Wrap Up and Hand Off

I ended my internship a couple of weeks ago. Since then I have seen six airports, relaxed, and started my second year as an MBA at the Darden School of Business.

In retrospect, writing a business plan for a protected area in Cambodia was a difficult challenge.

The draft I handed off to CCIF was, I felt, well-researched but incomplete. The most rewarding work was done in Phnom Penh with my coworker Sarah, bouncing ideas off people and organizations that have a stake in the Cardamom Mountains, and I wish I could have collaborated more with the CCIF team on refining the plan based on those conversations.

Thanks to everyone who has been reading this blog and vicariously working as a conservation financista in Bali, Indonesia.

Lembongan seaweed cultivation (island close to Bali)

Terraced rice-farming on the road to Bedugul, Bali

Bedugul, Bali

Phnom Penh by Cab

(**Click on collage to enlarge**)

Off to Phnom Penh

So, my input to the draft business plan is finished (the presentation I gave to my boss well-received) and I have been busy preparing for a series of face-to-face interviews that start Wednesday in Phnom Penh. It will be great to be in the field to talk directly to people about our ideas concerning trusts and financing strategies for conservation in the Cardamom Mountains.

I write the final wrap up of my blog next week when I back in the US. It promises to be introspective and long--I will try to break it up with photos!

The Devil in the Details

I am back from a week's vacation and fired up about this blog. First, permit me to gripe a little about NGOs. After that, I'll give you an update on the business plan that outlines the structure of a fund to support conservation activities in Cambodia.

I heart NGOs
How do you get NGOs to hire you as a consultant? Or how do you start doing meaningful work in an area already canvassed by lots of existing organizations? From the perspective of a private company interested in working on development issues, the NGO world can be a weird animal for the following reasons (warning--broad generalizations may follow):

1. It is hard to quantify impact (that is not to say it cannot be done). I've started to feel that NGOs, intentionally or not, use confusion techniques similar to retail supermarkets. Have you noticed that with all the limited-time discounts, super-saving coupons and special offers to card members, it can be very difficult to compare the price of one product, say cornflakes, from one supermarket to the next? Now take that to the next level -- with NGOs it can be next to impossible to compare product offerings! They have different approaches to working with communities, different training models, and so on and so forth.

2. People in the NGO world complain about the inefficiencies of government, yet when it comes to getting work done (using the right tools and people to look at a problem), the environment can become as political as trying to unseat a Raytheon or a Bechtel from its government contract. In a competition for funding, no one wants to rock the boat and let in an organization that could, god-forbid, do the work more efficiently.

It's about who you know, and about proposing something that doesn't undermine the way that the NGO is perceived by its funder. This can be tricky if you are trying to improve how the NGO operates and by extension its impact -- you can't be subcontracted for something the NGO has already promised its funder that it can do.

(side note: the last organization I worked for sometimes hilariously billed itself as a Government Organized Non-Governmental Organization -- work that out!)

3. There is no way to fund everything, but little attempt to define priorities in terms of their comparative costs, impacts and ease of implementation.

4. International NGOs can devise strategies for paying local beneficiaries according to incentive systems, but very rarely are equivalent incentive structures applied to payment of the NGOs that thought up those strategies.

5. NGOs (maybe with the exception of some well-run microfinance outfits) are ill-equipped to manage successful local sustainable development. First, it can be very difficult to raise the funding required for conservation/poverty eradication through such programs. Second, you can't pay/force people to be entrepreneurial. Third, many businesses fail.

Phew. I will stop at those five big ones. There is a lot I like about the NGO model, but also a lot I think can be improved. NGOs in my opinion should act more like for-profits in the way that for-profits are beholden to shareholders, and are accountable for operating results.

Whether or not it is required by funders, or whether funders have different requirements, NGOs should define for themselves the impacts that they want to engender through their work, where possible quantify those impacts and then measure themselves and their employees against those goals.

Business Planning for Conservation
So my boss is back from a prolonged trip to the US and we're starting to have more of the kind of conversations I like about the business plan (where we talk about nitty-gritty details, romanticize about how things should work, and generally organize stuff).

In collaboration with the Big International NGOs on the ground, CCIF has gained an understanding of the costs of funding conservation in the Cardamoms Protected Area Network, and has a bottom-up cost model, that when complete, should give the user flexibility in determining what the endowment will and won't support (costs can be scaled by function, by protected area, or by activity). The cost model, in theory, is based on management plans that were grounded in a multi-stakeholder consultative process conducted by the BINGOs. To give you a little background -- management plans are extensive documents that outline conservation objectives and address what activities need to be accomplished to ensure those objectives are met.

What we're trying to do in the business plan is to allow the model to tell a story: here is what is being done currently and how much it is costing everyone (baseline), here is the level of activity required to achieve a series of minimum conservation objectives and how much it would cost. The fund cannot cover the costs of all conservation in the area (I think I talked about this in an earlier blog), so within this scope, here is a list of priorities for the fund to cover and how much those priorities would cost. The cost of the 'priorities' scenario is the target capitalization. However, even this amount may be more than the funding that can be raised in the first years of the endowment.

Therefore, we need to show what can be achieved if the fund starts out with the amounts organizations have so far verbally committed (no handshakes) to funding and then ramps up to the targeted level of capitalization.

Easy, right? Just pull together some fancy text and graphs and you're done. In a way, I guess that's right. The text has to be persuasive and critical, but not biased or offensive and the numbers well-grounded; the visuals have to tell the story better than the text; and most importantly the document as a whole has to get other groups talking. I think it will take a number of drafts before CCIF is in a position to solicit feedback. Because we did not/could not begin work on the business plan until week six-seven of a ten week internship, it means I will likely have to leave the business plan in draft form.

Well, that's all for now. Next week is the last week of my internship (I can hardly believe it! I am beginning to have Bali-separation-anxiety). I will spend the majority of it in Phnom Penh with a colleague conducting interviews that will inform the business plan. See you then.

Weekend of a Conservation Financista

Not much to report -- chugging away at the business plan for the trust fund in Cambodia and working with an engineer to build macros and functionality into the valuation model we prepared for the voluntary carbon project. Trying to add value wherever I can, learn new things, and make it through the week so I can go diving.

Before I launch into telling you about diving - I wanted to field one question from a reader (yes, there are actually people reading about conservation finance...) My mother asks, " One thing I wondered is, writing the plan, do you have any funding resources to start with, or does it all have to be generated within the plan? Or does the plan partly do this and works to entice others to invest/donate resources?"

Well, Mum, in a nutshell, there are a couple of organizations interested in funding conservation in the region through a sustainable financing mechanism. These organizations seek to leverage the money that they could set aside for conservation with commitments from other international organizations, and everyone wants a deeper commitment from the government of Cambodia on conserving the area.

So, part of the plan will look at the fundraising landscape -- mainly at international multilateral donors, large, private philanthropic foundations, and NGOs -- to identify their requirements for funding and gauge their interest.

On to diving!! The highlight of my dives can only be expressed with this photo of a Mola Mola (ocean sunfish). We spotted two of these prehistoric lopsided creatures on our dive on Saturday, which was 15 minutes off the coast of Padang Bai at a dive site called Mimpang.

The one pictured above had to be more than 2 meters in diameter. When I first saw it coming out of the deep blue down at ~25 meters below the surface, I thought it was a whale. After realizing it wasn't quite that big, I was still hesitant to approach it. Never having seen anything like it I wasn't sure what it would do. Luckily, it turns out that the Mola Mola, like most fish, is pretty mellow, and we swam in circles around him/her for a good 5-10 minutes.

Endow This

So we finished work on the carbon project valuation, except for the countless little bugs with the model that kept coming up last week. The lesson I took away with it is that you can't test your model too much.

I began working this week on a business plan for a conservation trust fund in the Cardamom Mountains in Cambodia and am feeling woefully ill-equipped as I leaf through reports on the work done in the area since it became safe to live and work in. I'm not going to go into all the back history, but long story short, the mountains were the last hold out of the Khmer Rouge (if you don't know anything about the Khmer Rouge, I suggest watching the movie the Killing Fields), and the unsafe conditions and the lack of access to roads for decades kept people from venturing in and settling down with their families. The area is rich with plant and animal life endemic to the mountain range and probably worth trying to protect, especially now that it is under greater threat from illegal poaching, harvesting and logging activities and human settlement and crop cultivation.

It's all well and good to write a business plan, but I am afraid no amount of writing can make local enforcement effective, get government agencies and NGOs with competing agendas to cooperate, or convince communities to roust the illegal poachers and be more thoughtful when clearing of land for agriculture. All the reports I've read indicate that the development projects in the area try to do everything in very short periods of time - enforcement, government capacity building, sustainable livelihood development, research, monitoring, and the list goes on. As an aid organization, there is little incentive to undersell what you can deliver, so they under deliver.

So I'm trying to bring focus to the business plan, but just funding enforcement is so unsexy.

My other issue (I'm starting to create a list of them) is that a business plan, as far as my understanding goes, is supposed to provide guidance to an organization on how to increase their profits by either cutting costs, finding new source of income or increasing revenues. The problem with the endowment model is that, if operational costs are covered with the interest from the fund's investments, to disburse a reasonable amount every year to cover those costs, the fund needs to be very well endowed (in this case, endowment is not genetic). I am skeptical that anyone will pony up the resources (human and capital) that the protected area needs to raise the funds required to capitalize the endowment, or that, in less than one month, we will be able to satisfy what was promised in terms of researching potential sources of income. We will try.

So I've got a lot of work ahead of me, and not a lot of time to do it, AND Bali as a major source of distraction. I just hope this doesn't mean an end to surfing and fun.

Carbon is the New Black Gold

This week I’ve been working on a valuation for a project that aims to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation (otherwise known by its acronym REDD). In modeling and analyzing cash flows in terms of their sensitivity to numerous variables (price of carbon, rate of deforestation, etc) , and working with local investors, I’ve gained an appreciation of the position of the project developer in the highly glamorous voluntary carbon market.

Two quick links on carbon finance – both are chock full of info and materials if you want to find out more about these new markets: http://www.newcarbonfinance.com/, http://www.cdmgoldstandard.org/

Back to Indonesia 1997

Indonesia is central to the deforestation story-- because of all of its natural treasures and because of their misuse. In that story, one of the saddest chapters has to be what happened here in 1997-1998. Ten million hectares (25 million acres – an area eleven times the size of Yellowstone National Park) of forest were lost to fires that ravaged the earth. In 1997, the world was experiencing El Nino, a climactic phenomenon caused by the interaction between the atmosphere and warm water in the East Pacific ocean off the coast of South America. El Nino hit particularly hard in Indonesia, causing drought.

The sad part is that looking back on the event, researchers theorized that many of the fires were not due to the drought-like conditions, but were set intentionally by timber and agribusiness companies intent on clearing land for cheap, and ignorant of controlled burning techniques (some of which, ironically, had been practiced by locals for years). El Nino was a convenient excuse.

According to “Trial By Fire: Forest Fires and Forestry Policy in Indonesia's Era of Crisis and Reform” by the World Resources Institute/Forest Frontiers Initiative, there were numerous disincentives for logging companies to operate more efficiently. The government charged tax on the timber exported not on the volume cut down, thereby offering no regulatory incentive for the timber companies to be any less wasteful. In addition, companies didn’t just cut the trees, but many also operated as processing companies and used the logs to subsidize their inefficient processing facilities. This encouraged companies to try and source logs (the processing facilities raw material) at the lowest possible price, even it meant logging illegally.

The story goes beyond 1997-- Indonesia lost 1.5 million hectares each year from 1986-1997 as a result of land use policies under former President Suharto, a total of 40 million hectares (Germany and Holland combined) since the 1960s, 30% of Indonesia's forest cover.

But, 1997 was particularly bad. If I remember right, 1997 was the year Indonesia became the third large source of carbon emissions in the world behind the US and China. The effects of the fires were physically felt by people in countries as far as Malaysia and Singapore; the smog causes asthma, bronchitis, respiratory infections, etc. I can begin, from experience, to imagine how it felt. I was in Moscow in the summer of 2002 when, because of high temperatures, the peat bogs under Moscow began to burn. There was a cloud of smog over Moscow and you couldn’t venture outside without coming home smelling a little like burnt hair. Firefighters had to dig moats around the fires and it took an inhuman effort to put them out.

The earth was literally boiling. I don’t know how much peat there is under Moscow, but there are roughly 27 million hectares of peatland in SE Asia (think British Isles-size). Peatlands are bogs, but they are also huge carbon sinks, created over thousands of years and storing thousands of metric tons of today’s black gold. In 1997 peatland destruction alone may have caused 15-40% of global CO2 emissions (3000-9000 Mt).

Markets for Conservation
The carbon markets have created an opportunity for people to earn money for protecting forests and peatland. It’s not easy – project developers have to be able to get concessions from the government, understand the true value in carbon $$$ of the land to which they have the rights, document that through their efforts additional deforestation is not taking place, protect and maintain the land, work with local communities, and offer investors liquidity at some point in the future. They have to do all this with an uncertain future price of carbon, with risk of expropriation, in an environment in which middle men are slowly but surely lining up to take their cut.

So, the business model is full of uncertainty (great for Crystal Ball), but as an alternative to palm oil and paper and pulp plantations, it’s the coolest thing ever!