We Who Do – Empowering Businesses to End Climate Change

Hazel Needham

Hazel Needham

We Who Do collaborate with us earlier in the month to interview our CEO and founder, Ric Porteus. The first in a few as we celebrate our new partnership with We Who Do. 

We Who Do in Collaboration with One Tribe - An interview with RTichard Porteus - CEO of One Tribe

Get our best content on Climate Action in your inbox every week

We are empowering businesses in partnership with We Who Do

We are proud to now be in partnership with We Who Do as part of a commitment to empowering businesses within their community. Their Co-Founder, Mike James confirmed he wanted One Tribe to become its official carbon partner, empowering businesses to dramatically reduce their carbon footprint within the We Who Do ecosystem. 

For We Who Do’s members, they will now be able to reduce their carbon footprints by being able to fund the protection of tens of millions of trees in over a dozen rainforests around the world. With We Who Do backing us exclusively as their carbon partner, we will also empower their consultants and sustainability experts to achieve CSR goals across the community. 

We’ll also be giving anecdotal advice and helping We Who Do and their members to use the tech and work they are doing with us to secure B Corp certification, particularly around the environmental parts of the application. 

We Who Do will be empowering businesses already in One Tribe

For ONE TRIBE, the community can hope to be joined by market-leading brands and we can make a significant contribution that our conservation partners need now as they fight to stop rainforests from hitting their tipping points. And our brand partners can now gain access to expert advice and knowledge from trusted freelancers and consultants, empowering businesses in our ecosystem to grow and further achieve their own sustainability goals, quicker. 

Many of our brand partners are enjoying great engagement with their customers, but are on a journey to becoming carbon neutral and truly sustainable. With We Who Do’s support, we know that together we can help them to achieve everything they need to honour these incredible commitments to the planet. 

Screenshot 2019-09-10 at 12.02.45

Where did the idea for One Tribe come from?

I led the marketing department for a large organization called the Pacha group, which runs global festivals, events, lifestyle brands, hotels and resorts. And on an annual basis, we used to process around 2 million tickets to events. And we wanted to understand how we could give back to charities and help offset the carbon footprint of the events and industries that we were in. So we researched the EnviroTech industry. 

Fast forward a few years, I met a guy called Tom Murray. We were attending an event called the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, where we bumped into each other and started a conversation about rainforest protection. He was wearing a T-shirt with, “we know how to save the rainforest.” So we started a whole conversation about rainforest protection, and I explained how we were looking to connect this to our ticketing system. Following the event, we became close friends and started to work together. 

We formed a business and started looking at offsetting the carbon footprint of every event ticket. We onboarded hundreds of Festivals and Events globally, started saving the rainforest and every ticket purchaser received a ticket that saves trees in the Amazon. This progressed into working outside of the events industry, where we moved to New York to set up a blockchain project where we could tokenize rainforest protection. 

We amalgamated all the different projects together alongside several conservation partners. We wanted to create a platform that would allow connectivity to 98% of world payment systems. This was the formation of the business that we have today, where everybody works together from all industries backgrounds, from philanthropic investors to climate scientists, to NGOs, and land protection specialists all working together as one tribe, to protect the planet for future generations.  

Untitled-1_0008_Pixabay-Rainforest-Canopy-3-1
Image from Pixabay

What is actually going on in the Amazon? And have we already reached the tipping point in your opinion?

No, we haven’t. Not yet anyway. You reach a tipping point when you lose about 25% of a rainforest. Once reached, a rainforest’s ecosystem could potentially then break down, the forest becoming a dry forest or savannah within a handful of decades. Currently, the Amazon rainforest has lost around 20% of its coverage. ‘

Brazil has had massive issues with corruption, where most of the politicians from several main parties were not only taking money but also being involved in various scandals. 93% of Brazilians now recognise the threat of climate change and its effects around the world. So the real hope is that we’ll make 22-23% but we’ll bring the rainforest back from the tipping point through the work being done taking land from the government and giving it to indigenous people. 

Since scientific evidence is so strong around the world, the hope is that most governments in these territories will intervene at the last minute, if our and others efforts haven’t protected the 75% that we need to. 

Untitled-1_0007_Pixabay-Rainforest-Canopy-1
Pixabay - Forest canaopy

What makes One Tribe’s approach special and how do you guys ensure rainforest conservation is happening?

Well, One Tribe is an organization that specifically focuses on rainforest protection. Global rainforests are the planet’s lungs. While the world is focusing on reducing its carbon footprint, deforestation is escalating, due to demand for agricultural land for farming.

Gold Mines mineral exploration in the deep Amazon is causing huge devastation. Encroachment on land for domestic use is also destroying 1000-year-old rain forests globally.

In order to protect and sequester carbon from our atmosphere, the world, the Earth, the planet needs trees. Trees are the creator of oxygen and the removal of carbon, helping to dramatically reduce atmosphere temperature dramatically alongside carbon in the oceans. Rainforests are the single most important natural defence to rising temperature and the devastating impacts of climate change.

One Tribe is committed to protecting rainforests

One tribe is dedicated to protecting rainforests. Our mission, to empower businesses to protect 1 billion trees annually. By doing so, the members of One Tribe in our organization will have a profound positive impact in protecting the planet for future generations.

One Tribe connects online businesses and their customers to rainforest protection to take immediate climate action. And we specialize in connecting forestry protection projects, indigenous tribal land, rainforest organizations, directly to our climate action API, which is a set of technology that connects to 98% of global payment systems, enabling all businesses whether eCommerce, physical service-based to provide a portion of every sale or transaction and committed to carbon sequestration projects globally. 

Untitled-1_0004_Pixabay-stump-tailed-macaque-5585541-1
Pixabay - Image of monkey in the forest canopy

Why do you think it’s important to work at the business/industry level, rather than at the individual or consumer level?

We decided early on that the way we wished to deliver climate action would be by empowering businesses to engage their networks and customers. Many of the team are from a marketing agency background or have worked directly in the kinds of brands we are now supporting. We don’t want to have a marketplace or run consumer campaigns directly. Our priority is giving brands the marketing tools, assets and technology to take climate action with the help of their consumers, whilst being able to promote their sustainability journey to the world. 

This also means we can achieve so much more by focusing on business technology and supporting our conservation partners by saving more trees in the rainforest. 

 

Screenshot 2019-09-10 at 12.02.45

What does the future look like for One Tribe?

Exciting! We are well on our way to hitting our first target of protecting 1 billion trees and enabling 1000s of global businesses to participate in climate action. We see ourselves able to onboard over 10,000 global-based eCommerce brands, then 100,000 global businesses participating as one tribe to take climate action. 

We are currently onboarding several large projects in South America, mainly in Panama and Costa Rica, ready for 2022 where we will be participating and funding the protection of large mangrove based peninsulas in Panama, and large projects within the Costa Rican jungle. We will continue to expand our connectivity capabilities to enable all payment systems, from credit card machines to payment terminals on websites, to e-commerce providers like Shopify Magento, to CMS systems and marketing tools such as HubSpot and Klaviyo. 

Our movement will help businesses win the race to net-zero

We have Zapier connecting, which gives us infinite possibilities. We want to provide a toolset that enables all businesses, creatives and marketers to engage in climate action using one tribe as the framework and foundation for their campaigns. As part of a movement, we hope to work with businesses to win the race to net zero. 

One Tribe is working on a new measurement system that allows us to use satellite imagery, data sets and scanning techniques to map and calculate rainforest projects. The carbon sequestration amounts annually in order to accurately predict the climate action and power of each individual forest project. Working with our partners, we have a continuous supply of projects that need funding or require ongoing maintenance. 

In fact, we announced with the Rainforest Trust a pledge to work with businesses to help raise $500 million in private investment to fund forest protection around the world, across the next 5 years. Which combined with private funders of conservation as part of the ‘Protecting Our Planet Challenge’ will seek to raise over $5 bn. The biggest privately funded conservation project ever!

Screenshot 2019-09-10 at 12.02.38

Join the movement and work with us to take climate action now

One Tribe is now an official carbon partner of We Who Do. Does your business want to take climate action in a meaningful way? Working with the movement to fund crucial rainforest protection work? Check out One Tribe and its tools for businesses. 

Struggling to get your head around carbon and how it works, check out our help guide.

Climate action, empowering businesses, amazon rainforest, tree protection, take climate action, lifestyle brands, global festivals, offset the carbon footprint, carbon footprint, rainforest protection, offsetting the carbon footprint, save trees in the Amazon, conservation partners, climate sciences, save the planet, the Amazon rainforest, rainforests ecosystem, threat of climate change, global rainforests, planet’s lungs, impacts of climate change, protecting rainforests, forestry protection, carbon sequestration, business technology, conservation partners, eCommerce providers, enabling all businesses, engage in climate action, fund forest protection, privately funded conservation.