Challenges, opportunities, and the critical support needed to include rural African communities in voluntary carbon markets

Building Climate-Smart Livelihoods Through Partnership

Nuru and Viridian are partnering to help rural farmers build more productive and profitable livelihoods that are good for the planet. Nuru brings years of experience in agronomics and farmer-owned cooperative agribusiness professionalization. Viridian brings forest management and carbon market expertise. Our shared commitment is that farmers get paid fairly for climate-smart practices—like planting trees, protecting soil, and caring for water—by connecting their work directly to global markets. The goal is long-term, locally-led businesses that keep families thriving on their land while mitigating climate change.

Nuru Ethiopia Cooperative leaders with tree seedlings they intend to plant, 2025

We sat down with Nuru Chief Implementation Officer Matt Lineal and Viridian CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Matthew Aghai to discuss this partnership, how proactive forest management and voluntary carbon markets work, and how the farmers that Nuru serves can benefit from the work they’re already doing. Nuru Marketing and Communications Manager Tacy Layne facilitated the conversation. 

Introducing Nuru and Viridian’s Partnership

Tacy Layne: Let’s start with introductions. Will you each introduce yourself?

Matt Lineal: Hi, I’m Matt Lineal. I’ve dedicated my last 14+ years to working at Nuru. I currently serve as Chief Implementation Officer. My role is to interface with the respective Nuru country operations in East and West Africa–we work in eight countries. I bring together organizational strategy, business development, and implementation. When I recently introduced myself to a Nuru supporter, they jokingly parroted it back to me as “Chief Glue Officer”. I suppose I’m the type of glue that cements bonds to endure the pressure of heavy loads amidst fragmented systems. My work brings together disparate functions scattered across far-flung places, and structures regular interaction towards consolidated goals.

Matt Lineal observes harvests with a farmer in Burkina Faso, 2025

From Peace Corps to Global Implementation

Tacy Layne: What brought you to this work?

Matt Lineal: What brought me here and what keeps me here is a passion for local leadership building durable, lasting, local results. I believe in the power of ingenious, resolute, and hardworking people with whom I serve. I found a role with my colleagues in identifying innovation, sharing best practices, and establishing partnerships. I got my start in international development as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Honduras, where I spent four years. Along the way, I earned a master’s degree in forest sciences, and I have a background in international development, geographic information systems and community-based natural resource management.

Tacy Layne: Thanks for that intro, Matt. What about you, Matthew?

Matthew Aghai: My name is Matthew Agai. I’m a Co-Founder and CEO of Viridian Ecosystems, a natural infrastructure services company. We’re a new venture. Our role is as forest managers and natural capital advisors. We think on a global scale, yet have specific geographies that we’re focused on. And we’ve got a team of experts that allows us to implement a lot of the work that can leverage new market opportunities, enhance traditional forest management practices, and co-create impact, work like what we’ll be discussing today–agroforestry systems and the role that forests and trees play in ecosystem health, well-being, resilience, and durability.

Forests, Markets, and Natural Capital Systems

Tacy Layne: What’s your background?

Matthew Aghai: My background includes about 20 years of working on natural resources, natural resource management with a deep focus on forests and forest regeneration. My career has spanned a variety of academic, public, and private ventures, all focusing on the same thing: how to create incentives to take the best science and understanding around forest health and well-being, and then connect it to land stewards to drive real impact.

I’m excited to be here today because Matt and I have had this long friendship and collaboration. I’m eager to tell you about some of our ideas to co-create greater impact in some of the areas that we’re focused on.

Dr. Matthew Aghai observes tree seedlings alongside Nuru Ethiopia staff at a tree nursery in Ethiopia.

A Long-Standing Collaboration: Shared History and Shared Values

Tacy Layne: As you mentioned, this is not your first time working together. Can you tell me about your shared history?

Matt Lineal: Matthew and I met and became friends our freshman year at Loyola Academy–a private Jesuit high school in the northern suburbs of Chicago. We both had distinct reasons that we did not fit the school’s core demographic, but we sat at the same lunch table–I’ll spare you the Matt and Matthew high school stories. Basically we became friends over our differences.

Over the last 25 years, we’ve stayed friends. Matthew has cranked up the contrast in my own life. After I graduated with an undergraduate degree in social sciences, talking with Matthew inspired me to pursue my love of the outdoors and a master’s degree in forest sciences. I merged that with an interest in international work and travel through a joint program with the Peace Corps. Fast forward–I’m doing international work, and so is Matthew. We both entered the workforce in the aftermath of the Great Recession. And coming out of the relative protection of grad school and the Peace Corps, we found our respective ways.

Matt Lineal meeting with a community leader during Peace Corps service in Hon

I continued to focus on international work and volunteerism. I joined Nuru on a fixed-length fellowship assignment in Kenya in 2011. I resided on site for a year and joined the staff. My first job after my Kenya posting was supporting Nuru’s Director of International Operations and Nuru’s Founder in our first expansion in 2012. Ethiopia was Nuru’s first country expansion beyond Kenya.

In 2013, Matthew and I reconnected when he volunteered to study potential applications of forestry work in Ethiopia. For the first time, we got to travel together this year–2025.

Matthew Aghai: Matt, I’m very grateful that we’ve been able to maintain this throughline of interest in collaboration, shared values, and impact. It’s been over 20 years. Anchoring this in high school as well, one of the values we imbibed was a deep desire to serve. One of the slogans of the school is “women and men for others,” and I believe that’s a value set both of us have been able to express in our career arcs. As Matt described–we ran in parallel through a variety of professional ambitions. For me, it was very much one of academia that started to break out and bifurcate into both international and domestic work.

Tacy Layne: What did that look like, and why was that so impactful?

Matthew Aghai: My work kept me apprised of global health, global communities–and really the disparity in funding natural resource management in a low-income country versus a high-income country. I came to that understanding based on real experiences, real trials–trying to take research and implement it in either of those scenarios.

Domestically in the US, we pride ourselves on the rule of law and institutions that position themselves as sophisticated in terms of financial returns. In low-income countries, we aspire to create more. And this raises the question about what the baseline is for land stewards. Through the years, I had this lens, and then there was an interesting inflection point just under a decade ago.

Tacy Layne: What was that inflection point?

Matthew Aghai: I joined some folks who were building a technology company against new markets using venture capital. Working with them was almost like an MBA program–an entrepreneurship program, and a research & development program all smashed into one. I was educated on a ruthlessly efficient system for investing capital at new technological systems to capture market share and hopefully make outsized impacts for large enterprise missions.

With the enterprise that I joined, the goal was to scale reforestation because we were reaching this apex point of climate change–wildfires in the American West and other societal and economic pressures building around that. Building technology tools, bringing in venture capital, and bringing them into the carbon market space–I enjoyed learning, despite all the skinned knees and missteps that I made with that first venture.

Meanwhile, I had a conversation ongoing with Matt about Nuru’s admirable international development work addressing poverty. I truly believe all of these things are integrated. They were siloed–agriculture and nonprofit work in parallel with forestry, carbon, and for-profit work. But, these are all just semantics to build individual columns and levers for what is shaping up to be a much more sophisticated global view of our ecosystems, how these entities collaborate, and how a marketplace should function to sustain and incentivize all participants in the value chain. I’m very grateful to Matt for reaching back out to collaborate.

Ethiopian countryside, 2024

Why This Partnership Now: Parallel Paths Converge

Tacy Layne: What exactly brought you to this work, this specific niche, and this partnership?

Matt Lineal: What inspires me about this new partnership is that it’s grounded in entrepreneurship and what individuals can achieve under their own strength when they work together with others as a collective. I came to understand this point living in rural areas. I’m from the Chicago suburbs. What I appreciate about rural areas is this–to get something done, you take the initiative to do it yourself. Since people need to be proactive and self-motivated, there are natural tendencies to come together to take action and collaborate to solve problems.

The Reality of Rural Communities: Entrepreneurship, Resilience, and Remoteness

Tacy Layne: Where have you witnessed this?

Matt Lineal: I’ve rediscovered time and again that self-starting and entrepreneurial spirit in rural areas in the US, in Central America, and in Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s a common characteristic and something that I gravitate towards–taking initiative. Now, the flip side: there are a lot of challenges to rural life with low population density. You have low access to services, and not enough tax base to support the diverse needs of that population. So, people are generalists and often lack political representation.

Rural places are also very productive. They produce commodities, conserve our natural resources, and benefit urban populations. While we often assume there’s an alignment between urban and rural areas, there’s not a clear assignment of benefits over time. Long term change is tough work. The sustained support at times falters and falls flat for remote, rural areas.

Early in my career–working across the Western and Intermountain US, northern California, east central Idaho, across the state of Colorado–what I experienced was defunct forestry sectors laying off workers. I saw overburdened federal employees and unhealthy forests. I witnessed epidemic pine bark beetle kill, intensely out-of-control wildfires, ranching at interests at odds with urban development, drug addiction, and off-the-charts real estate speculation in the run-up to the housing crisis. There was poor connectivity in these areas, with little to no mobile internet (it was the late 2000s), infrequent cell signals, and much more dirt and gravel than paved roads once you got off the highway. Public services–schools, health infrastructure, even stores–were few and far between. Amazon was still mostly an online bookstore and Netflix had just started shipping DVDs.

Matt Lineal meets with foresters in Honduras during his Peace Corps service.

Honduras is where I got my first international education on forestry work. When I served in Central America in Honduras, the first part of that assignment was joining my host community of Jicalapa, Olancho Department at the height of a tropical depression that lasted a month. It was a soggy start, but ultimately I found my place working alongside other implementing NGOs, including German technical assistance, The Nature Conservancy, and the Government of Honduras Institute for Forest Conservation, supporting farmer cooperatives. Those cooperatives showed me that, working together, communities–even in extremely vulnerable circumstances with instability–can be highly productive. They can conserve national natural resources where the state authority falls short.

Tacy Layne: How have these experiences impacted the way you view rural development efforts?

Matt Lineal: What I’ve learned in all these contexts is that remote, rural communities pay their own cost in remoteness. I took it upon myself to help rebalance the equation. If we can gather people’s collective strength and provide formal access to voice and participation for rural economies–if we can offer enough scale to make their impact to economies, to social development, to environmental outcomes lasting at a regional and national level–that can make a difference. It can transform development outcomes for communities and countries.

Smallholder communities are at the forefront of these global challenges–economically, demographically, and environmentally. After years of returning to these different places, whether the Western US, Central America, East or West Africa, I’ve seen radical change and become inspired and swept up in it. Rural communities can advocate for and own their change.

Tacy Layne: And what about you, Matthew?

Matthew Aghai: Matt and I view the world through a similar lens. That’s why we’ve been able to maintain our friendship from different corners of the world. What inspired me to start and continue in the natural resources sector is a very long story, but I’ll summarize with a few anchor points. I’m a son of immigrants–a first-generation and urban American who grew up in northern Chicago. I didn’t have a sense of place or land. And to be perfectly transparent, the way I viewed the world was by flipping through National Geographic magazines that my parents had on their shelves. That gave me a sense of wonderment beyond the concrete confines of the very diverse and robust city that I was stationed in.

I felt inspired to think about what it means to be a steward of the land around you. And that was a very difficult thing for a child growing up in northern Chicago. I am a steward of what–my lawn? I started to think about what impacts I could have on the environment as somebody who grew up in that position and is part of out-migration from places like Poland and Iran–in places where people were farmers, stewards of the land, soldiers, business people. My circumstances allowed for this family history and a sense of place that was now not correctly positioned for me to execute on–this innate ambition to steward and be part of the natural world.

Tacy Layne: When do you feel like you were able to start living out this vision you had for your life?

Matthew Aghai: I started to scratch that itch through curiosity when I left for college. I was only 17 and very impressionable. I went to rural America–Indiana Purdue University–and started to work in natural resources. I was one student among a sea of students that all grew up on farms and in forests, kids who played in the backcountry, contrasting the urban environment I grew up with.

That culture shock also came with a very warm invitation to appreciate everything–from the hunting and fishing they experienced and I didn’t–to what they viewed as stewarding the environment within their confines. That really shook me loose and made me realize that I am a global citizen.

Tacy Layne: What does it mean to you to be a global citizen?

Matthew Aghai: I could position myself to steward any environment, so long as the framing and the impact meant something to me and those who would welcome me to work with them. I started my career fairly early, but had to step back and eat humble pie. You can get as educated as you want, but to Matt’s point, the real expertise, ingenuity, and understanding of what it means to steward a landscape is done by those who are attached to that landscape. I will forever frame myself as a global citizen worried about global and environmental impact. But, every time I arrive in a new place, whether it’s Honduras, or Lebanon, where I went early in my career to build a reforestation program, or the intermountain region of Hawaii–wherever I am, I am a visitor, and I am first learning and adapting to the steward’s needs.

Matthew Aghai meeting with leaders in Ethiopia

Tacy Layne: How does this lens impact your work?

Matthew Aghai: Before I introduce new technology transfer pathways, opportunities for leveraging science, or opportunities for thinking holistically about durability, I am first learning and adapting to the steward’s needs. I’ve been very fortunate in all these travel experiences to be humbled over and over again. You can go 50 miles in every direction and have completely nuanced cultural, stewardship, ecological needs that you need to consider. My hope is to bring that consideration to our collaboration with Nuru.

Viridian has a mission-driven and formidable team of experts who’ve learned hard lessons and want to work first in service of the stewards of the land–the local people. And we see the opportunity to learn from an organization like Nuru that has been focused on poverty alleviation, agronomic systems, and the social welfare of all these communities. Nuru has built sophisticated structures to create durability, and we want to continue to learn and build off of that model. I’m here with humility and just as much optimism and alignment as we try to do that.

Defining the Core Problem: When Global Markets Bypass Local Stewards

Tacy Layne: Thank you for sharing more of your story, Matthew. I want to come back and unpack this partnership and some of these key concepts, but first: what’s the problem that you’re seeking to address?

Matthew Aghai: It’s multi-faceted, so let’s start with an example. Matt was very gracious to invite me to visit him in Honduras, including the site where he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer. It’s resource-rich and very much a global player in how we’re thinking about the evolution of natural resource economies and their impact on underresourced local stewards.

Forest in Honduras, 2025, Photo Credit: Dr. Matthew Aghai

I think this will help me make the point. We talked to a local mill owner, a land owner, and they shared that the mill, despite being surrounded by thousands of hectares of native pine forest, was sourcing logs from the US–specifically, Alabama. This is a great example of the conundrum we’re in with today’s global marketplace. We’ve built quickly around efficiencies for a capital-focused economy, meaning, “How do we have perpetual growth?” This as opposed to a logical, ecological, and human-based economy. As a result, you have a local mill in Honduras that is far from ports, but importing logs from the southern US to process, mill it into lumber, use it locally, and export it.

Lumber being transported in Honduras, 2025, Photo Credit: Dr. Matthew Aghai

We hear this story over and over–with agricultural food products, with commodities grown in one location and shipped to the other side of the world. There’s a carbon impact, and therefore a responsibility to consider local nutrition and caloric needs.

Sometimes market forces get a tad too focused on the capital, and not on the humans or the ecology. The two don’t need to be mutually distinct. The two can coexist.

Tacy Layne: How do you envision this being different?

Matthew Aghai: We see a pressing need for ecosystem health and poverty alleviation, with market mechanisms to address those considerations. There’s a deep desire, not just for me, but for a lot of rural stewards and others–a desire to bring these economies local again, to participate in them, and to have meaningful work available locally. There’s a desire for these to be places where you’re a steward of the land, you understand the supply chain around you, and you ultimately benefit from it–with the calories you put in your stomach, the structures you put around you, and the investment in the infrastructure you make in your community.

From this vision, Nuru and Viridian are trying to establish a system that allows us to have these considerations, while leveraging different models to be receptive to what innovation looks like in these communities. We want to build the right model to bring all the participants of this market to a place to address some of the hardest challenges in some of the hardest places for some of the most vulnerable populations.

Reframing Smallholder Farmers: From Climate Victims to Land Stewards

Matt Lineal: Rural communities in Sub-Saharan Africa are facing an urgent crisis of climate change combined with massive demographic growth and rapid rural-to-urban migration. Villages are growing exponentially and emptying out into towns and cities. This creates multiple and overlapping socioeconomic pressures. With a globalizing economy, rural livelihoods are at risk, making it no longer feasible or attractive for rural people to make a successful and productive life in the rural areas they’re from–their homes. Individually, smallholder farmers are caught with relatively few resources, small landholdings, and a vulnerability to shocks and stressors. Paradoxically, there’s this huge collective asset base, know-how, and the capacity to take action. When you look at their ability and agency as an aggregation of smallholder farmers–they control vast tracts of land globally, but they’re also the ones most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

Nuru Ethiopia staff and Nuru Chief Implementation Officer Matt Lineal pictured holding tree seedlings, 2025, Photo Credit: Dr. Matthew Aghai

There’s a common and tired trope that casts smallholder farmers as poor climate victims. That classification of a whole group of people on what they don’t have–focusing on deprivation–is a self-fulfilling prophecy. What Nuru has long advocated for, and what Nuru and Viridian are partnering up to take action on, is recasting smallholder agriculturalists as land stewards and heroes. It’s time to turn the trope on its head and cast off saviorism.

We do, however, need to collectively solve the problems at hand. We need to work together to bring capital, technical resources, and implementation capacity to bear if we want to build quality solutions that last. The key problem is that remote, rural communities are dispersed, so it’s very expensive and costly to work at any sort of scale. But, where individual farmers lack the resources, bargaining power, and capacity to take action locally, much less globally, we have a solution.

The Power of Collective Action: How Cooperatives Unlock Scale and Fair Pay

Tacy Layne: And what’s that solution?

Matt Lineal: Collective action is how we work together to build shared strength. This is core to Nuru’s playbook. Farmers are land stewards, but they lack financing to grow their businesses. Even when they have sustainable practices in their business, they rarely receive fair compensation. For example, the smallholder farmers that Matthew and I visited in rural Ethiopia are actively mitigating the impacts of climate change through sustainable land management, but they’re not getting paid for that.

They’re not being recognized for their actions that are sequestering carbon. They practice climate-smart agriculture because it’s good for their business. It’s responsible, and regenerative farming supports crop health and income. We’re falling short in expanding those interventions to deepen their impact and systematize it. We have to bring a more research and science-based approach with quality technical expertise to properly invest in this over the long term. There’s a way to do this that heals the planet and local communities, while shoring up their local economy. We’re addressing the gap that keeps local communities from accessing and benefiting from nature-positive markets.

Matthew Aghai: We’re inspired by how the Nuru model builds local teams in local communities, enabling them with global systems and processes that make them competitive. I met sophisticated academics, researchers, land stewards, community organizers–all of which are team members at Nuru Ethiopia. They have worked with local smallholder farmers to develop cooperatives, and those cooperatives and unions create a texture to the landscape that is one of great sophistication, especially considering the amount of people they’re effectively representing in the agriculture markets.

Esipe Dicha Farmer Cooperative Union Experience Sharing Event, 2024

These entities work on behalf of smallholder farmers through bargaining collectively to access the appropriate inputs efficiently while working with organizations like Nuru for cutting-edge technical services, and yet doing all of the in-house work–this represents a sophisticated mechanism, a sophisticated fiduciary. This is why we want to enhance the local ability to create sophistication in forestry by plugging into the agriculture sophistication that already exists locally.

What Comes Next: Bridging Local Institutions to Global Carbon Markets

Tacy Layne: So, what’s the next step?

Matthew Aghai: We aim to bridge the gap between these entities and the marketplace. When I say the marketplace, I’m talking about skeptic bankers, carbon offtakers, and a variety of other individuals, offices, or institutions that are interested in nature-positive work. Sometimes money flows to short-term projects, with an offtaker mechanism, with some advocacy according to structural and regulatory rules, but it doesn’t inherently have the best intentions for the smallholder farmers, cooperatives, unions, or equivalent institutions.

We aim to offer a different model and incentivize these individuals and professional entities to go directly to these financial institutions, these market players, and say, “We do have the sophistication. Let’s transact directly.” We are shortening the distance that the capital needs to catalyze returns and impact. e We believe that demonstrating impact and collaboration, and continuing to earn trust on both sides, is the path to institutionalizing long-term sustainable change in the space.

Tacy Layne: What does it look like to increase that trust?

Matthew Aghai: It means proving that our work lasts, with real data and real accountability. Right now, when investment dollars flow into climate projects, they often pass through many hands before reaching the farmers actually doing the work. We want to shorten that chain. When local communities drive the solutions themselves, you get better results and clearer accountability. Our goal is to build up local expertise so that farmers and cooperatives can eventually manage these relationships on their own, without needing us as a permanent go-between.

Ultimately, we want to create direct connections between smallholder farmers in places like Arba Minch and the investors and companies in London, New York, or Silicon Valley who want to fund climate-smart practices. Instead of routing everything through outside organizations, the people doing the work can speak directly to the people providing the capital.

Stewardship Explained: What It Means to Care for Land Over Time

Tacy Layne: This idea of stewardship keeps coming up. Can you tell me what you mean by that, Matthew?

Matthew Aghai: At its simplest, stewardship means you’re responsible for keeping land healthy—not just for today, but for the long haul. It requires ‘tending’ in continuity to have as much harmony – by both giving and taking in a measured way – to the space for which you are responsible. Stewardship needs to be thought of in the context of the land. You are a steward of a particular land base. You can be transient and still be a steward. But, you have to be thinking dimensionally along the timeline of that land, that community, or the system that you’re stewarding requires.

So, for instance, in forests: The timelines we’re working on are basically dictated by the longevity of the main species in our forest system, which is a tree. As you get closer to the equator, that could be a decadel stewardship horizon–a period of 10 years. As you get into the northern hemisphere towards the polar regions, we’re talking multi-century, long stewardship timelines. Ultimately, that determines the speed at which you need to think about stewardship. When we started working on this project, one of the things we needed in order to understand how to enable the local stewards was a snapshot of that.

Learning on the Ground: Insights From Ethiopia

Tacy Layne: And how did you do that? What did it look like to get a snapshot of this?

Matthew Aghai: You can read about this all day long. You can have a million Zoom calls, but the best way to do this is to get on the ground and start talking to folks and seeing the places. I’m very grateful because Matt and the Nuru Ethiopia team basically set up this six-day mission. We got to see a 600-700 mile transect of the country, starting in the capital, Addis Ababa, dropping down into Arba Minch, and then basically taking a 600-mile drive through southern and western Ethiopia. It was eye-opening. It was informative. It helped shape a shared vision and values for the land, forests, and stewardship.

Tacy Layne: In what ways?

Matthew Aghai: It allowed us to localize and relativize all the conversations we were having around agricultural systems, cooperatives, unions, the local stewards, the ethnic groups, the cultural practices, and impact. It also allowed us to relativize things that we hadn’t thought to discuss. For example, the forests in the Gamo Highlands–we drove through them, and the growth rates were really impressive. There’s been a hundred years of forest stewardship there. They’re on their third rotation. I would have never known to ask, and they wouldn’t have known to tell me about that.

Matthew Aghai visiting a tree nursery in Ethiopia with local leaders

Now, we have an anchor point for what it would look like to structure a community-focused forestry operation or reforestation operation. We were able to dissect the supply chain in agricultural communities where Nuru works and go to the Nuru Ethiopia office to hear perspectives from the local staff who’ve been doing this work for a decade, people who grew up in these communities, and structure the agroforestry with carbon program accordingly We had many conversations over coffee and very delicious meals. I am looking forward to working in and with the communities, and being welcomed back, for the community, forests, and the meals!

Building Durable Solutions: Why Community Ownership Matters

Tacy Layne: Matt, as the trip facilitator, what was your hope in facilitating this trip, and how does this establish a foundation for Nuru’s partnership with Viridian?

Matt Lineal: I’ve organized a number of trips at the goodwill of our host, Nuru Ethiopia, and the counterpart communities that we serve. I’ve brought in technical teams for strategy sessions. We’ve done intervention design workshops, assessments, and capacity strengthening. On this trip, I aimed for Matthew to dive deep as quickly as possible. I wanted him to gain an appreciation for these communities we serve, as I do–an appreciation for their rich heritage, their strength, and their opportunity. Southern Ethiopia is extremely diverse and rugged, and there are very remote areas, but it’s not as if we’re the first visitors. There have been development projects and tourism to the area well before my career and lifetime.

The world of today presents some new, pressing challenges. There’s a paradigm shift with international development financing–we’re at a moment of change. To build something durable, it needs to be community-owned and community-led, but that doesn’t mean that it’s delinked from the need for international best ideas and financing capital markets. That’s the whole idea that we came to build on. These smallholder communities and cooperatives that I’ve been working with for the past 14 years with Nuru–they are an incredible base for partnerships upon which we can build credible, durable, and high-integrity nature-based solutions. High-integrity means the carbon impact is real, measurable, and permanent—with local stewards doing the work and getting directly compensated for it, not some middleman three layers removed.

I wanted to vet that idea against Matthew’s expertise. Matthew is investment savvy, and he was asking the hard questions to vet, verify, and validate all the assumptions he came in with. At Nuru, we’ve always valued that. We should ask the hardest questions of ourselves up front–be demanding when it comes to rigor, quality, and sustainability. We look to pass our own standards and ensure that there will be a lasting community benefit before we take anything to market. To me, that was the biggest value that we got out of this trip.

Matt Lineal and Matthew Aghai in Ethiopia, 2025

Tacy Layne: Based on that goal, what did you learn, Matthew?

Matthew Aghai: I was really blown away. The hardworking people in the regions that we saw, whether they were tending to forests, agricultural systems, or pastures, were doing so in a way that was collective across the entire stratum of their community. It was an all-hands-on-deck social, cultural, and economic exercise to tend to herds, crops, trees, and to tend to forest resources without overexploiting or overextracting. We saw extremely well-manicured landscapes, contradicting the false idea of Africa rooted in a snapshot of alleviating poverty because there’s a lack of will and environmental stewardship. Their biggest risks are the same ones trying to be solved by global nature-based solutions’ markets–dealing with a global environmental problem, not a local problem.

Tacy Layne: What else did you see and experience?

Matthew Aghai: The local stewardship is there. It’s sophisticated. They care. They’re thinking about implementing new tools and systems. They’re working with NGOs and other civil society organizations to make the impact happen. But what they’re suffering from is the wrath of perturbations that are political, geopolitical, and part of a changing global climate, both environmental and economic. Droughts, floods, wars, and even economic strife from wars that have nothing to do with their continent, but ultimately impact trade.

Financial institutions, investors, and those who need to create catalytic pathways need to build out a risk model, not just around the smallholder farmers and cooperatives or unions. It should be built around the geopolitical imperative for economic and social stability. We have to ask what addressing a changing climate looks like, and what addressing conflict and global trade looks like. We have to ask hard questions.

Tacy Layne: What inspired you on the trip?

Matthew Aghai: I received extremely sophisticated and confidence-inspiring answers from the people I met, whether from land stewards or a local scientist connected to Nuru Ethiopia. The people I met were thinking about this landscape dimensionally–ensuring crops were relevant for smallholder farmers located 500 miles from the closest metropolitan area. We have an opportunity to validate our thesis with these partners.

Nuru’s teed us up to have a conversation that starts on third base. I love that this focuses on this human-centered economy and creating accountability there. All the other things that we know need to be there–return on capital, incentives, etc.–they’re going to be built in, but they’re going to be focused on that human-centered impact in the ecosystem because we’re thinking on decadal timelines. In many cases, we need the institutions and the financial marketplace to build up its comfort with this timeline.

Matthew in a traditional Ethiopian hut during his visit, 2025

The local folks are ready to adopt new practices and pursue new marketplaces. They have the means. We need to build that bridge, so I’m really excited about this partnership and unpacking what innovation looks like here. And with great humility, we’re asking hard questions, while Matt and his team are challenging us on the right instrumentation, asking, “Who should we be talking to? How do we structure these arrangements, so that they can participate and get the blessing of the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market for an investor coming out of the US, Europe, Asia, or South America?” Our goal is to catalyze investment in Ethiopia by being brutally honest about both the challenges and the opportunities.

Nature-Based Solutions: Managing Ecosystems for People and Planet

Tacy Layne: You shared some terms here that I think it would be helpful for us to unpack. One of those was nature-based solutions. What does that term mean?

Matthew Aghai: Broadly speaking, we’re defining nature-based solutions as our ability to protect, restore, and manage ecosystems to address broader societal challenges–things like poverty alleviation, which is something Nuru is well-versed in and focused on. Biodiversity loss is a global consideration that we should all be focused on as well, but is hard to measure.

We’re looking at the management of resources that have typically had extraction economies associated with them. Things like forests, which have been typically focused on extraction, now we’re thinking about as a sustainable management operation. This does not preclude the opportunity for revenue and extraction, but we think about the next steps as well–managing that whole system and thinking about replanting, and then all the secondary and tertiary benefits. We’re thinking about the whole system, including water, clean air, albedo–all the considerations that we take for granted when we have healthy and thriving systems: agriculture, forests, or even mining. Nature-based solutions are incentive programs effectively coming to a head, so that we can leverage nature and markets to incentivize best practices in the evolution of how we tend to our systems locally and globally.

Nuru Ethiopia staff and local leaders on a hillside in Ethiopia

Voluntary Carbon Markets, Demystified: How Climate-Smart Practices Are Rewarded

Tacy Layne: We’re talking about nature-based solutions and thinking about positively impacting both people and the planet, but where do voluntary carbon markets fall into all of this?

Matthew Aghai: I’ll answer this through a light anecdote and then explain my perspective on the voluntary carbon market. Before my time, the society that we were born into was dealing with acid rain as a serious problem–a global problem. And part of this was the tail end of a centuries-long fossil fuel-rich and production-focused industrialization period. It came to a head after sustained extraction and fossil fuel use without environmental regulatory mechanisms through the 1960s. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson socialized this idea of environmental activism and highlighted the need for real incentive structures in addition to policy and frameworks for how we could correct that industrial age. In the age of acid rain, there was a market mechanism developed around sulfur dioxide and mitigation. Ultimately, a few decades later, we don’t even talk about that anymore. It was resolved because incentives and policy were put in place, and together, we saw markets pressure heavy industries, like fossil fuel emitters, to do the right thing. Then, it became common practice.

The voluntary carbon market is an evolution of a compliance market around greenhouse gas emissions that allows folks to go above and beyond the baseline for compliance with policy. It incentivizes best practices and market mechanisms that require best practices.

Tacy Layne: How does that work?

Matthew Aghai: The voluntary carbon market allows innovators and those who see the future–which could be very bleak if we don’t see participation in mechanisms like this–and say, “Hey, I want to volunteer to offset greenhouse gas emissions through one of the many different credit types that are possible for the voluntary carbon market.” That person can participate in a system that impacts everything from a global financial marketplace and those participants down to the individual stewards. So, the voluntary carbon market, despite its early machinations and the need for some increased sophistication and improvement, has done a great deal of work and made a great deal of progress to create some credibility and optimism towards what that future impact looks like.

Tacy Layne: Is there a lot of interest in this?

Matthew Aghai: We’ve seen participation from some impactful, large corporations that are leading the way and putting themselves in a position to show the path forward for other Fortune 500 companies and leaders to do this on a voluntary basis. We know there is a mechanism by which we can reward the smallholder farmers who are doing the climate-smart best practices–putting canopies over their crops, using tilling practices that optimize for carbon retention within the soil, protecting watersheds as a collective in a community.

The folks building data centers and sucking energy off a grid in a completely different part of the world can counter their environmental impact by participating in the voluntary carbon market. There’s an interrelated impact. The VCM allows us to bridge that divide, and as it matures and sophisticates, we put ourselves in a position where we may actually see a catalytic effect in a trillion dollar economy around environmental stewardship and mitigation. I am an optimist, a participant, and am eager to be an innovator on this front.

Roles in the Partnership: What Nuru Does and What Viridian Does

Tacy Layne: Can you further explain Nuru and Viridian’s partnership together? What is Nuru doing? What is Viridian doing?

Matt Lineal: Nuru and Viridian found common ground and partnership around the core services and impact that we’re seeking to achieve. And that’s all about making productive rural livelihoods that work in concert with social outcomes, economic well-being, environmental protection, and conservation. There is a natural resource base that can support rural populations now, and in the future. Regenerative agriculture and leveraging nature-based solutions has already been core to our model, and now we’re bringing in the voluntary carbon markets.

Nuru-supported tree nursery. Photo Credit: Dr. Matthew Aghai

These are solutions that fit within this overall framework–seeing smallholder agriculturalists and the farmer cooperatives in which they participate as the owners and stewards of the land and of these solutions over the longer term. There’s a connection to the land for smallholder farmers–best practices like soil conservation measures, integrating more trees on their farm, protecting water sources on their land and on surrounding landscapes. Those practices have additional benefits of erosion control, animal health, wildlife habitat support, family health, food security, and income generation. On top of these core benefits and impacts, there’s a logical extension to make a global impact.

We’re doing that by linking up the actions of many smallholder farmers–thousands and then tens of thousands–through a durable entity like a farmer cooperative that’s a legally registered, recognized, professionally-run business. That business can then hold and make enduring contracts and obligations to serve the smallholder farmers–to get them paid for their produce through commodity contracts, for example. These businesses can do that for nature-based solutions as well, through mechanisms like the voluntary carbon market.

This is an additional tool in the toolkit, an additional source of revenue, and one that’s necessary for both people and the planet. It’s necessary for keeping rural populations thriving in place–making them less likely to be displaced by climate shocks, economic migration, conflict, or otherwise. Nuru farmers in particular face these impacts of climate change–droughts, floods, heat waves. And then the global population is suffering from the impacts of a changing climate due to carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, accumulating. Smallholder farmers’ actions in Ethiopia can have a meaningful, lasting, and durable impact that’s felt both locally and globally.

Durability and Additionality: Making Climate Impact Last

Tacy Layne: You used the term “durability.” What is durability?

Matthew Aghai: Durability means resilience that is independent of outside influence. Whether it’s a conceptual practice, an implemented practice, a financing instrument, or a commercial transaction. Durability means that carbon sequestration will last in perpetuity for the duration of the offtaking or offsetting arrangement–for the duration of the transaction. In the case of forests, we don’t want to just plant a forest. We want to make sure that forest is then protected for the duration of time that resulted in the sequestering of that carbon, hopefully locking up that wood product in secondary and tertiary downstream uses that ultimately makes it a perpetual locking up of that carbon. We also have to consider additionality alongside durability.

Tacy Layne: So, if I planted 10,000 trees, but then nobody was making sure that those 10,000 trees didn’t get chopped down two years later, that’s a lack of durability, right?

Matthew Aghai: That’s right.

Cooperative leaders working at a Nuru-supported tree nursery

Tacy Layne: What is additionality?

Matthew Aghai: So, if we’re implementing a practice, the question is, would there be sequestration of carbon without this practice? If a practice is additional, that means that the carbon sequestration is a result of that action. Here’s an example–think about planting trees in a landscape where natural regeneration would not have occurred. In this example, there are no mother trees to seed the next cohort of trees to naturally regenerate, so without us taking action, these trees won’t grow and sequester carbon.

There are other reasons that trees might not be growing in a landscape, though. Perhaps the soil is degraded, and the climate is so much warmer and drier that even if we were to plant trees or drop seeds, we would not see growth without intervention to change that soil condition. There may be cultural and economic reasons–this may be a place where people need fuel for their wood stoves or to cook their food. If that’s the case, a tree-planting activity designed to sequester carbon could actually create conflict around a resource. In that instance, that’s not representing durability nor additionality.

To account for additionality and durability, we want to make sure that the actions or interventions that are taking place facilitate the implementation of a new carbon sink which ultimately has a secondary tertiary benefit, like watershed health, cooling of local temperatures, or enriching soils, but it also has a mechanism built around it to incentivize the community not to extract or put pressure on that resource, like income generation. There are a variety of mechanisms, all of which can be incentivized through markets or through best practices of community planning, to create that sophistication to have additionality and durability.

These practices exist. They’ve been well thought through by academia, by groups that look at integrity in the carbon markets, and by folks focused on the greater good in terms of poverty alleviation for these communities and sustainable practices. We need to think about these dimensionally, which is why it’s so important to work with local stewards and have local professionals leading this change. We want that buy-in, as well as an understanding of the ethnic, cultural, and local ecological contexts for decisions. This understanding of the local populace needs to be interwoven on a timeline that is not only good for the ecology and the economy, but for the local population to be able to adopt new practices, reproduce activities in a durable way, meaning independent of outside influence.

Tacy Layne: Are there other examples of additionality and durability?

Matt Lineal: In the forestry sector, there are many critical short-term actions you need to take that will make a big impact on safeguarding a healthy forest that year. But, it’s really the sustained action over decades that will ensure that a forest survives to maturity. Matthew and I were both wildland firefighters at one point–literally on the front lines of a raging wildfire alongside our fire crews to lead efforts to fight and put out a fire, safeguarding that forest for the next day. We’ve also both had the experience of seeing that same forest degraded or destroyed the very next year when noxious weeds and pine bark beetles moved in. It’s no longer a forest–it’s lost. Without holistic treatment of the landscape over time and sustained investment, this isn’t durable. You need to put out the fire, but you also need to do recovery efforts, control pest outbreaks to avoid epidemic levels and treat fuels to avoid the next catastrophic burn. Otherwise, you’re not going to safeguard the future of that forest and ecosystem.

In the farming context, at Nuru, farmers tend to be focused on one season at a time–that’s the normal time horizon that farmers think on. They’re focused on feeding their family this year. They need to make money this year. Nuru’s focused on partnering with farmers to help make them grow more and increase their income that year. That’s impactful and important, but ultimately it won’t be sustained unless they can come back and grow the same or more the next season after that and the season after that. That’s where the farming practices need to work in concert with the natural environment, the farmer, and the economic conditions that they’re in. Then, they should ultimately be linked to a business that can provide the enabling environment that supports the growth of that farming business over the long-term.

Matt Lineal with Nuru Ethiopia staff and local leaders, 2025, Photo Credit: Dr. Matthew Aghai

So, that’s durability–linking together these very critical short-term actions year-over-year, but also structuring long-term actions with long-term incentives tied to them. That’s going to get us to something much greater than just a series of fires put out or a series of good harvests. We want to see that there’s a healthy forest at the end of decades. We want to see that there’s a prosperous rural family living their best, healthy lifestyles in rural areas. That’s our vision for this–that’s what’s motivating our partnership.

Looking Ahead: Scaling Integrity, Trust, and Local Leadership

Matthew Aghai: This is plugged into global initiatives. We’re one of many participants on a broader path to creating sustainable and durable outcomes. The United Nations Development Program is thinking about this–I have a sticker that they gave me after the last COP 30 meeting–it says “No forest, no water, no food, no future.” It’s all interconnected, and we’re realizing this in the policy landscape globally. Now, the challenge is connecting folks at the global level to the local stewardship level. That shifts the conversation to be focused on real impact.

Frankly, I’d love to start reporting that, as a global community, we have impacted x number of acres, offset x amount of carbon through x number of participants, all while alleviating poverty for x families. This is about including and equipping the communities that have been doing good stewardship for decades and reporting out the real and hard numbers at the forefront of these conversations as opposed to showcasing possibilities for the future.

Matthew at a tree nursery in Ethiopia, 2025

We’ve already blown past every aspirational climate mitigation threshold. Our best bet is to showcase where we’re being successful, where we’re seeing good progress, and then make that the focus of catalytic work. And we should be enticing folks to come to the table. That’s where Nuru and Viridian want to focus. We’re building in the places where Nuru has already established a foundation of trust and impact, determining what exists currently and innovating and connecting to increase and expand the scale and reach of impact.

To learn more about opportunities to be involved in this new initiative, please contact: info@iamnuru.org.