Clinton Foundation Looks Into Reforestation

A researcher from the Clinton Foundation called me today to discuss the barriers to more investment in reforestation projects. The first and still best profile of the Clinton Foundation I've read was published by Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic Monthly ("This Is Not a Charity - How Bill Clinton, Ira Magaziner, and a team of management consultants are creating new markets, reinventing philanthropy - and trying to save the world.")

Needless to say, I'm extremely pleased the Clinton Foundation is looking into supporting reforestation projects. The take-away from the Atlantic story is that the foundation is becoming extremely adept at mobilizing fragmented markets into big buyers of whatever it is they want to support - be it AIDS medicine in Africa or solar panels in progressive cities around the world. The bottom line is that the Clinton Foundation has hit on a way to dramatically lower the cost of very good projects by finding and pooling demand for them on a large scale.

Particularly exciting were some of the researcher's pointed questions about the efficacy of avoided deforestation projects -- paying landowners not to cut down their trees. This may sound a bit weird as far as being a type of greenhouse gas reduction project, but in fact protecting threatened forest is one of the single most cost-effective investments we could make in our environment, and the Clinton Foundation could mobilize a huge amount of financial support for doing just that.