Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

Our purpose is to accelerate, align, upskill and upscale global social regenerative movements to repair Earth while removing carbon from the atmosphere. We have brought together for direct collaboration and alignment five global networks which weren't talking with each other (or barely!), but must be: the nascent climate restoration movement, the larger, more established ecosystem restoration movement, biodiversity conservation and rewilding organizations, youth leadership and biodiversity networks, women's leadership networks, and what we call indigenous "cultural bridges" co-designing future scenarios and values. In July 2022 we also began making a closely related global documentary series ("The Climate Restorers: https://www.backtoourfuture.net) on nature- and ecosystem-based climate restoration. Series co-producer, Phoebe Barnard's, background in biodiversity, ecosystems and climate science convinced her that all these fields needed strong alignment and acceleration, with the energy, ideas and needs of youth leadership global alliances in order to accelerate and scale this in a way that could truly transform the global economy and civilization while starting to stabilize planet and climate by 2050. Phoebe's approach was to use her convening and communication abilities to drive bold messaging among these networks while seeking strategic alliances with change leaders in all five realms to accelerate these at scale. Before 2050, we hope to bring 1 billion people directly and indirectly into the restoration economy, have 200 of the world's 230 major watersheds, 2072 million hectares of land, and quadrupled levels of coastal ecosystems under restoration to facilitate climate and sea-level adaptation, community resilience, and thriving local communities (see black-box goals, https://www.stableplanetalliance.org/restoration).

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Restores the planet, climate, and the very fabric of local communities through vast-scale restoration and regenerative farming, fishing, timber and land-management practices.  This is a multi-decade, urgent acceleration to fulfill the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and beyond, but also to help communities work towards a clear, inspiring, positive and achievable goal at scale to turn this broken civilization around and draw down up to 30 Gt of carbon (CO2 and methane) from the atmosphere.

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Project leader and global change scientist, Prof Phoebe Barnard has a lifetime of work in this justice, representation and capacity field. She worked 34 years in Africa building national and bioregional strategy programs for Namibia and South Africa and working globally to teach, mentor and supervise young graduate, undergraduate, youth and women professionals in the fields of climate, biodiversity, tropical and arid-zone ecology, ecosystem health and human wellbeing. She is an active mentor with CoalitionWILD, the American Society of Adaptation Professionals, and Society for Conservation Biology, and she takes on numerous unofficial mentees especially from Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, and Namibia, frequently mentoring them online and via email, WhatsApp and social media, writing testimonials, helping secure grants and university and job placements. These disproportionately support young women, and Phoebe was a cofounder of the Society for Conservation Biology / Africa Section's Young Women Conservation Biologists' Group (YWCB), an award-granting body to collect women working in the field in isolation from colleagues and sometimes against strong cultural and social mores for young women. Since returning to the USA in 2017 she has led a team planning climate in-migration preparedness programs to help cities and states in the Pacific Northwest plan ahead to welcome and place climate refugees. (This was the subject of a National Science Foundation grant proposal which was turned down in the final stages.)

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