Saving threatened forests| Making conservation an investment through tokenization| 30k+ hectares of native forest protected| 1 Oxygen Token ($OM) =1m² protected
Argentina
Joined May 2025
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Researchers reviewed 52 forest protection projects across 12 tropical countries and found that only about a fifth delivered the emissions reductions they had claimed. Roughly 13% of the credits sold held up under independent analysis.
A huge part of the problem comes down to the baseline, the amount of forest loss a project says would have happened without protection.
Set that number too high and you can create credits for deforestation that was never likely to happen.
That is exactly the problem we are trying to avoid at La Florencia.
Before a single credit is issued, we are building the baseline from the ground up. We are measuring the forest itself, establishing how much carbon is actually stored there, mapping the areas under real clearing pressure, comparing that against historical deforestation around the property, and then tracking what happens over time with satellite and field monitoring.
We are not starting with a credit target and working backwards. We are starting with the forest and asking how much destruction is genuinely likely without protection.
And in Formosa, that threat is not theoretical. The Gran Chaco is being cleared right now, and the economic incentive to convert native forest is already there.
A forest credit should represent destruction that was actually prevented.
If the threat was invented, the credit was too.
[Source: Science (2026)]
Elephants in parts of Africa are literally being born without tusks now because humans slaughtered so many of the ones that had them for ivory that the trait is vanishing from the population.
Decades of relentless poaching selected against tusked animals so hard that tuskless females became far more common, and that genetic shift is now showing up in the next generations.
This is not some neutral “adaptation.”
It is the direct, measurable consequence of people killing elephants for their teeth until the survivors were the ones less likely to grow them.
We did not just reduce their numbers. We changed what an elephant has to look like to survive us.
We slaughtered elephants for ivory so relentlessly that having tusks became a genetic disadvantage.
Big Bend has the darkest night sky of any national park in the continental United States.
On a clear night out there, you can see a couple of thousand stars. In most cities, you can see a few dozen.
This month, bulldozers began clearing ground inside the park near Santa Elena Canyon, where the cliffs rise 1,500 feet above the Rio Grande on both sides.
Here’s some of what depends on that landscape.
A fish called the Big Bend gambusia, which exists in one spring-fed pond and nowhere else on Earth. It has been down to a handful of individuals before.
A bat that flies up from Mexico every year to feed on agave flowers, pollinating them as it goes.
Black bears. They were shot out of the Chisos Mountains by the 1940s and were gone for forty years. Then in the 1980s, they came back on their own, walking north out of the mountains in Mexico.
Nobody reintroduced them. They simply returned because nothing was in the way.
More bird species have been recorded at Big Bend than at any other national park in the country. The bones of Quetzalcoatlus, the largest known flying animal, were found there too.
And fewer than one in two thousand border apprehensions nationally happen inside this park.
The bears took forty years to come back, and they did it without any help from us.
Places like Big Bend are built slowly. Once you tear them apart, almost none of it can be put back the way it was.
Oxygen retweeted
From the island’s coasts to its sloping mountain ranges, Puerto Rico’s tropical forests teem with biodiversity.
But these forests are even more diverse than they appear at first glance: When it comes to how they use water, trees in Puerto Rico are surprisingly individualistic.
A recently published study reveals that in these forests, two trees belonging to the same species can vary wildly in how they transport, manage, and store water, depending on how dry it is in their specific habitats.
The findings suggest Puerto Rico’s tropical forests may be more resilient to drought than once thought and point toward better ways to model forests’ responses to future climate change.
Learn more: scim.ag/4gFI0s8 @NewsfromScience
Calling tree planting “bogus” because the effect changes by latitude and street design is a stretch. The same research shows strong cooling in the tropics and moderate cooling across temperate regions.
Plant the wrong trees in the wrong place and you can create problems. That’s an argument for better urban forestry, not fewer trees.
Planting trees for cooling will not work:
'For example, converting multi-layered forests into single layer croplands or prairies (Lei et al 2023, 2024) at high latitudes can increase albedo, but warming effects are observed with the establishment of poplar tree plantations in arid and semi-arid regions of northern Eurasia (Chen et al 2018). Thus, the perception of croplands as contributors to cooling effects should be evaluated in the context of local landscapes. For instance, croplands and afforested ecosystems in arid and semi-arid regions reflect less solar radiation compared to grasslands and deserts, thereby potentially increasing GWI through land conversions in these areas. Indirect LULCC effects can also have impact. For example, black carbon deposited on alpine glaciers, from forest burning, can substantially and extensively decrease glacier albedo, thereby accelerating climate-change induced melting (Bøggild et al 2009). 'iopscience.iop.org/article/1…
If forest protection is going to mean anything, it has to work where the bulldozers are already coming.
That is why we are in the Gran Chaco.
Around 87% of Argentina’s deforestation happens here, and the country lost 149,649 hectares of forest in 2024 alone. The pressure is real, the economics of clearing are real, and the machinery is already close enough to matter.
Protecting land nobody planned to clear is easy. The real test is protecting forest where clearing is already profitable.
That is what we are building at La Florencia.
We’re protecting more than 30,000 hectares of native forest in Formosa, Argentina, and working to certify the project under international forest carbon and biodiversity standards.
The goal is simple: make the forest worth more standing than cut.
There has never been a better time to love this planet than right now.
Not because everything is fine. Because so much of it is still here, and so much of it can still be saved.
There are forests standing today that could be gone in ten years. Species alive today that could disappear within our lifetime. Rivers that can still be cleaned, wetlands that can still recover, coastlines that can still be protected.
That makes being alive now strangely important.
We are one of the first generations to understand the scale of what is happening, and one of the last that still has time to stop some of it.
Loving the planet now cannot just mean admiring sunsets, mountains and wildlife.
It means fighting like hell to make sure they are still here for someone else to love.
Oxygen retweeted
5-6% recycled while production doubled. We're rinsing yogurt pots and feeling personally responsible while the plastics industry keeps producing. The system was built to deflect, not to solve.
Every time you rinse a yoghurt pot and put it in the right bin, you're completing a task that was designed for you by people who already knew recycling could never solve the plastic waste problem.
The little triangle of chasing arrows was not invented by regulators or environmentalists. It came from the Society of the Plastics Industry in 1988, and the industry pushed the system into state law while fighting growing pressure for plastic bans.
Recycling became the answer they could offer instead.
Behind closed doors, their own people were already admitting the limits. In 1994, an Exxon Chemical vice president summed it up perfectly: committed to the activities, but not committed to the results.
Around 5 to 6% of American plastic gets recycled. The rate has never cleared 10%. Different plastics cannot simply be processed together, the material loses quality each time it is recycled, and virgin plastic is often cheaper to make.
None of that is a recent discovery.
The industry's defence is that those documents are decades old and technology has moved on.
Maybe.
But global plastic production doubled between 2000 and 2019 while U.S. recycling still struggled to reach even 10%.
What was built was not a solution big enough for the problem. It was a chore handed to consumers, one that made hundreds of millions of people feel personally responsible while plastic production kept climbing.
[Sources: Center for Climate Integrity (2024), U.S. EPA (2018), Beyond Plastics & The Last Beach Cleanup (2022), OECD (2022)
Image credit: Ville de Plomelin, France]
You’ve probably seen this frog, the tiny round one that squeaks like a dog toy when it’s frightened. It has just been moved a step closer to extinction.
The same viral fame that made people love it also helped create demand for it in the exotic pet trade, while mining and coastal development keep eating into the tiny strip of habitat it has left.
The desert rain frog lives along a narrow band of sand on the coasts of Namibia and South Africa. It spends most of the day buried underground, comes out at night to hunt insects, and is only about 5 centimetres long.
Diamond mining and coastal energy projects are projected to affect up to a third of its South African range and two-thirds of its Namibian range within twenty years. Without stronger protection, its population is expected to fall another 20% in a decade.
And that famous squeak? It isn’t the frog being cute. It’s a distress call. Millions of people watched it, laughed, shared it and fell in love with it.
Now some people want one as a pet, while the ground it lives under is being dug up. Fame was supposed to make this frog harder to lose, not easier to sell.
[Source: IUCN (2026)]
Oxygen retweeted
Excerpt
"Around 5 to 6% of American plastic gets recycled. The rate has never cleared 10%. Different plastics cannot simply be processed together, the material loses quality each time it is recycled, and virgin plastic is often cheaper to make
None of that is a recent discovery"
Every time you rinse a yoghurt pot and put it in the right bin, you're completing a task that was designed for you by people who already knew recycling could never solve the plastic waste problem.
The little triangle of chasing arrows was not invented by regulators or environmentalists. It came from the Society of the Plastics Industry in 1988, and the industry pushed the system into state law while fighting growing pressure for plastic bans.
Recycling became the answer they could offer instead.
Behind closed doors, their own people were already admitting the limits. In 1994, an Exxon Chemical vice president summed it up perfectly: committed to the activities, but not committed to the results.
Around 5 to 6% of American plastic gets recycled. The rate has never cleared 10%. Different plastics cannot simply be processed together, the material loses quality each time it is recycled, and virgin plastic is often cheaper to make.
None of that is a recent discovery.
The industry's defence is that those documents are decades old and technology has moved on.
Maybe.
But global plastic production doubled between 2000 and 2019 while U.S. recycling still struggled to reach even 10%.
What was built was not a solution big enough for the problem. It was a chore handed to consumers, one that made hundreds of millions of people feel personally responsible while plastic production kept climbing.
[Sources: Center for Climate Integrity (2024), U.S. EPA (2018), Beyond Plastics & The Last Beach Cleanup (2022), OECD (2022)
Image credit: Ville de Plomelin, France]
Every time you rinse a yoghurt pot and put it in the right bin, you're completing a task that was designed for you by people who already knew recycling could never solve the plastic waste problem.
The little triangle of chasing arrows was not invented by regulators or environmentalists. It came from the Society of the Plastics Industry in 1988, and the industry pushed the system into state law while fighting growing pressure for plastic bans.
Recycling became the answer they could offer instead.
Behind closed doors, their own people were already admitting the limits. In 1994, an Exxon Chemical vice president summed it up perfectly: committed to the activities, but not committed to the results.
Around 5 to 6% of American plastic gets recycled. The rate has never cleared 10%. Different plastics cannot simply be processed together, the material loses quality each time it is recycled, and virgin plastic is often cheaper to make.
None of that is a recent discovery.
The industry's defence is that those documents are decades old and technology has moved on.
Maybe.
But global plastic production doubled between 2000 and 2019 while U.S. recycling still struggled to reach even 10%.
What was built was not a solution big enough for the problem. It was a chore handed to consumers, one that made hundreds of millions of people feel personally responsible while plastic production kept climbing.
[Sources: Center for Climate Integrity (2024), U.S. EPA (2018), Beyond Plastics & The Last Beach Cleanup (2022), OECD (2022)
Image credit: Ville de Plomelin, France]
Nothing prepares you for how ordinary the end of something looks. No announcement, no last day. Just a species that stops turning up in the surveys, and a handful of people who realize what that means.
Starting January 2027, international airlines will be forced to buy carbon credits at a scale the market has never seen before.
CORSIA enters its mandatory phase, bringing China, India and Brazil into the system and pushing coverage to roughly 87% of international aviation emissions.
Airlines are expected to need around 146 to 236 million credits for the current phase alone, but eligible supply had only just passed 40 million tonnes as of last month.
Guyana has become one of the biggest early suppliers, selling credits to 19 airlines already.
But Guyana was never losing much forest to begin with, which raises the obvious question: how much deforestation are those credits actually preventing?
A forest carbon credit should pay for deforestation that was genuinely avoided, not reward a forest that was never likely to be cleared.
The money should reach forests where clearing is already a real threat.
That is exactly why we @Oxygen_Token are measuring La Florencia on the ground before a single credit exists.
[Sources: IATA (2026), Government of Guyana (2026), ART (2026), Carbon Market Watch (2024)]
Artisanal gold mining is the largest human source of mercury pollution on Earth, responsible for roughly 37% of global releases.
And mining has already choked more than 35,000 km of tropical rivers with sediment.
But the worst damage is harder to see.
The mercury gets into the fish, and eventually into children who have never been anywhere near a mine. 🧵
[Image credit: ACCA / Planet / MAAP (2026)]
5/6
There are millions of people at the bottom of this industry who depend on small-scale mining to survive.
That is exactly why raids alone keep falling short.
Destroy a dredge today without replacing the income, and another dredge can appear tomorrow. UNEP itself says mercury reduction requires cleaner technology, formalization, financing and alternative economic opportunities, not just prohibition.
Poverty cannot become the business model that keeps poisoned rivers profitable.
6/6
After all that destruction, look where the gold goes.
In 2025, just 323 tonnes went into technology, 1,638 tonnes into jewellery fabrication and another 2,175 tonnes into investment.
We are tearing apart rivers and exposing communities to mercury for a metal overwhelmingly bought to be worn or held as wealth.
The river absorbs the cost and the gold carries the value. Something is badly wrong with that.
