Explore every episode of the podcast The Understory - a podcast where nature restoration gets real

The Understory is a podcast about restoration where practitioners can real talk — no polished conference-stage performances, no organizational spin, just honest conversation about what's working, what isn't, and what it will actually take to reforest the world the right way.

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.
  

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.

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.

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.

That movement has done two things at once. It has made forests more valuable, because they are among the largest carbon solutions available to us. And it has made them more fragile, at a speed and reach nobody in forestry has seen before. We are leaning on forests harder than ever, at exactly the moment they are least able to take the weight.

Chris Swanston and Joseph Appiah-Gyapong have the same job on different continents: changing what other people do to trees, at scale. At the U.S. Forest Service, Chris built the translation layer — turning climate science into a decision a working forester can actually make on a particular stand. In Ghana, Joseph connected that science to the payment layer, changing what hundreds of thousands of cocoa farmers do by making the better practice the one that pays. Two halves of the same machine.

Hosts Dr. Sweta Chakraborty and Jad Daley put three questions to them: what good forest practice looks like under a changing climate, how that knowledge reaches the people who do the work, and what kind of financial support makes adoption possible.

It gets specific. Twenty percent of the southern Sierra is no longer forest — it is shrubland, and it is not coming back. Prescribed fire made giant sequoias four times likelier to survive a megafire. A forty percent stake in the harvest changes whether a farmer sets a fire. Sixty-nine percent of Ghana's carbon revenue reached communities, deliberately not as cash. And fourteen billion dollars of U.S. federal money arrived before anyone had the seedlings, the supply chain, or the workforce to spend it well.

Learn more at terraformation.com/the-understory

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?

In this episode, recorded live at London Climate Action Week, hosts Dr. Sweta Chakraborty and Jad Daley dig into an uncomfortable irony — a gathering of tens of thousands convened to solve the climate crisis, where most of the people in the room are neither young nor from the communities most immediately at risk — and ask what the established movement keeps getting wrong.

They're joined by two people who responded to that gap by building institutions to close it: Samrah Khan, who helps lead a nonprofit founded on the fact that roughly 90% of climate science is published in English while about 80% of the world doesn't speak it, and Zainab Bie, who advances unconditional cash transfers as a tool for climate justice — from a pilot paying young climate defenders in Tuvalu to a proposed South Pacific Climate Justice Fund.

Guests:

• Samrah Khan — Chief of Staff, Climate Cardinals; a former conservation specialist (AmeriCorps / Climate Impact Corps) who helped grow the language-justice nonprofit from a $500 Google Doc into an organization that has translated more than four million words across 100+ languages.
• Zainab Bie — Asia Pacific Director, Equal Right, and co-founder of Impactship, a community of ~2,000 young changemakers across the Global South. An economist by training, she works on unconditional cash transfers and direct-access climate finance, with active projects in Tuvalu and Kenya.