An open letter to the world and each one of us shared by GoParity’s CEO Nuno Brito Jorge.
My purpose as a person and businessman (or entrepreneur), is somewhere between sustainability, innovation and changing the way capital relates to our planet.
From an early age, I got used to people around me thinking that the way I spoke about sustainability or my motivations surrounding it were strange, exaggerated or even nonsense.
It happened to me initially when I talked about recycling and renewables, then about climate change, and then about energy democratization or about the democratization of the financial system.
Even though I did not invent any of this, I am pleased to see that nowadays most of these issues, such as climate change or recycling, are basically obvious to everyone, or at least is seems that way.
Fortunately, 2019 was a year where many people spoke out, not only influential people, but also people the world didn’t know before. These people previously did not speak (or spoke only shyly) about climate change, probably because they were scared of damaging their image among their peers.
Finally, thanks to the efforts of Greta Thunberg and other activists (who “just” decided to raise a red flag and highlight a problem that many scientists, environmentalists, politicians and businessmen have long warned of) and the realization of many expected consequences (fires, droughts, floods and a greater occurrence of extreme climate phenomena) we started to realize that we are all concerned about the climate.
But climate change is just the “tip of the iceberg” in what we need to do to reverse (or at least diminish) the environmental catastrophe that our planet is facing.
That is why, while I saw numerous news, posts and end-of-year statements on climate change and sustainability as the next challenges, I found myself thinking that now it is too late: when everyone finally sees the problem, it is almost impossible to avoid it.
It is no longer enough to think about acting in a sustainable way because sustainability, especially in a simplistic perspective, is no longer enough to recover damaged ecosystems, degraded soils or burnt forests.
Here regeneration appears as a great opportunity and challenge for our performance in the next decade (which, by the way, only starts in 2021). It is a holistic approach, which ceases to focus ‘only’ on meeting the needs of human beings (which unfortunately are not reasonable), but starts to consider us as part of a whole, on which we depend. We must care as well about providing basic resources, which we still have now, for the future generations instead of taking nature for granted and exploiting it to get the most out of it.
Carbon, which emerges as the main focus of combating climate change, is both the problem and the solution. If it is true that burning fossil fuels contributes to the greenhouse effect, it is also true that carbon is the basis of life — a basic component of all organic matter. It is a matter of imbalance: we are releasing much more carbon into the atmosphere than what we are retaining in plants, soils and oceans. About a third of the carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere of the last century came from agriculture, much of it resulting from soil degradation, which today has 4 to 8 times less organic matter than it did before industrialized agriculture was introduced.
Massive reforestation campaigns, with regenerative forestry practices — which respect biodiversity, respect native species, allow the life cycle of all plants to conclude and value the incorporation of organic matter in the soil — should become a priority on Earth in the upcoming years.
All of this is clear, if we want to keep life on Earth and not on Mars.
Sources:
Beste, A. What is Europe’s agriculture doing to the soil. (2018).
Houghton, R. A. & Nassikas, A. A. Global and regional fluxes of carbon from land use and land cover change 1850–2015: Carbon Emissions From Land Use. Glob. Biogeochem. Cycles 31, 456–472 (2017).
GoParity as a role model
To follow up on this meaningful speech, it is important to stress that the change should start (or already should have started) with yourself with the idea of everyone working towards the same goal. 2019 was a decisive year for the future of the planet, during which a big part of the world population finally realised the problem. A lot believe it’s already too late. However, it shouldn’t be stopping us from fighting for a better future even harder!
GoParity was born in 2016 in response to all tragic events that started occurring due to climate change. With more than 30 projects that we presented on our platform to our community of impact investors, we gave the chance of changing the world for good to more than 5200 people (data from 29.01). They had the chance to help in different sectors due to the diversity of our projects.
One of the latest projects dealt with a really important topic in Portugal, which is fighting the devastation caused by wildfires. GoParity launched the first reforestation project looking for funding for the plantation of around 270.000 trees in Belver area, where during 2017 two wildfires destroyed more than 80% of the forest area. The total amount to be raised for this project was 50.000€ and was financed in less than 24 hours! All of that was achieved by 123 investors who believed in change and helped to reforest 600 ha of Belver. To read more, please check our Medium article about this project 👇
It’s never too late unless you work twice as hard to eliminate the problem. To help you with that, you can always visit GoParity’s website and check our open projects at www.goparity.com !
