Loose dirt blows around as the unremitting sun beats down. A small native shrub, an ilima, is just beginning to flower. The plant, brimming with new life, seems undaunted by the parched environment-and so do the seven thousand other native plants growing in neat rows on this forty-five-acre plot in Kohala. Despite conditions that would kill most native Hawaiian species, these plants aren't struggling; if anything, they're working to transform this abused landscape, with an assist from an emerging technology that just might change the world.
Hawaii Island's northwest peninsula has the steepest rainfall gradient in the world. From its western coast to the summit of Kohala, a distance of just eleven miles, annual rainfall ranges from as little as two inches to nearly two hundred. While dense cloud forest sits at the summit, the mountain's leeward flank is blanketed with miles of parched, windswept grass, more African savannah than tropical island. At one time this area was home to an expansive sandalwood forest with some of the richest dry-forest plant and insect biodiversity in the world. Years of logging and cattle grazing, however, degraded the land. Native trees and shrubs that captured moisture and protected the watershed have been replaced by invasive monocultures that do little to harness the infrequent but heavy rainstorms. Runoff pulls topsoil into the ocean, exposing the bare hardpan and silting reefs.
Nursery manager Rocky Thiel cultivates native Hawaiian plant seedlings at the Waimea planting site of Terraformation. The environmental start-up headquartered on Hawaii Island is aiming for a stratospherically ambitious goal: planting one trillion trees on three billion acres around the world to accelerate carbon capture and combat climate change.
In this sunbaked, depleted soil, the Hawaii-based environmental start-up Terraformation is hoping to grow a native forest, and this plot along Akoni Pule Highway is a small step in a long journey: to combat climate change by restoring native forest on billions of acres around the world-altogether, an area larger than the United States and Mexico combined. For Terraformation site leader Lopaka Dela Cruz, the company's local roots have an important role to play in achieving that ambitious goal globally. "Hawaii is unique because we have ten different climate zones-from dry to wet and all different types of elevation. I think everybody could learn a little something from us no matter what part of the world they're in," he says. "Especially because we're on an island chain in the middle of the sea, and we've got all of those hurdles," adds restoration technician Chauncey Revilla. "If we can be successful here, pretty much anyplace in the world can be as well."
Terraformation's origin story sits at the intersection of coincidence, luck and fate. Founder Yishan Wong, a key player in the early years of the Silicon Valley tech boom and former CEO of Reddit, had originally moved to Hawaii to retire. In 2017 he was driving along the highway when a sign caught his attention. For Sale: Eco Retreat. Curiosity piqued, he turned up the driveway. "It was just this building and a barn," Wong recalls, "but there was something about the land when I stood there. I'm a pretty technical person, but there was this magic or, I don't know, 'the call of destiny' might be too dramatic, but there was a feeling."
Terraformation has projects at several sites on Hawaii Island, including the agroforestry project at the Kaiwiki Food Forest (seen above). The island’s fourteen climate zones make it an ideal laboratory to experiment with reforestation approaches that could be applied in different environments around the world.
The parcel included a small set of solar panels and a brackish water well. Taking stock of the abundant sunlight and degraded landscape, Wong saw the potential to reforest the land by irrigating heavily with desalinated water, powered by solar energy. As he assembled a team to build the solar desalination system, Wong and his family were living in the nearby town of Waimea. Known for its cool, breezy climate, Waimea at the time was unseasonably hot. Historically hot, even, as Wong discovered when he spoke with his neighbors. That was when he decided to come out of retirement. "Everybody who works in climate has their moment. Maybe something happens to them, or they read a book. They realize something, and they're like, 'OK, I have to work on solving climate change until it's solved.' And that was my moment."
Wong began to research large-scale climate solutions, and it quickly became apparent that planting forests was the answer due to its efficacy, cost, reliability, safety and inclusivity (anyone can plant a tree; you don't need special training or expensive tech). At the time, however, some estimates projected that reforestation might address only about a third of the climate problem and was therefore broadly discounted. ("Which, by the way, is a weirdly irrational way to think," says Wong. "If you could wave a magic wand and solve a third of the climate change problem, you would obviously want to do it.") Looking at those calculations, Wong determined there was a good amount of land that wasn't factored in due to poor growing conditions, particularly desertified areas-areas that could be irrigated using systems similar to the solar desalination system he was building in North Kohala.
"If you don't do solar desal, you get about a third of the way to solving climate change," says Wong. "And if you really lean into the solar desal, you can potentially do the entire thing. If you combine that with reducing fossil fuel usage and decarbonizing our grid, we could in fact solve climate change in this generation. It's actually possible now, and you don't have to develop significant new technologies to pull it off."
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(LEFT) Terraformation founder and former CEO of Reddit, Yishan Wong (RIGHT) Site operations manager Bryn Lawrence at Terraformation’s key innovation, its solar desalination facility in Kohala. “It’s the only solar desalination facility in the world that’s fully off-grid and 100 percent solar powered,” says Wong; it’s capable of desalinating 34,000 gallons of brackish well water per day for irrigation.
The idea that climate change can be addressed through large-scale tree planting has seen countless critiques, particularly in response to a 2019 study by Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich, the conclusions of which are in line with Terraformation's goals. Scrutiny is largely focused around the feasibility of planting such a large area, how to safeguard planted areas to ensure they aren't logged or otherwise misused, and concerns that a dramatic increase in dark-colored canopy cover might lead to greater planetary heat absorption.
Dela Cruz and Revilla work primarily at Terraformation's Ohia Lani site in Waimea. Together with their team, they've planted about 150 acres over the past two years-more than 17,000 plants. Planting, however, is unique to Terraformation's work in Hawaii. Elsewhere, the company partners with established community organizations already doing native forest restoration in their regions to help address the four main bottlenecks in conservation: funding, access to native seeds, tools and training.
To that end, Terraformation's work in Hawaii serves partially as R&D. "We did experiments with soils. We worked on different planting methods, trying to be as efficient as possible," says Revilla. Dela Cruz explains that there was almost no plan at the beginning. The team was tasked with developing a system that worked best for the site in the hope that what they learned here might jump-start other restoration projects in similar climates around the world.
“We have enough human beings, and we have enough resources,” says Wong on the effort to plant a trillion trees. “This is actually within the realm of logistical possibility.” Above, restoration technician Aka Rodriguez-Herring examines a koa tree in Terraformation’s Ohia Lani at Mahiki restoration area near Waimea.
To improve access to native seeds, the company developed an off-grid seed bank built from a modified forty-foot shipping container. Seeds, while seemingly infinite and available, are often locked in remote forests, where seeding events can be infrequent. Forests are susceptible to climate extremes like drought and wildfires, making seed sources fragile. By collecting and storing native seeds throughout the year, restoration projects can also eliminate a major bottleneck: having the right plants at the right time, an issue that Terraformation ran into early on. "In the beginning my plan was to have every species ready before we planted, but the nursery wasn't ready," recalls Dela Cruz, highlighting the value of a seed bank. "It's super important that they can start growing six months or a year ahead of the project." Terraformation's original plan was to build and send these seed banks around the world, but it was ultimately thwarted by the high cost of shipping from the middle of the Pacific. Instead, they provide plans and expertise to help their partners build their own seed banks using locally available materials, something they've done in Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Ecuador.
For now all eyes are on Wong's North Kohala property, called Pacific Flight at Kaupalaoa. While degraded lands have been successfully reforested before, it's usually a decades-long process that requires planting in waves, with generations of plants growing and dying to rebuild the soil before putting in the plants that will eventually make up the forest. Terraformation is betting that consistent irrigation via solar desalination will allow restoration projects to plant the final forest species directly into degraded landscape. It's unorthodox, but if it works, the savings in time, energy and resources could make all the difference.
More than seven thousand native seedlings have been planted across the site’s forty-five fenced acres. Species such as koaia, aalii and wiliwili were chosen because of their documented historic presence in the area or their environmental compatibility. As the plants mature and the forest fills in, they will eventually be able to capture enough water to be self-sustaining, but in the meantime each plant has its own drip line delivering water directly to stem to prevent waste or runoff. The solar desalination system making this all possible is powered by 336 solar panels, which have the capacity to pump and desalinate over 30,000 gallons of water per day using reverse osmosis. (Roughly ten thousand gallons of water are used each day for irrigation.) The goal, ultimately, is to bring solar desal to restoration efforts around the world, particularly those located near coasts.
Planting was completed at Kaupalaoa in 2021, and early indicators are extremely positive. One year later, over 70 percent of the plants survived.
While these early successes in the field are promising, planting is only part of the work that Terraformation needs to do, says Kealiʻi Thoene, Terraformation’s former community programs manager. The most important lessons that Terraformation can learn working in Hawaii, he believes, should come from engaging its Native people. “Most of the land that will need to be reforested is going to be in the global South, tied to indigenous populations. Hawaii is in a unique position because we straddle two worlds: We have a thousand years or so of indigenous knowledge and an indigenous population that is still thriving on the same land where that knowledge was developed, but we’re also a part of the United States and the Western world. If we can get the relationship between those two worlds right, we can highlight how the Western world can support indigenous populations to create a reforested planet Earth that is healthy and mutually beneficial for all humans involved.
“In the Kānaka Maoli [Native Hawaiian] worldview, our ecological communities are not separate from our human communities,” he continues. “This is clear when you look at the Hawaiian language. Take the foundational word wai. Simply, it means fresh water. If you reduplicate it, waiwai means wealth, abundance, riches. So, in Hawaiian, wealth is intrinsically tied to the health of the natural ecosystems. When you contrast that with the Western definition of wealth, it’s pretty striking, but there is a way to include waiwai into the wealth of our people, our ecosystems, as well as our business models.”
Building trust with the community has been slow, and Wong acknowledges that the way he runs the Hawaii operation probably didn’t help. “Early in my career I worked on the internationalization team at PayPal, and one of the things we learned was when it comes to other countries and understanding other people, you need to remember that you don’t know anything,” he says. That experience informs his approach today, which may result in the company being less proactive in the community as some might wish. “Lots of other orgs have been doing this for a long time,” Wong says. “They know a lot more than we do. I’m not going to go and say, ‘Hey, we should do this. We know how to do it.’ And so we’re walking a fine line there because I don’t want to impose, and that can seem kind of standoffish, but at the same time people are like, ‘Why aren’t you [Terraformation] stepping up?’”
Terraformation personnel plant koa in what was once pastureland in the Ohia Lani at Mahiki restoration area. Before it was cleared for cattle, this area was the likely location of the historical and legendary forest of Mahiki—a vast stretch of koa and ohia.
Terraformation’s presence is being felt, though, as it begins working with more community partners. One of its seed bank prototypes now sits on the lawn at Bishop Museum in Honolulu and is operated jointly by three Oahu-based conservation groups.
Earlier this year, Hawaii Island restaurateur Peter Merriman reached out to Terraformation for help reforesting seventeen acres in Kohala to offset his restaurant’s carbon footprint. While Merriman’s Waimea has been carbon neutral for the past few years, that was achieved through purchasing out-of-state carbon credits. “We really wanted to have offsets that would help Hawaii as well,” Merriman says. “Then we started looking at it, and we realized that this might ultimately be something that’s good for landowners, farmers and other agricultural people in the future, as more people want to buy offsets. I’m excited we can be one of the first restaurants to go down this path, and hopefully make it a little easier for any other restaurants who want to go down the same path in the future.”
In collaboration with Arizona State University, Terraformation is also developing the Ridge-to-Reef Restoration Center in Kailua-Kona, where both organizations can develop solutions to environmental degradation on land and sea. The eventual goal, says Greg Asner, director of ASU’s Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science, is to do land-reef restorations jointly. “We’re ready to restore some reefs, but we have all these land issues in the reef, mostly sedimentation and pollution. And Terraformation is in the pole position to lead those land-based interventions.” Ultimately, Terraformation will manage upslope resources and reduce runoff, while Ridge-to-Reef will grow and outplant coral on the reefs.
For Wong it’s only the beginning of what he hopes Terraformation can offer Hawaii and the world. “The Hawaiian word for wealth is water, and until I embarked on this, I did not truly understand, but now I really, truly understand. Access to water is the true measure of wealth in human society. And we can now create or bring water anywhere in the Islands. We can have as much water as we want, and frankly, the economic development and the improvement to people’s lives would be amazing. I don’t want to push anything on anyone. I just try to tell people that it’s possible and that the future can be bright and the Islands can be wealthy in the truest sort of sense of the word: having water and abundance.”
