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August 10th 2021
It's with great excitement that we can announce Michael will be joining Cecil as a Senior Science Advisor. We have been blown away with Michael's climate knowledge and his vision for the natural capital ecosystem. Michael's experience dates back to contributing to the first GHG protocol in the late 90s, advising global corporate leaders on climate solutions and even founding tech start ups in the climate ecosystem.
We asked him to write up a quick note on his journey to Cecil!
Over to Michael 👇
It took me a while to understand that our global climate and natural capital challenges were fully integrated and had to be solved together. Considering that my climate change career began in 1998—that’s a long time to wait to experience such a profound epiphany.
I was aware of the major role played by the biosphere in helping to regulate the global climate system and, more precisely, how improving land management across forests and farmland would play an important part of the climate change solution.
However, I had overlooked the global scale of the human activities which had led to significant losses of natural capital and ecosystem services.
The global natural capital challenge shares at least one key characteristic with the climate change crisis: both need to rapidly scale the annual level of capital being invested into solutions, from $billions to $trillions. This level of capital won’t find its way to natural capital solutions without the appropriate underlying market infrastructure capable of transforming the entire value chain into investment quality opportunities. The global markets for wheat and oil, for example, both of which are traditional natural capital commodities, have investment quality standards across their entire value chain which allow trillions of dollars to flow through them.
I envisage a market where $trillions in capital can restore billions of hectares of ecosystems. A market where natural capital can accumulate to provide the goods and services on which modern society relies. To get there, we must develop the underlying infrastructure needed to attract the entities, capital and trust to scale a global natural capital market. Where oil and wheat had almost a century to get their infrastructure in place — the scale and timing of today's global environmental challenges demand that we move faster. Cecil has created the best chance to be part of an emerging group of climate startups stepping up to this challenge and I cannot be more excited to be part of the team.
I have two daughters, aged 8 and 5. I start every day asking myself the same question: how can I leverage my expertise, experience, and networks to ensure they have a stable climate system and sufficient natural capital to live their best possible lives?
Up to now, I have felt confident that I was doing enough to leverage my talents to help drive climate solutions at scale, but my work on natural capital was almost non-existent. This all changed when Mick Liubinskas from Climate Salad introduced me to Cecil and the two co-founders, Alex and Rory. I would not have made this decision to jump into a natural capital startup unless three things were completely clear:
Now there's only one thing left to do, get started!
If you would like to connect or hear more about my experience, you can find me on LinkedIn or drop me a line at [email protected]
Michael Molitor, Senior Science Advisor
To friends who are looking to join a purpose-driven group of product builders, we are searching for top talent hungry to drive carbon capture through better collaboration.