Interview 3

Who Did You Interview?

• Former colleague from startup
• Explanation: the mentioned climate-tech startup tries to enable forest owners to participate in the voluntary carbon market by digitizing the manual certification process, aided by remote sensing and artificial intelligence.

Demographics That Might Provide Helpful Context for Their Responses

• Position: Co-Founder
• Age: Sth. end of 20's

Key Findings from the Interview

• As an early-stage climate-tech startup, without a doubt, you are facing lots of challenges in the context of “Sustainability”. What do you struggle with the most?
• My interview partner emphasized his awareness that in the startup world, it is becoming increasingly important to become a unicorn and show rapid growth rates every month. However, this contradicts his personal view of the world, which is why the startup tries to have a more sustainable approach. This applies not only to the software solution offered, but also in terms of company growth.
• However, here comes the first challenge, namely that the economic aspect of sustainability is just as important as the other two (environment, social). After all, without a commercially viable product, it is very difficult to get funding and positively impact the world on a large scale. He didn't seem to envision this being as difficult as it turned out to be. Another problem he and the other co-founder face involves politics, including political commitments. For the startup's vision to thrive, Article 6 of the Paris Agreement (on double counting) is critical. However, the final form of this article has not yet been agreed upon and will likely be some time in coming. As a result, the expansion of the voluntary carbon market is at least partially hampered.
• Taken together, economics and politics are some of the biggest problems in his view.

• Okay, interesting. So how is your view about potential customers? How are CO2-emissions certificates viewed by the public?
• According to my interviewee, there is a big demand for carbon offsetting on a voluntary basis, for all kinds of companies. This shows that many more people are thinking about sustainability than a few years ago.

In this context, aren’t CO2-emissions certificates actually the same as indulgence trade in previous centuries? “The rich” can emit as much as they like, as long as they have enough money to compensate for it?

• Actually, you could argue that way. But the interview partner pointed out that mankind has no other option than to tackle the climate problem in every possible dimension. Moreover, a voluntary CO2 emission certificate is something that is not regulated and therefore allows for many bad projects that do not ensure sustainable forest growth, for example. Adding up, there is almost not a single recorded CO2 emission project in Europe - all are located somewhere else in the world. This makes it all the more important to find a way for more sustainable forestry on the ground, and to give people the opportunity to offset their travels, etc. Because ultimately, this is the first step in raising awareness of this huge problem: once people start changing their behavior and buying certificates, they may also think about other ways to contribute.