NCX’s mission is to accelerate the transition to a nature-positive economy. Achieving this mission will require a massive effort across billions of acres, millions of landowners, and thousands of businesses, governments, and communities across the globe. It is far more than any individual company could hope to achieve alone. That is why we are refocusing NCX on the core of that mission: helping landowners and foresters participate in the nature-positive economy. Today, that unfortunately means that NCX is reducing the size of our team by 40%.
After our layoffs last year, we committed to listening and learning. In hundreds of conversations since then, we’ve found that the biggest challenge in carbon markets is confusion. Many companies have sprung up to advise large corporate buyers on navigating these complex and rapidly evolving markets. We’re proud of the role we’ve played in catalyzing clarifying conversations about dynamic baselines, storage durations, and risk in carbon offtake agreements.
However, the millions of family landowners across America remain profoundly underserved. They want to understand what carbon and other emerging natural capital markets mean for them and their land. Which programs are they eligible for? What is a fair price? What are the tradeoffs between timber and carbon and biodiversity? It’s hard to get answers to these questions today.
Landowners deserve better. Without them, there are no forest carbon markets, no timber markets, no biodiversity markets. Landowners deserve an honest broker who can help them get a fair deal for the full value of their contributions to the nature-positive economy.
That’s why starting today, NCX is narrowing our focus to helping landowners discover, evaluate, and compare opportunities to participate in natural capital markets. Landowners can take advantage of NCX’s unique data platform to understand the full potential of their property and find the programs that best match their goals.
To provide an unbiased assessment of opportunities for landowners, we’re stepping back from developing new forest carbon projects ourselves. In our new role, NCX will accelerate the transition to the nature-positive economy by helping landowners evaluate and connect with many other project developers and service providers in the industry. By providing data, insights, and powerful software tools, we’re excited to help the whole natural capital industry flourish and achieve massive climate impact together.
For the thousands of landowners participating in NCX’s current programs, you will still receive payments at the end of the performance period based on your carbon stocking.
For project developers and forestry service providers, there are many ways we can support your work with North American landowners. We’re looking forward to working together.
Our narrower focus on connecting landowners and project developers requires that we make some changes to our team. While we are continuing to invest heavily in engineering, product, and landowner relationships, we are scaling back other parts of the company. Unfortunately, that means that today we’re saying goodbye to 15 NCXers.
To our team: this is a profoundly difficult decision. The market hasn’t evolved as quickly as we had hoped and we’ve had to find a different approach to achieve our mission. We’ve already reached out to those affected to ensure you have details on next steps, including severance and continuation of benefits. Each of you has done inspiring work to accelerate the transition to a nature-positive economy and the industry looks different today because of your efforts. Thank you.
Armed with some hard-earned perspective, we’re excited to open a new chapter for NCX by returning to our roots and delivering value to landowners and foresters across America. We look forward to sharing more details soon.
-Zack Parisa and Max Nova
