Carbon Tanzania is growing up

A Founder takes a look back, and forward, reflecting on what it takes to build a conservation business ready for an uncertain future.

In English there is an aphorism that goes “You wait ages for a bus, then three come along at once”. Like all good sayings, it is memorable because it contains more than a grain of truth. It both reflects the mundane reality of using public transport, as well as speaking to a deeper truth about how the natural world works – it is full of randomness and unpredictability, nature is clumpy, ecosystems are complex and dynamic and always changing, despite the best efforts of human societies to control and manage them. It is in this spirit of recognising that change and dynamism are natural and good that Carbon Tanzania has been undergoing some fundamental development over the past year. And recently three buses, that are physical evidence of this growth, have arrived all at once!

In the past few weeks Carbon Tanzania held a small celebration to mark the opening of a beautiful, sustainably constructed Head Office in Arusha, our new CEO has started work after a six month recruitment process, and the new Carbon Tanzania website has been launched. These big public events and announcements are simply the visible fruits of a long-term strategic journey that we have undertaken to ensure that Carbon Tanzania, still only a youthful eleven year-old pioneering forest conservation business, is prepared for the many challenges to come in, some foreseeable and some less clear.

Carbon Tanzania has become Tanzania’s most prominent carbon project developer, and it’s always good to remember how it all started. When Marc and I began talking to communities in the Yaeda Valley, like all start-up entrepreneurs we focussed almost entirely on the “how?”. We knew the “Why?” of course – after years of working in all manner of conservation and environmental management situations we realised that deforestation was still not being addressed meaningfully outside of large fortress conservation areas like National Parks. Areas where local communities lacked genuine economic incentives for habitat management were suffering from the usual patterns of land clearance for low-value agriculture and opportunistic charcoal making and timber cutting. We realised that we needed to find a way to get a payments scheme for protecting natural forests working and we chose the emerging market for carbon credits as the way to finance this scheme.

Fast-forward 11 years and we have several certified projects up and running. We have largely worked out the “how”, but it turned out that to do this we had to build a company that could run these projects in partnership with local forest communities. Carbon Tanzania was built around the projects, and the form it took early on reflected this imperative to make the process work. However like all good businesses we came to realise that making the sauce was only the first step – you have to convince people that it tastes good, convince them to buy it, to use it and to understand what goes into making it. You have to comply with legal and financial rules and regulations and have your accounts audited, find good people to take on the work that two founders can no longer manage, and manage those people and their aspirations, hopes and practical needs. And finally you have to make sure that the sauce factories (there is no longer only one!), while they made great sauce when they were shiny and new and under the watchful eye of the founders, continue to run smoothly. You need to be sure that the right ingredients are still used in the right proportions, and that the people running overseeing the operations understand what went into that first magic batch.

The keen reader will see that this rather clumsy metaphor is simply a list of what are quite conventional parts of any functioning business (operations, marketing and sales, human resources, finance and compliance), a business that nonetheless is making something that is still considered new and not entirely uncontentious – carbon credits. To this list we have added the all-important layer of formal governance represented by a diverse board that brings with it independent judgment and experience aimed at enhancing our transparency, credibility, stability, and strategic direction in a market that is evolving rapidly, a market that is still subjected to a level of scrutiny and criticism that exceeds anything that more established commodity or agricultural markets experience. This ongoing divisive debate which at its root is really just an argument about what source of finance is best suited to fund the protection and management of nature and biodiversity (market-based or philanthropic / donor-driven), has drawn us into the much wider global political arena. Here, under our global brand “Level”, we continue to make every effort to be part of building the architecture and creating practical examples for how nature can be valued appropriately by the global economic system.

We have learned that while implementing complex, innovative and impactful community-led forest conservation projects in a results-based way that ensures long term finance flows from the sale of verified carbon credits is no widget making business, it still needs many of the traditional features of a well-run company to thrive. The new website speaks to the critical role of marketing and communications in building and maintaining market confidence in the work, and our new office and CEO are crucial building blocks for the future of a business as an idea and a solution that will, we genuinely hope, far outlives its nature-loving founders.