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This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The climate adaptation problems that Pantheon Regeneration is trying to solve are really around the collapse of the atmosphere, solving the carbon sequestration [challenge] by restoring important native ecosystems and destructed habitats.

We’re also looking to solve biodiversity and water issues with a ecological restoration platform, that really restores, wet- and peatlands, that reintroduces endangered species, that works on the beneficial water elements of restored ecosystems and sequesters massive amounts of carbon at the same time, and then permanently conserves those native ecosystems for perpetuity so that they cannot be changed from a land-use perspective to ever be anything but a rewilded landscape functioning as it would in its native state.

If you don’t have resilient native ecosystems then you have continued degradation to the land, to the water cycle, and certainly [you risk] biodiversity collapse, so species collapse or trophic level cascading collapse.

With restored wetlands and peat ecosystems, you are able to do things like stave off saltwater intrusion and some sea level rise effects. That’s because once the water table in these wetland systems is back to its natural mean, it actually does create saltwater mitigation and allows for species to then have the correct habitat.

When these wetland waters are restored, they do things like bioaccumulate toxicity out of the waterways. So you’re actually cleaning the water for people and planet, pulling out NPK, for instance, agricultural runoff, PFAS — some of the forever chemicals — they are actually bioaccumulated in the biomass when the waterways are restored.


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Number one, I have a deep background in conservation and natural systems. I’ve done almost 20 years of philanthropic work for the Colorado Wildlife Foundation — where I’m president and chairman — and for Western States Water.

I have a deep reverence for natural systems and restoration — water in particular. I’ve built a team that has 40 years’ deep expertise in restoration ecology, with tens of thousands of projects here in the US.

I also bring a unique skill set because I come from not only that background in philanthropy and conservation, but also high finance, where I managed alternative assets and institutional capital. [That means I] can really bring projects to bear that have the ability to get financed and then stay monitored and maintained through perpetuity.

I really can sort of transliterate the ecology to the investment committee, which I think is a critical component for project developers to be able to not only put the right capital stack in place for a given project, but then also be able to sell carbon credits, water credits, and design these complex projects.

Our solution works in a couple of different ways. We have a software that allows us to look at a given parcel of land and build an ‘ecological intelligence’ around what the solution set for that specific jurisdictional landscape could be.

In the peat wetlands where we have purchased just under 20,000 acres in the United States, we actually use a series of engineered solutions to help restore these degraded landscapes. They’ve been trenched and drained and what we’re doing is we’re putting water control structures around the perimeter of a peat system and allowing the gravity-fed natural precipitation cycle to fill these peat wetlands back up.

We monitor them with eddy covariance flux towers, gas chambers, and water transducers all over the property that then allow us to manipulate the water control structures to keep the water at what has been a historical mean in these 15,000-year-old systems.

So we have a very elegant sort of low-disturbance, but very high-impact, engineered solution for restoring these wetlands. We then do other interventions like remove invasive species, reintroduce endangered and native species that were taken out of these systems. We’ve reintroduced red wolves, for instance, are bringing back Atlantic white cedar — a tree species with ornithological ramifications that we will be interceding back into these post-restored wetlands.

Each landscape is different, but for our first pathway, those are the solutions.

Our customers are fewfold. We have a income stream stack that’s ecosystem specific.

So we have water credits: those customers are typically municipalities or developers who need water offsets or water credits. That’s very specific to what they call a HUC — a hydrologic unit or a watershed.

The carbon customers for the sequestration we’re doing are the universe of voluntary carbon market customers. We have a partnership with Microsoft. They’re an investor not only in the company, but are looking at our carbon credits. We have a Canadian carbon fund [customer] that has already purchased our first 100,000 carbon credits.

Then we have a universe of buyers that we’re talking to that are kind of the typical cohort of tech companies, energy companies, and other corporate buyers that are looking to offset their Scope 3 carbon footprints and looking [toward] a net zero 2030 or 2050 commitment.

We then have other income streams around biodiversity. That’s a burgeoning market. We monitor and baseline biodiversity and have an outreach going on to customers there. It’s a smaller universe, but a growing universe.

And lastly, conservation easements — those are typically title encumbrance that we put on the land that ensure that for perpetuity that land cannot change. Those customers are everything from the Department of Defense to Clean Water Act municipalities and state players.

 I think the hardest thing to explain about what we do is the complex ecology and hydrology around working in degraded peat wetlands. It’s obviously something here in the United States that’s not very well understood or known.

In Europe [and in Canada] these are protected and regulated markets — but in the US, people are not really up to speed on the importance of these systems, the biodiversity importance of these systems, the freshwater impacts of these systems, and the massive carbon sequestration engine that these systems have provided for millennia and continue to provide in the event that they can be restored and brought back to their functioning natural ways.

I think we spend a lot of time educating not only carbon buyers, but the greater public of investors on why these are such important systems, why they’re climatological superheroes and kind of punch above their weight.

People are always amazed to hear that even though peat, for instance, is 3% of the Earth’s surface, it sequesters more carbon than all the forests [two times over].

There have been multiple moments of feeling close to failure in this process.

When I stood this company up almost three years ago, it was a very abstract idea for most people that I talked to. We have an amazing set of investors now — but out of those thousand-plus [initial] meetings, we had 10 ‘yesses’.

As an entrepreneur — which I’ve been my whole life — I think you have to have a sense of optimism and a very thick skin to be able to take “no” most of the time and still keep going.

But I knew irrespective of the “noes” the importance, the profound need, for this work and urgency around what’s happening with the climate and how these solutions could be incredibly powerful. And also I think the conviction that these systems — if they’re lost and totally degraded — can never be brought back within human timescales.

I felt a that a real important mission was at hand and that we were the team, in our partnership with Duke University, who had sort of the decades of science and data points around these systems that could bring it to bear and, I was willing to persist.

  I wish I would have known a couple of things. Number one: the amount of time that it would have taken to get here.

I think I had a potentially an overly optimistic view because of my history in fundraising and pulling start-ups up. I didn’t know that this one — because of its really esoteric nature — would take so long. So I wish I would have had my expectations [better] managed around the time horizon.

I also wish that I had understood a little bit better who the appropriate investors for the project were. I think I went out with a large aperture, and I could have been a little bit more tapered and focused — understanding [which] funds and individuals would really be appropriate for a strategy like this.

Lastly, I wish I would have known the amount of team building and recruiting it would [take] to bring the right people in to the company. I’m so grateful for where we ended up — but I didn't know that was gonna be quite as difficult and take quite as long as it did.

When I think about capital inflows, I really am thinking about nature-based solutions. Capital is flowing into what are a little bit more de-risked and historically profitable businesses: so really around tree systems. I see a lot of IFM [Improved Forest Management] projects that get appropriate funding and capital flows from institutional investors and even public market capital.

I think where that should be flowing is a lot more into wetlands, peatlands, coastal salt marshes, marine estuary restoration, bivalve restoration — so think mussel and oyster bed reconstruction — for hurricane and wave energy mitigation.

I think soil organic carbon — in terms of the soil fertility, nutrient density, and water holding capacity — is a critical climatological element that is being overlooked.

I think the regenerative agriculture movement is up and coming, but I think the flows into those particular adaptation pathways is slow and needs to be increased on massive levels. I also think — from the sort of the ranching and intensive rotational grazing side — the perennial grass and mob grazing pathways are very important.

Lastly, I would say that fresh water restoration quality and quantity issues need massive funding.

Pantheon Regeneration is really a landscape-scale platform that looks at important and degraded ecosystems that we can actually bring ecological intelligence to and restore — and do it in a way that we can be rewilding large amounts of wildlife corridors, birding habitats, freshwater systems that have a impact on what I see is this interconnectivity between water, biodiversity, [and] atmospherics, which include carbon, but also super pollutants around methane, nitrous, and the food system, and in particular, nutrient-density in the food system.

I think all of these things are connected, and the ethos of Pantheon is to try to find and work with large landowners and large landscapes where we can really have an impact around bringing an ecosystem health metric to these people and places where we can impact communities positively, in multitudes of ways, but also the climatological solutions that I think are incredibly urgent.

What do you think of a business model based on the sale of carbon and/or biodiversity or water credits for creating and maintaining nature-based solutions?

Answer by replying direct to this email. Thanks for participating!

Thanks for reading!

Will Everill & Louie Woodall
Editor, The Adapt | Editor, Climate Proof