Get to Know: Rich Gilmore

And how he thinks about impact, environmental optimism, and scaling solutions

I’m delighted to introduce my friend and former colleague, Rich Gilmore, to readers of this newsletter.

Rich and I worked together at The Nature Conservancy for many years; he led our Australia unit and was a conservation finance lead in Asia during my tenure as CEO. At the time, our main strategy at TNC was pretty simple: given TNC’s size and financial strengths, we wanted to pursue the biggest and boldest conservation initiatives we could think of. Size is not everything, of course, but if you’re looking to have a big impact by protecting nature, doing things in as large a way as possible is usually a good way to make that happen.

Rich was a great colleague—super smart, fearless, always ready to not only challenge the private and the philanthropic sectors to step up, he also challenged TNC leaders like me too. Rich devised and led some of our boldest strategies. He left TNC shortly after I did in 2020 and today is the CEO of Carbon Growth Partners (CGP), a leading investor in the nature-based carbon business.

Please meet Rich.

Rich, thanks for agreeing to talk with me for our newsletter. Many of our readers are trying to build fulfilling and impactful careers in the environmental sector, so we like to start our interviews by asking how you got to where you are. Can you please walk us through the arc of your career to date.

Great question, Mark! I’ll start by saying it wasn’t meant to be this way. My career arc, as you call it, is really a series of sharp turns that at first look random, but in hindsight make sense if your goal is investing in climate action.

I grew up on a small farm in conservative rural Australia, where my main ambition was to become a wealthy stockbroker. So that’s the path I pursued: I left home at 17 and started trading on the Sydney Futures Exchange. After almost eight years, I moved into the physical commodities market, trading paper and cardboard in the circular economy. I was good at both, but it wasn’t fulfilling. Then in 2005—long before the term “blue carbon” was coined—I volunteered on a community project in Kenya, exploring how mangrove restoration might someday generate carbon credits.

From that moment, I was hooked on making an impact. I went back to Australia, completed an environmental management degree, and was hired as the CEO of Earthwatch Australia—the very organization I’d first volunteered with in Kenya. After that came a tourism social enterprise in Timor-Leste, followed by nearly seven great years at TNC, before founding CGP with a few TNC colleagues in 2020.

It’s an unusual career path, but I think that’s also the point: there’s a role for everyone in climate action. Yes, we need scientists, advocates, and policymakers. But we also need cloud technicians, accountants, marketers, lawyers, truck drivers, and plumbers. Whatever you’re good at, you’ll find a way to put it to use for the cause.

I have to admit, I’m worried. On the climate front, carbon emissions keep increasing, and public policy is going the wrong way in many places, including the US. When we consider biodiversity, despite our great efforts, the world keeps missing its key targets, and the vaunted 30x30 goals look like they’ll be very difficult to reach. The plastics crisis seems to only worsen, and so on. What do you think about these matters? Are you at all optimistic?

Optimism is hardwired into my DNA, so yes, I remain optimistic. The alternative is simply too bleak to contemplate. That said, it is getting harder. Pick almost any issue you care about—democracy, equality, biodiversity, human health, social cohesion—and the trend line is heading in the wrong direction. And paradoxically, that will feel true to you no matter which end of the political spectrum you view it from.

On climate specifically, the science is clear: whatever progress we make in the next decade, this period will see increasing disruption to food supplies, rising water stress, mass extinctions, more floods and fires, and growing human displacement.

The task of climate action is to limit those impacts in the longer term and to avoid the truly catastrophic outcome of heating the planet by more than 2°C. On that front, I remain hopeful. We know what needs to be done, and we have the tools, institutions, and money to do it, if we have the will. I trust that we’ll rediscover that will before it is too late.

Let’s shift to your current work. Could you please give our readers a brief overview of nature-based carbon removals and offsets? How do they work? Why do we need them? And what are the co-benefits of doing this stuff?

Nature is one of the most powerful and underutilized carbon solutions we have. Let me illustrate with an example: in Mexico, we are investing in a project called “BlueMX” to protect and restore more than 150,000 hectares of mangroves and other wetlands. Mangroves are prodigious carbon sinks—drawing down CO2 up to 5X faster than land-based forests—but more than half of all mangroves globally have been lost since the 1970s. Restoring degraded mangroves draws huge volumes of CO2 out of the atmosphere and stores it deeper and for longer underground.

This allows companies with residual emissions to offset them as part of a holistic carbon mitigation strategy. That’s the elegant simplicity of balancing emissions with durable, nature-based carbon removals: you put a tonne up, you take a tonne out. A credit for every debit. Over the life of the project, it will draw down 50 million tonnes of CO2 and store it safely in plants and soils.

But that’s not all. BlueMX is conserving the habitats of 600 known species (100 of which are threatened with extinction), has created jobs for 1,000 local community members, and has enrolled hundreds of people in social security, giving them access to health care, insurance, and fair working conditions. It is a living blueprint for how carbon projects can work: fixing the climate crisis, protecting nature, and uplifting communities.

Some bad—or even fraudulent—deals in the carbon offset market have attracted a lot of bad press. To me, this is no reason to panic. Complicated new financial markets always have bumps in the road. As long as we learn from mistakes and address what went wrong, we can keep moving ahead. Do you agree? Can we now be confident that carbon deals are working and will deliver the climate benefits they are supposed to?

Yes, carbon markets have received their share of criticism. Some of it was justified, much of it was overstated. But it is important to be clear about what was actually at issue. By and large, there were no credible claims that forests meant to be protected were destroyed, or that solar farms paid for were not built. Those outcomes are readily observable: anyone with Google Maps and 10 minutes of free time can check them out online. The concern was that some projects, having been proven, were issued more credits than they really should have been, based on arcane technical questions of carbon accounting baselines and “additionality.”

In the past two years, significant reforms have addressed these concerns. First, carbon accounting rules—especially related to nature-based solutions—are now more consistent, transparent, and less open to interpretation. And second, all major verification standards are now subject to the independent oversight of the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market. Together with improvements in monitoring and verification technologies, we can be confident that the climate benefits being claimed are genuinely being delivered.

One welcome outcome of these reforms will be to turn the integrity debate on its head. The real question for corporate leaders will no longer be why they are using offsets to mitigate residual emissions, but why they are not.

The buyers of these credits are typically corporations acting voluntarily. I really admire the leaders who opt in like this. What do you think is their motivation? And will it continue and scale? Or do we need regulations that require emitters to address their emissions by removing carbon from the atmosphere? If so, how do we get there?

There are many motivations for voluntary climate action: corporate responsibility, to head off unwanted regulation, the expectations of staff and customers, peer group norms, and just personal motivation to leave a better world for our kids and society at large. Those who take voluntary action should be applauded for it, loudly. But it is not enough: voluntary action currently accounts for around 1% of global emissions, and those who don’t take action face few consequences.

That’s why the convergence of voluntary and regulated markets is so important and will continue to accelerate. In countries as diverse as Australia, China, Chile, India, and Singapore, governments are including the infrastructure of the VCM and project-based carbon into their compliance regimes. The effect is powerful: companies that go beyond their regulatory obligations can generate tradable certificates, while those that fall short must buy them or pay a tax. The result is more finance flowing to high-quality projects and a fair system that rewards leadership instead of leaving it stranded. We will see more of it between now and 2030.

Putting on your forecasting hat, where do you think we’ll be in 10 years on the climate front? How important a role will carbon projects have played?

There’s no middle ground on this one: either the carbon market will have grown by orders of magnitude and played a key role in turning the tide of the climate crisis, or it will have collapsed, along with the world’s climate ambition. That’s because the two outcomes are inextricable: To address the crisis at the necessary scale and speed, we need the accelerated and cost-effective solutions that carbon markets enable, alongside direct emissions reductions. Without them, there is simply no credible path to a safe climate.

It always feels to me like we’re in a race against the clock when we pursue environmental progress. I believe we need change to happen fast and at major scale. How do you think about the challenge of speed and scale? Do you have any encouraging examples?

You’re right—it is a race against the clock. That’s why we often talk about the need to do “everything, everywhere, all at once.”’ Incremental progress won’t cut it.

The encouraging thing is that when the right mix of policy, finance, and innovation comes together, change can happen very quickly. Think about renewable energy: a decade or two ago, solar and wind were expensive niche technologies. Today, they are the cheapest form of new power in most parts of the world, and the speed of deployment has outpaced even the most optimistic forecasts. China’s emissions have probably already peaked—5 years ahead of schedule—and we expect the country will capitalize on US backsliding by taking the mantle of global climate leadership, backed by a more ambitious target, to COP30 in Belem.

Or take nature: we’re now seeing large-scale restoration projects—tens of thousands of hectares at a time—that combine satellite monitoring, drone-based aerial seeding, community leadership, and private capital in ways that simply weren’t possible 10 or 15 years ago. These are proof points that big, fast change is achievable.

The challenge is to replicate those successes across every sector, every region, and every ecosystem. That’s daunting, but it’s also encouraging—because we now know it can be done.

Back when we worked together, you and I—along with the entire TNC team and our great partners and supporters—managed to get some huge deals done for nature. It was exciting. At the time, I expected that the positive momentum would just keep increasing and that the big NGOs would become ever more powerful players in protecting nature. But it’s not clear to me if things have really worked out that way. What’s your take on where we are and how the big environmental NGOs are doing? What are the things the big organizations (together with their supporters—especially donors) should be doing to gain maximum momentum?

One of the things I loved most about working at TNC under your leadership was that sense of bold ambition—that feeling that anything was possible. The organization had the resources, courage, and clarity of purpose to ask: If not us, who? If not now, when? and then to act accordingly.

But working in the environmental movement is tougher now. With polarization so high, it often doesn’t matter how evidence-based, urgent, or important the work is, half the population will still criticize you. Add to that political leaders who seek to punish organizations for not toeing the line, and you can see why some of the big NGOs have stepped back from the front line of advocacy.

Increasingly, that space has been filled by independent media—podcasters, influencers, and viral campaigners. That’s a loss. Those voices are valuable, but they are not a substitute for fearless, evidence-based advocacy from large organizations with the history, scale, and gravitas to effect lasting change.

For NGOs and their supporters, the opportunity now is twofold. First, donors must give generously and publicly, providing the financial and political confidence for NGOs to reclaim that leadership role: to speak truth to power and to bring the community with them.

Second, they should embrace catalytic finance as a core philanthropic tool. A single dollar invested early in a project or technology can unlock a hundred more in private capital. Together—advocacy and catalytic finance—these are the levers that can restore momentum and deliver the scale of impact the world urgently needs.

All of us at The Instigator, and most of our readers, love tips on good books. So we always ask our guests for their recommendations—both on environmental books and anything else. What are some books you suggest we should read next?

I’ll use my interviewee’s prerogative to suggest a book that’s not yet on the shelves. It’s called The Carbon Paradox, co-authored by three leaders in climate finance: Renat Heuberger, Steve Zwick, and Marco Hirsbrunner. It’s a "fiction-based-on-facts" adventure story about overcoming the 25 key paradoxes facing carbon markets, and it concludes with a vision for how governments, NGOs, academia, and the private sector can unite for bold climate action. It’s a must-read. Available September 21 through

https://carbonparadox.org/

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Thank you, Rich. That was very inspiring and actionable!

Onward,