for carbon. That’s combined with an increasing cost of carbon, which is driving urgency,” she says. “There are two billion hectares of degraded land. There is not a lack of land. What there is, is the lack of coordination to scale up projects to address the challenge.”
More urgently is the necessity to do something about the devastation of global ecosystems before the impact on the planet becomes too severe. The value of BioCarbon Engineering’s technology, Graham says, will become ever more apparent as the cost of inaction becomes clearer.
“There’s a high likelihood that we will overshoot the 2°C mark,” she says. “And we will need a way back.”
However, reforestation projects are complex and expensive. It's also extremely hard to quantify how much carbon is being sequestered by trees. Verification is mostly done manually – a project has to hire an independent consultant who goes out into the field to measure the trees and plug the data into an internationally agreed equation, which outputs a figure for the number of tonnes of carbon dioxide that a project is drawing down from the atmosphere.
“Biology is a messy business,” Peter Smith, chair in plant and soil science at the University of Aberdeen and an expert in sequestration, says. “If you put a scrubber on the top of a power station, you know exactly how much CO2 you’re reducing. It’s more difficult where you’ve got trees that are growing on variable soils in variable climates, exposed to varying degrees of climatic extremes.”
BioCarbon aims to solve this data problem. The company’s drones can perform these measurements from the air at a drastically reduced cost, which can be visualised, so that clients can monitor the performance of new trees. If, for instance, a reforestation project is sponsored by different investors, BioCarbon’s mapping, planting and monitoring systems are able to digitally divide an area of re-forested land on the map and assign different patches to different companies, down to the individual tree. This means that they can source multiple, smaller investments or donations and aggregate them into a single, real-world project and output individualised data for each client.
The potential impact is quite profound. If the system works, it could enable many more investors to enter the market with smaller amounts of money, and it would offer huge buyers – such as oil majors, who will need to offset hundreds of millions of tonnes – a way to efficiently deploy their money. BioCarbon would sit as a kind of market-maker between organisations like WIF and the potential buyers of carbon, linking land to capital and vice versa.
“It’s a very complex world right now which we are trying to simplify,” Fedorenko says. It won’t cost you much. We’ve already done all the legwork for you. We want to be the Airbnb of carbon offset.”
For the past few months, BioCarbon has been fielding cold calls from oil majors and consumer goods companies looking to put money into offset projects. “We want to make the barrier to entry much lower [for companies]. Imagine you are Audi and you sit in Germany, and you think: Oh, let’s plant some mangroves in Myanmar. How do you even start? What do you do? Who do you call? And here we come.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
