Amazon Rainmaker: Rob de Laet

 Eduardo: [00:00:00] In today’s episode, we have Rob de Laet. Rob is an earth systems thinker, who realizes this is the most consequential decade in the history of humanity and advocate about addressing climate change through the management of the hydrological cycle. Rob is co-founder of the world climate school and a European climate pact ambassador.

Rob is also a project lead for the Amazon team of Seeding Hope with Water, an initiative to regenerate our planet by the Eco-Restoration Alliance and a founder of Arara, the Uber platform of reforestation. An application and enterprise aiming to activate millions of people to earn money with reforestation, forest protection, and the switch to agroforestry.

Welcome to the show. 

Rob de Laet: Thank you Eduardo. Thank you for having me. 

Eduardo: Great. So Rob impressive trajectory. Uh, Why don’t you tell us a little bit [00:01:00] more about your journey? How did you end up where you are? 

Rob de Laet: Actually my journey started at the age of 16, so I won’t bother you with the whole thing because I’m 66 now, but basically it started first with reading Limits to Growth.

The famous book that basically showed that we were up against the limits as a species on our limited planet. And the second one, I was obsessed by What is Consciousness and what is a thought, how does it work? And that made me study philosophy, but I actually flunked out at the university because I got actually quite bored by it.

So instead of that, I did a lot of traveling around the world. So I visited maybe a hundred countries or so. I ived on four continents. And luckily I’ve been a lot in touch with with nature. For instance, I’ve been a, a, a safari guide for two and a half years in in east Africa. One of the places I love but many other places I lived in India and other places.

And so basically all the time, while I was having this [00:02:00] wonderful life in the background, there was this lingering shadow that we were up against the crisis of unknown proportion. And every time when there was a crisis, I thought, well, it’s definitely bigger than this one, but I couldn’t see the dimensions.

And I think it took me until 2013 to understand the full dimension of it, which is basically threatening the whole web of life on the planet. Not that I think that we are capable of killing all life on the planet, but we are certainly able of making it shrink to very low levels out of which it would take millions of years to recover and probably without us.

So from 2013, I’ve been really thinking about how do we get ourselves out of the mess we’re in and that’s basically has been my work till then. And I’ve been operating the last 10 years or so [00:03:00] from a valley in the Atlantic rain forest in Brazil where I’ve been reforesting and rewilding an area.

And that actually was basically my greatest teacher because nature started to teach me that nature is very resilient and that we don’t have to do too much to turn things around. We just give nature a little push in the right direction instead of hacking away at it all the time. So I’ll leave it at that for now.

Eduardo: Tell us a little bit more about the top initiatives that you’re working on today. 

Rob de Laet: I recently tried to make a list of the projects and am probably involved in about 30 projects. So it’s a bit ridiculous, but let me start with the priority. The priority is that right now the Amazon rainforest, which is the size of Australia is starting to die back on the Southeast side because it is drying out and trees in a tropical rainforest need a lot of rain in order to stay alive.

And this is a self reinforcing [00:04:00] cycle of die back that can become a runaway event within 10 years maybe. And if that happens, then basically we’ll lose this, what I call, a planetary organ. And basically it will disrupt the balance on the planet that much, that our species basically is a goner.

Not saying that all humans will die, but certainly global, connected, complex societies will not be able to survive. So we have to stop and reverse the die back of the Amazon rainforest, which is possible.

Eduardo: And the most heavily affected area I understand is like the Serato on the Southeast.

Exactly. Right? 

Rob de Laet: That’s correct. That’s where they’ve hacked away too much of it because of agriculture and and cow pastures. Everybody understands right now that the trees basically make rain. So if you take away the rainmakers, then there will be less rain.

And this is a process that becomes a vicious circle. And that has happened over there. So we need to basically bring back [00:05:00] higher levels of precipitation and longer rainy seasons. And that sounds a little magic, but that is what trees can do. And the way you do that is by doing it at the entrance of what we call atmospheric rivers of moisture coming from in this case, the Atlantic ocean.

And if you reforest the area at the place where it’s entering then it will suck in more moisture from the ocean. So you repair the climate with trees, and this is based on the theory of the biotic pump and specifically the work of Antonio Nobre, who is one of the top scientists in this field. 

Eduardo: the entire world and funding has mobilized or is mobilizing in an increasing way to CO2 emission reductions.

And you have been pretty vocal about prioritizing efforts. The fact that prioritizing CO2 emission reductions is not the main thing it’s important, but it’s not the main problem to regulate climate. this is [00:06:00] innovation. I mean, this is a new thought for many people. Can you explain to us a little bit more about why is CO2 not the main issue?

Rob de Laet: the current science works from a materialist mechanic worldview. That looks very much at, for instance, the atmosphere as a chemical substance, while if you look at the whole world as an interconnected living being, then you would have to look at it differently.

And then you suddenly see that actually the world has been regulating its own climate and weather more and more over the course of millions of years. And you see that the water cycle has a central role in that balancing. And everybody actually understands that. I mean, you don’t take a shower for nothing in the morning.

the understanding that water plays a crucial role in all of life, first of all, there is no life without water. But also in cooling it in making it grow. [00:07:00] and, and in all its forms in ice, in water and in vapor, in clouds, in rivers, without that there wouldn’t be life. And somehow the water cycle gets very little attention when we look into the programs about how to solve the climate crisis.

And I think that’s a big mistake. Of course, we need to decarbonized. I have no questions about that. I’d like to stress that it’s an important mission, and that luckily is getting on the way, although we’re still very far because we’re still going to have a top year of emissions again, but bringing in the knowledge about how the water cycle cools the planet, but also calms the weather, if it’s done right, I think it’s crucial because otherwise we will be running out of time if we don’t include this crucially important element. 

Eduardo: can you um, describe the biotic pump? 

Rob de Laet: it’s actually quite simple. Trees pump up water [00:08:00] and evaporate that through their leaves, where they go up as water vapor and they do that accompanied by small biochemical particles, which actually help as seeds to make rain drops.

So basically when the vapor goes up together with what is called BVOC, those little particles. At some point they will form raindrops and clouds and fall back on the earth. So that’s the biotic pump. There’s a couple of facets which are very important in a biotic pump. The first thing is that it takes a lot of energy.

If you put on the kettle to boil for for a cup of tea, you know, how much energy it needs to vaporize that water. And so basically those trees use energy, solar energy to transform liquid water into vapor. And basically with that take heat from the surface, and put it up in the upper atmosphere.

So that’s [00:09:00] already a form of local cooling. And that’s very crucial. And again, everybody knows if you walk under a tree, if you are in a forest, you know, that it creates its own atmosphere. So it’s very intuitive. It’s very easy to understand. Now, the second thing is that the moment that the water vapor molecule goes back into the condensate state, it emits energy uh, in the form of photons.

And that energy goes in all directions. Like the sun shines in all directions here, it is emitted in all directions and those photons are not reabsorbed, as far as I understand by the atmosphere, which means that half of that heat is actually leaving into space which is not in models and that’s a huge amount of energy.

So there’s actually, basically the biotic pump is the naturally evolved air conditioner of the earth. So while we are decarbonizing our industries, we are still hacking away at our air [00:10:00] conditioners at our natural air conditioners, because we do not understand how crucially important they are, not just for local cooling of micro climates, but in the end for the whole planet.

Eduardo: it’s referred to as a theory, the biotic pump theory. Is it really still a theory or is it a widely accepted, fact?

Rob de Laet: It’s not widely accepted unfortunately well, you know, I’d eat my hat if it wasn’t true. And you know why? Because a lot of complex science quite often basically starts off from an intuition and then everybody starts doing measurements and writes incredibly complicated papers to basically in the end, find out if it’s true or not. If that intuition is true or not. I think that anybody who has lived in a rainforest and sees, the daily interaction between the trees and the water and the atmosphere and, forest forming their own clouds.

And you can see it in front of your eyes. Understand that this is a fact. And actually I I’ve [00:11:00] been reforesting that valley where I live for a couple of years and the temperatures. No, I didn’t measure it, but the temperatures have gone down considerably in that valley. And people say that when they come to my valley, it’s much cooler than the place where they live you know, a mile down the road.

It’s basically obvious to anybody that trees in combination with rain and with water, have a cooling function. So I think maybe we should make things a little simpler instead of making them more complex. 

Eduardo: so trees have in reality, more value than what we realize.

It has a natural cooling effect. What is the implication for the planet?

what happens once the vapor is in the air? You know, there’s this what is it? Humidity, rivers. , flowing around the plant. I mean, how does the cooling effect actually work 

for the for the world?

Rob de Laet: Well, in, in all kinds of ways, let, let me first maybe start with the fact that this biotic pump because the moment, so the molecule goes [00:12:00] from vapor to liquid water it becomes smaller.

So you get a little, you get a depression and depression draws in humidity. So while the principle movement is vapor going up and rain going down, there’s also a lateral movement pulling in air from the side, because it forms low pressure. So what you see is that atmospheric rivers start at points where the forest meets the oceans and sucks in humidity from the oceans. Now, if there is a continuation of forests for a long time, you see that actually that water is pushed on all the way over the continents. It’s already quite clear for instance, that the deforestation in Europe is likely a large reason why desertification in Northern China has increased because the water vapor that comes in from the Atlantic ocean, which was pushed through the medieval forests and through the Siberian forest all the way would be [00:13:00] able to moisturize the whole continent.

And that’s what the biotic pump does. So if you interrupt that with large patches of non forest. Then basically the biotic pump stops and you get desertification. 

Eduardo: in the visual, we can see kind of two flows of this water river flows, you call them atmospheric rivers 

Rob de Laet: Atmospheric rivers, I think, is the agreed upon term. 

Eduardo: So you see two flows, one that starts somewhat in Africa moving into the Amazon and then dispersing downwards into Patagonia and then upwards through Mexico into the west coast of the United States and then circling back around. Yes. So, and then the other one goes from Africa, upwards to Europe, and then all the way down to Asia.

Rob de Laet: Exactly. And then basically makes a turn over Indonesia into the monsoons of India. And if there was no interruption because of [00:14:00] deforestation, it would push on all the way over Balochistan (Pakistan), Iran, Oman, Yemen, what is now the Saudi desert and all the way it would connect to the atmospheric rivers of Africa, which basically come in on the east side and flow all the way over the west side where they come out and they connect to the Amazon.

And I’d like to add one detail here is that we also have to understand the dimension of it because again Antonio Nobre has shown that the atmospheric river over the Amazon holds more water on average than the river system itself, which is by far the largest river system in the world.

So there’s more water in the sky than flowing through the river. So it’s really an incredible amount.

Eduardo: Well, so, you know, I am from Northwest of Mexico in Baja and I see the problems around all that peninsula all the way up to California. Right. Of all these droughts increasing. We’re [00:15:00] deforesting, what about 17%, 20% of the Amazon so far? This has an implication directly then on the droughts on California and Baja? 

Rob de Laet: Well, on the one hand, more research needs to be done because there’s not a lot, lot of scientific research of the direct relationship with these things.

At the same time, we don’t have time to do all this research and we have to act on the information we have right now. But you could say that and it’s not just the Amazon don’t forget. That has been a lot of deforestation from the tropical areas of Mexico down all the way to well, luckily Costa Rica doing a great job, but at least until I mean, Nicaragua, Honduras, etcetera.

So so I would say there’s, it’s almost definitely it has a, has a direct effect and I would also like to say another thing is we all talk about global warming, but a lot of the problem that we deal with is not about the 1.2 degrees increase in temperature, but it’s what we call the drought flood cycle.

At some point you have [00:16:00] immense rain events, which I’m sure California had as well. And basically inches of rain, they drop down in a matter of hours then wash off and then the whole thing dries out again. So that’s what I call the floods drought cycle. And that’s caused because of the deforestation.

Eduardo: Tell me what are the key regions where we need to intervene to support this planetary air condition system? 

Rob de Laet: I agree with things like the 1 trillion tree program and there are talks about basically regenerating a billion hectars of degraded land around the world.

And I think that’s the size we have to look at. So, but then that’s a lot of work and we’re very late in the game. And so we have to start with what I call strategic intervention. Well, the first one I already mentioned is the Amazon where you see that the moisture of the atmospheric river basically comes in on the Northeast side between two cities where a lot of deforestation is taking place. So if you would reforest there, it will [00:17:00] draw in the atmospheric river. The other one I think, which is extremely crucial is we see huge droughts in the horn of Africa. And we also see that the atmospheric rivers that probably used to be there.

We don’t have satellite data from a hundred years ago, but they’re not connected anymore to the, vapor over the Congo forest that then goes on out on the west side of America. So I think reforesting the area sort of a corridor for this atmospheric river. Somewhere along the Somali coast and in the Kenyan coast all the way inland so that it can connect to the moisture.

If you see, for instance, South Sudan is very moist. In fact, they have so much moist. They have big floods programs because the biotic pump is working very well, but the moist can’t go anywhere because there’s no flow because all other sites it has been cut off. So it’s sort of raining on itself all the time.

The third one which is crucially important is the area where most of the [00:18:00] moisture comes in from the bay of Bangal into India because you see, of course, one of the biggest tipping points of danger we have right now is the melting of what they call the third pole. The glaciers over the Himalayas. I think this is about 90,000 glaciers, if I’m not mistaken and they’re melting back very fast.

Once that goes, this one and a half to 2 billion people are dependent on the rivers that come from the third pole from the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau. Now they’re melting. And that’s part because of the heating up of the planet. No doubt. Also is because the interruption of the biotic pump, because in the area, a lot of the forest has been cut for cities, agricultural, mining activities. So if you could restore, let’s say, okay, we had a magic wand and tomorrow we would have continuous forests all the way up to the Himalaya foothills. It’s likely that the amount of precipitation on the third pole would increase rapidly, which means [00:19:00] you would help the glaciers.

And at the same time it would whiten the whole area. So it would cool. So you get a, sort of a positive feedback. But then if we just continue, we’d actually have to have that flow continue over the Thar desert and, the Indus valley all the way connected to Oman.

To get it into the middle east and the Saudi peninsula. So that’s a lot of reforestation, but I would say that those are a couple of the major projects, but I would love to talk to hydrologists, for instance, where would you plant key forests on the Iberian peninsula, which is drying out like that also again, to have smaller flows of moisture coming in.

Eduardo: So it looks like around the equatorial line, basically across the planet could essentially reinforce that biotic pump and that cooling effect. 

Rob de Laet: The biggest dynamics is around the tropical area because it simply gets more sunlight and the [00:20:00] moisture the biotic pump are are strongest.

But I do agree with colleagues that all forest are important, but in your list of priorities, you get your biggest bang for your buck if you start in the tropics for all kinds of reasons, because it’s not just that it goes fastest downhill if you don’t do something about it and uphill, if you do something about it, but also regenerating and transitioning to agroforestry in that area, for instance, can help a lot with food production, food security, water security, which is basically the biggest problem in those areas, 

Eduardo: So the first project you have listed is the great green wall for the Amazon. And that’s the section in the Northeast of Brazil? 

Rob de Laet: Yes. I think ideally an area roughly the size of Portugal if that would all be reforested. And I’m not just taking forest. Good agroforestry integrated agroforestry with a high canopy, but also with undergrowth of food products and stuff integrated in that area would help the biotic [00:21:00] pump get the moisture to the Southeast side, so the die back in that area would stop. But it’s not the only place. The Amazon is quite damaged. And actually there’s four points in the whole Amazon where I think we need to do crucial action, but this is the one on my plate. 

Eduardo: Well speaking about the Amazon in particular, we have a trend severely going in the wrong direction.

I mean, I was looking at the charts of how deforestation has increased almost exponentially in the last two years.

Rob de Laet: Yes.

Eduardo: And it’s evident that we had to stop that trend and then reverse it into a restoration trend. But I mean, in your opinion, how can we make this happen? What needs to happen so that actually the trend corrects? 

Rob de Laet: It’s pretty simple, if you think from a top level, pay a million people, a decent salary to protect regenerate and train everybody in agroforestry.

Let’s say that costs a thousand dollars per person per month. Then you need a million time a thousand. So that’s a billion dollars per month. There’s $12 billion a year. You [00:22:00] would probably be able to reverse the trend because while there are real criminal consortium who know how to make money out of the devastation,

the real work is done by, you know, very poor people who need to put food on the table for their kids and have a decent life. So if you can take them out of the process from destroyers and turn them into protectors and restorers we can do that very fast. At the same time,

there’s a lot of indigenous people in the area, which are the protectors of the forest, but they’re only countered. But if we would give them the means to restore their own forests and protect their own forest, that would go a long way as well. 

Eduardo: Just From a CO2 sequestration standpoint. I was running some numbers on how reforestation compared to a technology that is getting traction that is direct air capture. So just from the CO2 perspective, I was looking at the statistic of [00:23:00] $600 per ton of CO2 captured by direct air capture technologies.

And if we compare that to reforestation, I think in one of your articles, you mentioned there’s 10 to 20 tons of CO2 per hectare, and it costs about $1,845. And that’s a pessimistic approach. That’s pessimistic number to restore a hectare of the Amazon, which comes down basically to about $123 per ton as for the first three years, and then is practically free forever after that.

Worst case scenario really looks like at least three times cheaper to just reforest than buy these expensive CO2 machines, not even taking into account all these other advantages of the cooling effect that has not been considered in some of the models.

Rob de Laet: So the core benefits alone would make it a no brainer to focus on. Second one is let’s [00:24:00] not forget that even if those machines work and could be doing it at a certain price, they need a lot of resources they are in no way circular. I mean, you have to have all kinds of metals and stuff like that and big industries.

Eduardo: Let’s switch back to this initiative called Seeding Hope With Water. Can you tell us a bit, a bit more about what is it and what is it trying to accomplish?

Rob de Laet:  Okay. Let me first say that from my perspective. And I think at least I would like to honor the brave words of António Guterres the secretary general of the United nations.

 I have a feeling that people still don’t understand how near we are to the precipice. At some point you get a cascading collapse of societies and we won’t have the resilience to get ourselves out of the hole we’ve dug. Nature will do that, but nature will do that without us.

So we need to act now and we need to act fast and at the scale of a problem, which is huge. Now, humans, [00:25:00] usually in the end do what is necessary after they have made all the other mistakes before they act. And we really need to wake up everybody. So the plan basically has a couple of pillars that you could say, okay, now I’m talking a little bit mechanical, but we need all the cylinders fired up at the same time in order to really get the ship making the big turn.

Okay. The first one is we need to look at the climate models and include the water cycle and see that if you include the water cycle and the regeneration of land, and front load that in the whole action on climate worldwide, you see that we can calm the weather because forests calm weather.

Forests don’t allow for droughts. They don’t allow for heat waves. They don’t allow for flash floods. They absorb those. So we have a problem with extreme weather rather than the global warming of 1.2. Okay, so you have to have put the water cycle into the climate [00:26:00] models and the climate science so that people understand this is crucially important. Front load that the decarbonization needs to happen, the energy transition needs to happen. We have to go circular. We have to eat less meat and all of that, but we need to front load regeneration. Okay. That’s one. So that’s, that’s on the science level on the business level the insurers and the pension funds basically see from their own models that their future is going out of the window.

Basically they’re their business model is broke when the effects of climate change, which are the damage of that is accelerated and accelerating. They can’t ensure because all the insurance becomes too big or they have to shrink their customer base. Because they can’t ensure a lot of things because most things become more and more risky to ensure.

And the pension funds, they can’t find any secure assets anymore to invest in, to make sure that they can pay their pension funds in 20 years or so. So regenerating the planet is actually the best [00:27:00] investment for the large financial industry and money talks, as we all know, to get their risk models back into a way that they work. Right now they’re going all over the place, but basically they’re out of business and they know it. Okay. So that’s the financial aspect.

I think we have a decade to make the great turning, otherwise simply we’ll go into cascading collapse, like already is happening in parts of the world.

 That means we have to scale up this and basically involve everyone. At least half a billion.

Okay. Half a billion of small holders, farmers in the global south should get payment for regenerating their own land and talking now anywhere from Indonesia to, the Southeast Asia, South Asia, India, but all the way to Pakistan and in Africa and in other parts of Latin America, so that they would be able to regenerate their land.

And with that calm weather and co Now the last thing is, and maybe that’s[00:28:00] important. Right now, the world is suffering do they think, okay, we’ve had it. We’re going down the drain. The moments that the climate youth and the youths that are in the global north realize that this is actually a way out, they will, they will join in. They will stop protesting the governments that are not doing enough and protesting the oil companies that are not doing enough. They say, get outta the way. We’ll do it ourselves. And I think that energy, that hope that we can bring to the whole thing. And in fact, make it a sort of a wave of regenerative energy will really entice the whole world to come along and really do it. We need that. It’s going to be the largest movement our species ever has done in the history of 

Eduardo: So is that what the up with water initiative aim is to do? It’s making the flow of money, go to the people who need it to restore the land? 

Rob de Laet: Yes, that’s one of the [00:29:00] big parts. And for this, you need a lot of technological platforms.

So if you, if you design a system and I roughly know how to do that, if you design a system where people could upload themselves and their land on a platform and say, okay, I wanna regenerate and you’ll give them a sort of a menu. What is the nicest way to do it in your place? 

Then they get finance to do that based on the carbon sequestration that would happen over a period of 20 years. It’s like a mortgage. You buy a house you get the money from a bank, and then you pay off the installments. And because if you regenerate, you’ll have carbon credits sequestration over a long period.

Then that money will come in. A hectare, let’s say it does 15 tons per year in the tropics. Over a period of 20 years, that’s 300 tons. That’s at a current price. Let’s say there’s no clear pricing in that market. It’s not a mature market yet, but let’s say it’s $20.

We’re talking about $6,000. And we just talked that the restoring one would cost $1,800. So if you could get a credit [00:30:00] for $1,800 to restore it, then the banks could easily make a reasonable profit to to do the loan and make some money in the process. And actually the farmer would get more money in the end also. It’s not even that complicated. We don’t have to develop new technologies. We just have to assemble technologies that are already there.

Eduardo: That’s a good segue to talk about Arara, you know, what is it? And what role is it playing in the Seeding Hope With Water initiative. 

Rob de Laet: Because we have some time constraints, I would like to compare it with now socially and ecologically some form of what I call Starbucks chain combined with a Uber, but now it’s the Uber of redorestation. Okay. What does the Starbucks chain do? That’s the Arara shop basically. That’s the shop in your nearby town, where you go for your regenerative needs.

Which is first of all get yourself onboarded on that application with your terrain. So because you have to put it on a digital map, you have to show some ownership documents, etcetera. Then you have to model how that place should be [00:31:00] regenerated for instance, to agroforestry where you, grow bananas with Coco beans and a couple of other things and large trees for shade.

 And then that’s that app will make a calculation on how much it would cost to do that. And it would also make a calculation how much carbon would be sequestered over, let’s say a period of 20 years. And so it would automatically release the credit to the account of that person. If he or she agrees with the contract and basically they don’t have to pay back, the credits as long as the growing.

So, and that’s possible. There’s a lot more detail to it, but why you need also this regenerative shop, the Arara shop which is then a franchise everywhere because there’s more needs for instance, the right kind of seeds, also some instruction and instruction videos. I, myself I’ve been dabbling a bit in cocoa farming and I’ve always neglected it because I had other things to do.

But at some point I said, okay, let’s try to do something. [00:32:00] And some expert was a young man. He knew much about cocoa and he just, he was busy there for a couple of months and he doubled the harvest. I have no, I have no clue what he did actually but anyway so if you get the expertise to the people on the ground and they can actually increase their income.

I modeled the increase of income with smallholder of farmers in the area where my value is. And you see that you roughly get a doubling of income in, let’s say four or five years if you combine it with the carbon credit finance and the increase of productivity and also give it what do you call it certification of of that it’s ecologically sound produces.

So you can actually double the income of small holder farms in the south, and that’s really what we need. 

Eduardo: Who needs to get involved, who needs to wake up to make this this new model a reality? 

Rob de Laet: The big word is finance really because we have the technology, we could get a first viable product and worked on a, pilot project [00:33:00] within months because we know who to do it. Right now funding is, is a very complex process. It takes so much writing and, and so much formatting and the practitioners who really know how to do it actually don’t have the, maybe not even the writing skills, but also simply not the time.

And they don’t get paid for doing that. The Inter-American Development bank said if you really want this, we really like your project. So come on, let’s do this. And then, so I gave a short outline and then they said, yeah, that’s wonderful.

Okay. And then they sent me the requirements for the grant application and I looked through it and I had to rent also some specialist outside. So I said, well, okay, writing this grant application will cost $60,000. Can you please give me $60,000 so that I’d be, I will be able to organize demand application?

I’ve never heard from them again. I mean, 80% of the information they already had in my three pager. They could also have said, okay, we’ll release 10%. Let’s see what you come [00:34:00] up with. And then, you know, we’ll do the next tranch if you really follow through. Instead of making life so difficult.

I also had to have an organization which had seven years of due diligence of the groups, et cetera. They make it so complicated. Basically they make it almost impossible for the real change makers on the grounds to get it done.

Eduardo: Ah! I think there’s two layers to this one, us to get the project off the ground.

Right. And then you have another mechanism of finance to actually provide that bridge of the first five years for the landowner to execute the project. I mean, you’re talking about creating a very interesting multi revenue model for families, right?

Because they, they have the, the new practice regenerative agriculture upside, which is a higher yield of their land. And then also on top of that, you have carbon revenue. 

Rob de Laet: But right now for, if you look specifically to the finance in agriculture, you see that for [00:35:00] the current monoculture crops, they grow in six months and they’re non perennial. You get your pesticides and your chemical fertilizers, the bank will loan you the money. And after six months you have to pay it back after you harvested the crop, the transition to agroforestry will take three to five years. So the whole financial method doesn’t work because their cycle is too small. So they have to think of a bigger cycle, which in other projects is not so difficult.

I mean, there’s, you have loans that can be paid back over five, 10 years and you have mortgages that can be 30 years, so it’s not unusual bankers are conservative and then it takes them a long time to to embrace these new projects and, and products.

Eduardo: Well, this is amazing.

Let me ask you how can people get involved with helping Seeding Hope With Water or helping out Arara? How can people learn more about it or those who want to get involved in help? 

Rob de Laet: Reach out to me. The project is understaffed and underfunded and I think [00:36:00] maybe more than money, it would be wonderful for people who get engaged and become part of a team because we’re looking at the largest project humanity has ever undertaken.

Obviously it’s not just through us. It would be a network of networks and communities and organizations but we have to start somewhere. And so the basic plan is there and I’m sure it will change in all kinds of ways, but the outcome is nonnegotiable.

We need to regenerate our planets, calm the weather cool the planet. And with that have the core benefits of reducing hunger and food insecurity in the global south, which by the way, also, and that’s then also a message to the politicians in global north, which also will stem the flow of climate migrants because those will actually have incredibly bad pressure on the political systems of the Western countries.

And basically they will be toppled. You’ve seen what happen with Syria with just a couple of million people after the country basically [00:37:00] collapsed in a sense. Just a few million already derailed the political system in Europe.

Eduardo: How can people reach out to you, Rob?

Rob de Laet: Mail me? I would say, yeah, that that would be the most logical and then and it could be a little time before I react because I have a little bit too much on my plate, but otherwise, yes, please. Or go to my website.

It’s a very small website. It’s not very professional. It’s futureoftheamazon.org. 

Eduardo: Very good. I want to read something from your article “Are Fish Really The Last Ones To Discover Water?” That I found really, really, really good and really clear. so While we are, we are destroying forests and without the cooling capacity of the earth, we attributed the heating to a higher climate sensitivity of CO2. The investment in the protection and reforestation of tropical rainforests, and the transition to agroforestry will have a much larger cooling effect than the world realizes.

It’ll also [00:38:00] mitigate the effects of climate change in the global south fast, slowing the increasing flow of refugees as economic conditions improve fast. And it gets even better than that. Everyone knows that large forests actually temper weather extremes. Large healthy forests do not allow droughts, heat waves, or extreme flash floods to occur.

They protect food production and slow down storms. So forests also calm extreme weather. If the world pays the tropical areas to regenerate the landscapes, we can accelerate the fight against climate change and biodiversity destruction while fighting global inequity.

Thank you for today. Let’s let’s jump to the rapid five, Rob. What’s your favorite author or book? 

Rob de Laet: Daniel Pinchbeck. A very courageous writer. Who’s on the edge of what thinking what is possible. And how soon is now is his 2017 book around which I [00:39:00] formed a Facebook group called Metamorphosis.

So Daniel, thank you very much. I know him in person. 

Eduardo: Number two is what climate leader do you look up to or inspires you?

Rob de Laet: I was thinking about that and actually I think I’d like to mention two people which are not considered immediately climate leaders. The first one is a very unknown person, but he gave me guidance when I was young and he’s an old aboriginal Shaman basically.

And his name is Guboo Ted Thomas. And it was an honor to get to know him. And I think the other one. I think that I would, I would choose the unfortunately deceased Desmond Tutu,

His amazing personality and his love outshines almost anybody. 

Eduardo: Number three, if you had a magic wand, what would be the one thing you will change or problem you’ll fix today? 

Rob de Laet: The consciousness of people open the consciousness to the beauty of life. Don’t be fearful.[00:40:00] 

The planet has always been abundant and has given you life and actually everything that you needed. That abundance is still there, but if you are afraid of it, you won’t find it. 

Eduardo: Number four. Who do you think we need to have in the podcast? 

Rob de Laet: Well, Daniel Pinchbeck obviously that would be great. I like a lot of people in the Eco Restoration Alliance. I like John Liu, for instance. He’s an amazing regenerator. Yeah, I could mention a lot, a lot of people.

Jamaica Stevens, Katelin Archibald, Jake Kelly. There are so many. 

Eduardo: Number five. And last one is, do you think we’ll make it? 

Rob de Laet: You know, the jury is out, we will know in the end or not, but it doesn’t really matter because as I sometimes say to people, it’s better to have fought and lost than never to have fought.

Eduardo: Thank you so much for being with us today, Rob. 

Rob de Laet: Thank you. Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to tell my story.