In this episode of The Carbon Removal Scoop, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart sit down with Julia Strong, Founder and Executive Director of the Symbiosis Coalition, the buyers' group whose members, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Salesforce, McKinsey, Bain and REI, have committed to purchase more than 20 million tonnes of nature-based carbon removal. Julia's starting point is that today's nature-based projects look very different from the ones that earned the sector its reputation, and that the world cannot afford to count them out.
Julia walks through what she calls the next generation of projects, from dynamic baselines and conservative leakage deductions to digital monitoring, and explains why Symbiosis treats local communities as a driver of durability rather than a co-benefit. She draws a direct line to how corporate power purchase agreements de-risked renewables, and points to Living Carbon as evidence the model is starting to work: a Symbiosis offtake followed a few weeks later by $500 million in project finance from Octopus Energy Generation.
Eve and Sebastian then press on policy. Should nature-based removals sit in the EU ETS, or does Europe need a different home for them? Julia makes the case for including nature across removal policies, explains why slow-growing European projects need longer offtakes and more demand certainty, and responds to Sebastian's observation that nature-based removals often fall into a gap between national forestry departments and the teams handling engineered removals.
They close on innovation, from secondary forests that could store carbon faster and more cheaply than new planting to fungi that speed up tree growth, and on the hardest lesson from the Symbiosis portfolio so far. Tune in to hear why so many promising projects are not yet ready for the offtakes they are chasing, and how much financing alone can add to the price of a tonne.