Nyra, a new social venture from King’s College London, is trying to change that.
Nyra is a platform that breaks positive climate actions into manageable pieces that everyone can be a part of. It has three parts that bring people together to take transformational change to improve the climate and biodiversity:
- The platform trains farmers in the global South who are deeply motivated to adopt sustainable farm practices like planting trees between crops, organic composting, and beekeeping. These actions absorb carbon and promote biodiversity while improving farmers’ resilience.
- Nyra works with manufacturers and artists to create stunning products from farmers’ sustainable outputs. The key to transformational change is that these products are carbon-negative. This means that they absorb more carbon than they emit across their life cycle.
- Nyra identifies partners who are motivated to do something about climate change – upwards of 76% of the UK population, according to ONS data – that have some financial means to support these climate actions. They provide small financial contributions to purchase the necessary inputs and offer a living wage to farmers to undertake these actions. They receive Nyra’s stunning climate-negative products in return.
This steers us away from charity and towards mutual benefit. Everyone gets a tangible return from these small climate actions on top of the wider benefits to our shared environment.
Over time, and with the support of the academic community behind Nyra, these climate-negative products will become financially viable on their own. Some climate negative products already exist in the building and packaging industries. But Nyra wants to expand this to the coffee you drink, the oil you cook with, the soap you use and anything else that can be made through farmers’ positive climate actions.
Climate change and biodiversity loss are what economists call ‘collective action’ problems. The solutions to these problems require us to work together, but the systems we operate within don’t encourage us towards these common goals. Governments and corporations are trying – that’s what brings them to COP – but the average person, or even a single country or company, is limited in what they can do to address these system-wide problems.
Nyra is tackling this collective action problem head on. Nyra’s first series – the Ghana series – is supporting farmers in Ghana to capture 200,000 tons of carbon and restore 400 acres of degraded land, transforming them into biodiverse landscapes that support both people and planet. This first series has produced creatively designed personal care products – soap, body butter, and lip balm – whose production will result in more carbon being absorbed by the farmers producing them than was used in their production and shipment.
This doesn’t mean we are off the hook for our unsustainable consumption patterns. Reducing consumption of environmentally harmful products needs to be our first priority. But there are things we need to consume – cooking oil, soap - that can be part of the solution. Check out Nyra’s first line of carbon-negative personal care products for a glimpse into what is possible.