Show Notes
What if everything we're doing to restore the world's forests is missing the point?At every COP, every Climate Week, every major nature summit — the panels are the same, the talking points are the same, and the hard questions never get asked. In this first episode, Jad Daly and Sweta Chakraborty introduces The Understory: a podcast built for the people who are ready to talk about what's actually happening on the ground.Why are we talking about forests without talking about forestry? Why do the voices closest to the work — indigenous communities, local practitioners, field scientists — keep getting left out of the conversation? And what would it take to go from 15% tree survivorship to 85%... just by being willing to geek out on the details?This is the space for that conversation.In this episode: Why the big climate forums have become a "performance" — and what we're missing because of it The forest understory as a metaphor for everything our movement is getting wrong Why braiding indigenous knowledge with climate science is the unlock no one's talking about The "pre-mortem" question every restoration project needs to askSubscribe so you don't miss upcoming episodes, including live recordings at EarthX, COP, and Climate Week.🌱 Real talk. Real practitioners. Real solutions.
More from The Understory - a podcast where nature restoration gets real
Recorded live at The Nest during Climate Week NYC 2026, this episode brings together Adam Met, co-founder of Planet Reimagined and a member of AJR, and Monica Medina, former U.S. Special Envoy for Biodiversity and Water Resources, to ask the question the climate conversation keeps stepping around: if nature is a third of the answer, why does it get treated like a footnote?
A forest is built by millions of separate decisions, made over timescales longer than any career, election, or fund life — while the climate moves underneath them the whole time.
Everyone agrees the climate movement needs young people, and everyone agrees the next generation will live with the consequences. So why do the rooms where the decisions get made still look the way they do?
Everyone agrees reforestation needs to scale, and everyone agrees private capital has to be part of the answer. So why is it still so hard? In this episode, hosts Dr. Sweta Chakraborty and Jad Daley dig into the gap between what corporate buyers and investors require and what the communities actually stewarding the land can offer — and what it takes to build a bridge that works for both sides. They're joined by two people who've spent careers closing that gap from opposite ends: Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, who represents pastoralist and Indigenous communities in Africa's Sahel, and Christine Cadigan, who built a program making U.S. carbon markets accessible to small family forest owners. The conversation gets specific — aggregation, contract length, property rights, permanence risk, and where the money actually goes (Hindou notes that less than 7% of the $1.7B pledged to Indigenous peoples at COP26 reached communities). It ends with a live agreement to pilot something together. Hosts Dr. Sweta Chakraborty — CEO, North America, We Don't Have Time Jad Daley — President, Terraformation Guests Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim — Co-chair, International Indigenous Peoples' Forum on Climate Change; founder of the Association for Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad. A Mbororo pastoralist, she works on participatory 3D mapping, Indigenous knowledge, and direct-access climate finance. Christine Cadigan — EVP of Carbon Origination, American Forest Foundation; architect of the Family Forest Carbon Program and herself a family forest owner.
Earth Day started in 1970 with twenty million Americans, a bipartisan coalition, and no carbon agenda. It gave us the EPA, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act. So why does it feel like the environmental movement has spent the last two decades narrowing — not expanding? Recorded live at EarthX in Dallas on Earth Day 2026, this episode brings together some of the most credible voices in American conservation to ask the question most people in this space won't say out loud: has the obsession with carbon as the single metric for nature been holding us back? In this episode: Why the shift from "nature" to "climate" wasn't inevitable — and who benefited from it How siloed funding structures are actively limiting what gets built on the ground The Trinity River Audubon Center: what 120 acres on a former illegal landfill tells us about what restoration can look like Why the bipartisan conservation coalition fractured — and whether it can be rebuilt What investors and business leaders actually need to change about how they spend money on this Subscribe for upcoming episodes, including live ones at COP, Climate Week, and beyond. 🌱 Real talk. Real practitioners. Real solutions.