Futures Wild meets Native CEO, Robert Cobbold

Stefan Ferguson (Co-Founder, Futures Wild): Thanks for joining us Rob. Native really piqued our interest, it looks like What Three Words for indigenous stewardship. What inspired you to found Native and how does it build upon your previous entrepreneurial adventures? ‍

Robert Cobbold (CEO, Native): Interesting that you picked that up. We have created our own grid system; three square metres as opposed to What Three Word’s nine. This means that the price for protecting three square metres of rainforest is only three dollars as opposed to nine. At that price point, it can be tacked on to most consumer purchases. 

So if I buy a pair of trainers, the company selling the trainers can protect a square of rainforest and legitimately claim it as part of the purchase. Then the consumer can track that impact.

This leads into the fundamental question Native - and its two previous iterations - tried to answer: how can we design contexts where virtue is rewarded and encouraged? How can we conveniently give people the maximum intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for protecting our planet?

It's much more rewarding if people can see the impact they're having, if they can track it transparently, and if they have a convenient way for them to showcase their impact as well. This applies to companies as well as individuals.

With Native, it's much easier to track and view your impact and engage with it tangibly, particularly when compared to a donation to a rainforest charity, or buying a carbon credit for example. Native is all about giving people the tools they need to see, track and showcase their impact. That great feeling of tangible reward drives people to protect our planet one square at a time. 

‍‍SF: Can you elaborate on Native Squared's ABC methodology and how it differentiates your approach from traditional carbon/nature markets? ‍

RC: Carbon markets are by nature very reductionist. They take something dynamic and complex, like nature, like rainforests, like mangroves, and then they reduce it to a single metric.

That inevitably ends up undervaluing nature because of course, rainforest and mangroves do so much more than just sequester carbon. There's emerging evidence that water cycles are instrumental and at least as - if not more important than - the carbon cycle.

The Amazon rainforest, for example, evaporates more water up into the air than the Amazon River.  That is unbelievably significant for rain and global cooling. So it's not just about the carbon. And that's without touching on the biodiversity or indeed the community value beyond carbon.

Rather than reducing nature to tonnes of carbon, we analyze nature according to three things: carbon, biodiversity and community impact. These three things are mutually reinforcing.

So how will the project in question - and your money - benefit local indigenous communities and improve their standard of living? Empowered indigenous communities are far better at protecting rainforests than anything else. This way you don’t end up with so many unintended consequences where you optimize for one metric, but at the expense of others. For example, we've seen projects where indigenous communities get kicked off their land because the project believes indigenous communities there might chop down trees. That’s a very reductionist, two-dimensional way of coming at the problem so by capturing all three, we mitigate the risk of problems we’ve seen in carbon markets. 

SF: How does Native Squared ensure that indigenous communities receive 80-90% of the revenue, and what measures are in place to support their autonomy and stewardship?

RC: Firstly, for full disclosure, the first project is 80-90%. There could be other projects in the future where the percentage won't be so high. This is due to the proportion of community members attached to a project. For example, there’s a target project in Africa with barely any community members attached to the forest that is going to be protected, which if we shared 80% of revenue with them it would make every single person in that community a millionaire and that wouldn’t be practical. There are other ways to distribute that money equitably. Similarly, with regeneration projects a higher proportion of the fund may need to be allocated to the upfront activity of say, planting trees. Native will always be fully transparent on project financing.

The extent to which the communities participate in a project and have a voice in what happens with that money is reflected in our community percentage. 

The first project has a community percentage score of 78%. That means that they've been thoroughly consulted and included in terms of how that money will be spent and that they've always had a voice and a say in how the project has been designed.

If the community score is low, that could mean consumers won’t be happy to contribute to the project, so the interests are aligned to maximise community participation for mutually agreeable outcomes.  Native is all about transparently relaying that information so that consumers can make a choice which best suits their needs.

SF: Tracking impact seems to be the trend for 2025. How are you thinking about it and approaching it in the context of Native? ‍

RC: We provide a custom data platform dashboard where you can track your impact across carbon, biodiversity and community impact. Those figures and stats will be updated annually for every single project as we get more information. Naturally they can go up as well as down depending on the performance of the project. 

Our grid system makes it much, much easier to track your impact when you've protected a physical area as opposed to donating to a rainforest charity or buying a carbon credit. You can see your squares on the map and you can see for yourself that your money is having an impact.

You'll also get live updates from the indigenous communities as they take action on the ground. That's a feature that we will roll out very soon after launch. 

SF: What role does technology - such as AI and satellite imaging - and data play in enhancing the transparency and effectiveness of your conservation projects? ‍

RC: It plays a huge role. Take our first project: the standing rainforest in the Soloman Islands. We have to do an analysis and additionality analysis to say what would happen to this forest if we did nothing, if we did not do this project, because then you can use that to calculate the differential in carbon. That was all done remotely using satellite imaging, using methods developed by the Cambridge center for carbon credits.

We simply couldn't do what we do without satellite imaging and AI. Our biodiversity methodology will soon incorporate things like bioacoustics. We’re speaking to a German firm who put microphones in the forest and they listen to the sounds using AI to calculate the strength and complexity of the biodiversity. There are huge developments in this area and Native intends to incorporate as many of these new technologies as possible.

Tracking impact using a grid square and the ABC system as opposed to selling a tonne of carbon also encourages adoption of these new technologies to keep tracking more and more accurate as time goes on. Once you've sold a tonne of carbon, you can't evolve the methodology because it's been calculated a certain way and it has to continue to be calculated that way to stay certified. Whereas when selling a square of rainforest, what you're really selling is the environmental rights to that square of nature. And you might think about it in one way now with a certain methodology. But in 5-10 years, there might be better methodologies, and we can just simply update the information that we present. We can analyze the square in a different way, come to a different conclusion, and share the results with you. So the area based approach is uniquely adaptable in the face of these changes.

SF: And what are the challenges with the above?‍

RC: The exciting technologies above have to be validated by ‘ground truthing’ in each project. Balancing those two things can be difficult. Being consistent with our methodology and approach across different projects while also being sensitive to the fact that the situation on the ground might be very different. The history of the project might be very different as with the target project in Africa I mentioned earlier. We have to find a consistent and fair way of assessing the ABC scores for each project. That's going to be a constant source of tension that we'll have to resolve.

SF: What’s the most important thing that needs to happen to meet Nature Positive by 2030?

RC: I could come up with a practical to-do list. You know our civilization loves a practical to-do list. Fix this, fix that point, one, two, three and then it'll all be fine. But I think it's obvious that, as Albert Einstein said, we're coming at this problem with the same level of thinking which got us into the problem in the first place.The root of the issue is that we have a strong left brain bias. We like abstract, fixed qualities. We like reducing things to their parts and analyzing them and unfortunately nature doesn't work like that.

It's dynamic. You can take metrics and aspects of it. But if you continue to do that, by dissecting something, you’re killing what you're trying to value. One of the missions of Native is to try and be a bridge between this sort of left brain analytical way - and right-brain holistic way of looking at the world.

The communities that we work with see nature as this living, breathing, dynamic thing, which can't be reduced to a load of static metrics. Whereas our left-brain bias confounds climate action and it's causing us to reduce the value of nature to a few static metrics.

That is leading to a whole host of unintended consequences and an egregious undervaluing of the things that are actually most sacred and most important to us. Before we can come up with any to-do lists, we need to address our civilization's left brain bias and embrace a more holistic, nuanced, complex way of thinking. 

Only from that place, that mode of operating, can we meet that kind of Nature Positive target. 

SF: What’s the one thing you’d recommend to individuals wanting to contribute or change their own lives to work towards the 2030 goal?‍

RC: Well, of course I'm going to say Native is one thing I would recommend. You can sign up at www.nativesquared.com and you can protect a square of rainforest for only $3. People say they feel powerless to tackle the climate and biodiversity crisis. Well, $3 is within your power. Ironically, that's much more than a logging company would pay to chop down the same area.

This problem is not insurmountable. It just needs people to build that into their everyday choices and actions. Soon we'll have a service where you can have a subscription. So perhaps you protect a square a month for $3 or three squares a month or whatever it is you choose so that every single month you are protecting nature.

Eventually we'll start building it into everyday consumer purchases, as I described earlier. That’s the way we can start building incrementally towards the kind of goals set out by 30 x 30 and Nature Positive.