May 20, 2026
Speakers
- Martina Potlach, Field Data and Reporting Coordinator at Veritree
- Peigi Rodan, Group Senior Sustainability Manager at Invia Travel Germany
- Jordan Niell, Decarbonization Delivery Analyst at Rappel
Martina came into climate work from design rather than science. She studied art and architecture as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, then went on to a master's in landscape architecture where her thesis focused on nature-based solutions. She is a Climatebase fellow who never finished her cohort, because she landed the Veritree role partway through it. She calls being back at one of these sessions a full circle moment.
At ten she met Jane Goodall, followed her work obsessively, and held onto a simple message to follow your dream. She always cared about the environment and thought of herself as a conservationist, but there was no clear path into climate work and nobody around her to show the way.
So the route was anything but straight. After graduate school she took a job in government, a city-level resilience role where she sharpened her skills on nature-based solutions. It was her first time in government and a genuinely useful experience, but after about a year she grew disillusioned and felt she needed to pivot. She spent the next stretch reading newsletters, joining the Climatebase Fellowship, and connecting with as many people as she could to understand what the climate tech and nature tech worlds actually offered. She found Veritree through a climate newsletter, applied, and got in by drawing on the mix of design, research, and government experience she already had. Her takeaway is that pivoting is allowed and even empowering. A lot of opportunity exists for people whose backgrounds do not match a job description on paper.
Veritree helps businesses invest in tree planting with confidence and ground-level transparency, and its mission is to make saving the planet simple by building trust through technology. The problem it goes after is that most tree planting and environmental work lacks proof, which is where greenwashing and false claims creep in. Veritree answers that with on-the-ground data drawn from sensors, satellite imagery, and blockchain-verified records. Its stakeholders run across roughly 300 corporate partners, a growing set of planting NGOs in many countries, and local planting communities working on reforestation at different scales and across different ecosystem types. The company is Series A funded and has planted and verified over 100 million trees. Martina personally works on agroforestry and mangrove reforestation projects with planting partners in a few countries.
She sits on the forest team, where the focus is data quality from the field and the verification workflow that backs up a claim that something actually happened. A surprising share of the work is relationship building rather than data, and that has been the part she has had to grow into most. The hardest recurring challenge is how much gets lost in translation between the field and her screen. Time zones, weather, and the realities of partners spread around the world all play into that, and the work is never only about data. It is about communities, people, and livelihoods. Her main objectives are building strong partner relationships, helping build out science-informed operations and frameworks, and eventually scaling reforestation. Her days run from looking at data to troubleshooting issues in the Veritree app alongside the product team to building reports and joining calls across time zones.
This is her first time at a startup, and the pace pushed her to build real data fluency. She also leaned hard into becoming fluent with AI, which she thinks pays off in almost any job. Her toolkit includes n8n, the Google Suite, GIS, Slack, and Claude.
A lot of climate impact comes down to ordinary tools already in use, spreadsheets and sensors, but the thing that matters most is trust. She means trust in the data and trust in relationships, which is why building healthy relationships with partners and communities is something she takes seriously. The market trend she points to is the rise of high-integrity MRV, short for monitoring, reporting, and verification. The past couple of years have seen a real boom there, and it directly attacks the greenwashing and false-claims problem, especially for anyone interested in biodiversity or restoration. She also keeps an eye on the bigger picture, meaning not just what gets done but how, who it affects, and what story gets told, which makes science communication central. For following the field she recommends Project Drawdown, whose founder presented during her own cohort, the Climatebase job board, and the Nature Tech Collective, a membership platform that tracks who is building what in nature tech and publishes useful reports.
If fellows could solve one thing for Veritree, it would be telling complete stories about data. Companies sit on enormous amounts of data and still struggle to convey the what, the how, the where, and the impact. That goes beyond marketing into relationship building and design, and it means not losing the human element to AI. The richer story moves past we planted this many trees toward the livelihoods affected, the ecosystem services created, and the jobs generated. Data visualization and science communication are invaluable here, and you do not need a remote sensing or hard science background to contribute.
Veritree is hiring and the team is growing, so the current website is the place to watch. Martina is not part of the hiring process since she joined fairly recently. Her advice is to understand what verified impact really means and to learn where nature tech and MRV still have gaps to bridge. She is happy to connect on LinkedIn, where she can be found under her name.
Peigi, pronounced Peggy in a Scottish spelling, grew up in the Scottish Highlands surrounded by woods and hills, and that early closeness to the countryside stayed with her. Unsure what to study, she settled on travel and business, then built a career in travel before turning toward sustainability from the inside of the companies she worked for.
A study-abroad year in Vancouver gave her the spark. The university there ran modules on sustainability and tourism, and that is where the passion took hold. When she graduated, her main goal in the job hunt was a company with a positive-impact business model, which she found in the Netherlands. She moved there, started in a junior customer support role, and worked her way up to what many would call a dream job creating local tours and experiences with local people around the world. The catch was a growing guilt about jumping on planes to build those experiences, and a pull toward sustainability she did not yet know how to act on.
So she started a podcast about eight years ago with a colleague, before the trend really took off, mostly to learn. They picked a topic, studied it, then talked it through, and over time began bringing experts on. Inside the company she set up an impact team to look at emissions and sustainability, and after enough conversations the CEO agreed to make her the company's first sustainability manager. The early months were hard because she felt underqualified and had never formally studied the field. What carried her was taking the company through its first B Corp certification, which taught her a great deal. A move to Germany for personal reasons led to her current role at Invia Group.
Invia is an e-commerce travel platform focused on package trips across Central and Eastern Europe, with many brands and entities under it and a separate media arm. She was the first sustainability manager when she began and now runs a team of roughly two and a half people. The company was at the very start of its sustainability journey, which made it a satisfying challenge to push forward. Two forces created the opening for the work, a genuinely passionate CEO and the regulatory pressure in Europe that requires larger companies to report.
On paper the role is about translating regulation into action, which means reporting, building the ESG strategy, measuring carbon, and working on decarbonization. In practice it is a lot of project management and, above all, driving cultural change. Because the department is small, spreading ownership so other people carry the work without constant support is essential. The part that never makes the job description is the sheer amount of diplomacy. She ends up explaining the same idea in about twenty different ways, because she works with nearly every department and each one speaks its own language. A large share of the job is making the business case, since sustainability competes with every other priority tied to the bottom line, and no two days look the same.
The strategy rests on three pillars. The first is corporate sustainability, covering regulation, decarbonization, and emissions measurement. The second is customer knowledge and choices, helping travelers make better decisions and giving them better options to choose from. The third and most aspirational is industry collaboration, because no single company can solve this alone and tourism lags behind other sectors, so companies increasingly have to work together.
People come first in her day to day. Speaking with everyone and making allies matters enormously, and having the CEO or CFO on your side can carry an initiative a long way. One surprise of the role is how much she works with consultants, since a small team can only do so much and areas like risk, decarbonization, and CSRD demand specialized knowledge. For data and tools, Excel is her best friend, a separate tool handles emissions calculations, and she relies on MicroStrategy to read and understand data for the strategy. On skills, no single sustainability manager can do everything, so her team deliberately mixes capabilities rather than duplicating them. Her own strengths are communication, coordination across all the moving projects, and facilitating the workshops and discussions that turn cross-department ideas into something workable.
The biggest lesson is the need to speak the business language. When she started, sustainability was a hot trend that customers were actively asking for. Then it shifted into a box companies felt they had to tick for regulation. Now she sees it maturing into part of the business story itself, tied to cost savings and reduced risk, which means you have to tell sustainability stories in that language. Constant learning matters in a field this fast, and she leans on LinkedIn every morning, following people who surface relevant news and even new regulations. She is also blunt about the emotional side. Working in sustainability is a roller coaster, you hear a lot of no, and you get pushed back often, so protecting your energy, building some thick skin, and keeping good people around you all matter.
One challenge she would hand to fellows is an online platform of sustainability product ideas strong enough to compete for resources against everything else a company is prioritizing. The value is that it would help product teams focus on ideas that are evidence-based, commercially realistic, and likely to be implemented. Doing it well calls for customer research, product thinking, an understanding of the triple bottom line of people, profit, and planet, and the ability to put a business case forward.
Do not fixate on jobs with sustainability in the title, since those are few and far between. More companies are building sustainability into the departments themselves rather than creating a chief sustainability officer, and in a sense a sustainability manager's job is to make their own role redundant as every department takes ownership. A better strategy is to find a company whose mission you believe in and that is already advanced on sustainability, then enter through product, AI, or another function where the work is already happening. There is not much hiring at her own company right now, but she is glad to chat on LinkedIn.
Sustainability has moved away from being a hot topic, and that makes some people anxious, but she reads it as good news. It is being built more properly and more durably into how companies think about risk and cost savings. The direction is the right one, even when it does not always look that way.
Jordan is a Cohort 7 alum based in San Francisco who took a less traditional route into climate. He began his career in legal technology, a niche corner of B2B software, working with a startup for a few years out of school.
In that first job he handled data operations and customer service, interfacing with attorneys and law firm IT directors, and he discovered he liked work that blended technical systems with collaborating with real people. He got good at teaching people to use software and at learning what they loved and hated about it, and he spent time on the product team shaping the user experience and new features.
He left that company in 2023 while experiencing severe climate grief and anxiety. He traces it to things like the California orange sky day during the wildfires, to grasping concepts like planetary boundaries, and to the dissonance between how he spent his time and what he believed mattered for the planet. After a needed pause he poured his spare time into local political organizations and campaigns in San Francisco, including the Yes on L campaign to fund public transit, where he managed small teams of canvassers, knocked on doors, and printed literature. He found he loved talking with people and cared about making urban life affordable, accessible, and decarbonized. After about eighteen months on the job market he decided to sharpen his focus on climate and joined Climatebase Cohort 7. There he worked on a capstone team called Haven, building a climate adaptation app for homeowners facing climate-induced pressures, guiding user research, running product QA, and turning feedback into ideation workshops. That experience convinced him his skill set fit climate tech and that he wanted work with a clear, demonstrable way of reducing carbon. After a choppy 2025 labor market he landed at Rappel, and he met his current manager at one of these very lightning talks.
Rappel is a tech company that helps lean sustainability teams measure greenhouse gas emissions and build actionable decarbonization roadmaps. He frames the market as a gap between two extremes. Off-the-shelf software gives you a greenhouse gas inventory but stops at telling you how much CO2 you emit, never answering the so what. At the other end, large consulting firms run deep, labor-intensive engagements with big price tags. In the underserved middle sit companies that need something like a chief carbon officer but may only have one sustainability lead doing it on top of another job. Rappel's software fills that role for mid-sized companies, working with firms that run large vehicle fleets, do industrial manufacturing, or build software, across many industries, countries, and continents.
His work comes in two parts. The first is helping customers build a greenhouse gas inventory across Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions. Rappel pushes further into asset-level accounting, down to the individual vehicle by VIN that consumed a given number of gallons of diesel at a given cost in a given geography and produced a measurable amount of CO2 equivalent. Done across a company's full operational chain, that detail reveals exactly which assets are the carbon hotspots. The models cover everything from garbage trucks to lawnmowers, and date and time sensitive weather modeling can estimate how much natural gas a facility likely burned for heating when the utility bills are missing. He also helps customers see the data they have and, just as importantly, the data they lack, then builds an inventory management plan they can repeat every year out to 2050.
The second part turns that data into a roadmap of decisions. A naive plan, say swapping every propane forklift for a battery electric one, will cut carbon, but the investment will not be optimized and the cash and carbon savings stay murky. So he builds a model using Rappel's Carbon Optimized Asset Investment Model, a discounted cash flow analysis that weighs the real cost of an upgrade like rooftop solar or new forklifts against operational savings and the time value of money. In one case study a customer wanted to electrify forklifts across warehouses nationwide. Asset-level data showed that in South Carolina the forklifts ran around the clock with high propane costs, so going battery electric there carried a negative incremental total cost of ownership and actually saved money on fuel and maintenance. In Missouri the same swap would lose money, because the forklifts ran less and propane was cheaper. That kind of differential is a real difference maker for companies on lean budgets, and he supports the rollout once the plan is set.
In his own words, he turns bad spreadsheets into good spreadsheets. A typical project might involve a customer with thousands of vehicles who has usable information on only twenty to thirty percent of the fleet. He bridges that gap with Power Query, Python, AI coding agents, and Rappel's own suite of data tools and proprietary modeling software. The practical work includes converting several fleet tracking systems into one standard format, cleaning data to catch nonsense like a vehicle that supposedly drove a million miles or burned a million gallons in a month, and getting on calls with operations teams to justify assumptions about annual mileage and fuel efficiency. The job swings between hard data skills and getting into the weeds with a different kind of operation each week, from fleet operations to durable goods manufacturing to a globally operating software company.
He also helps roll out the plans, including how to engage supply chain partners. One example is a restaurant customer estimating the Scope 3 emissions from buying cheese using an industry-standard figure for CO2 per dollar spent at a dairy farm. That is a fine start, but he can do better by engaging the actual dairy farms, finding which ones are already decarbonizing, and pinning down their real emissions per dollar or per ton of product. The estimate goes from broad to razor sharp, and there is a bonus. Once you know which suppliers are decarbonizing, building stronger relationships with them becomes a free way to cut your own Scope 3 emissions.
Greenhouse gas accounting means meeting customers where they are today. Both greenhouse gas accounting and decarbonization are young fields, and many of the people doing this work wear five different hats with no central repository holding every piece of data the standard requires. So a lot of his job is understanding what a customer actually has and making sure that, rather than being one hundred percent right about everything, they are one hundred percent clear about how they reached every assumption. That clarity matters because of regulation. He pointed to two California state bills, 253 and 261, which will require businesses above a certain size to publicly report their Scope 1 through 3 emissions and, depending on ongoing litigation, possibly their overall climate risk profile. Those companies need a clear inventory and decarbonization plan, especially as they have to seek assurance from outside auditors who will trace exactly how every number was produced.
He kept this one simple. A big part of his job is knowing which incentives exist, so a useful capstone would capture what utility incentives are available for vehicle electrification.
Rappel is hiring. The open roles are energy efficiency specialists and subject matter experts on HVAC, lighting systems, process heat, and related systems, the people who lead on-site visits to plan how a customer will decarbonize. He can be reached at jordan@rappelclimate.com or on LinkedIn. He is not on the hiring team but is happy to talk with anyone.
He expected most sustainability leaders to care mainly about cutting costs and has been surprised again and again by how many want to go further, decarbonize their business, and make big investments to do it. There is a real and lovely amount of momentum in the space.
Nature-based solutions — Approaches that protect, manage, or restore ecosystems to address challenges like climate change while benefiting people and biodiversity. source
MRV — Monitoring, reporting, and verification, the process of measuring climate outcomes and independently confirming them to support high-integrity claims. source
Agroforestry — A land-use system that combines trees and shrubs with crops or livestock to improve productivity, resilience, and carbon storage. source
B Corp Certification — A certification for companies that meet verified standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. source
ESG — Environmental, social, and governance, a framework used to assess a company's sustainability and ethical impact. source
CSRD — The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, an EU rule requiring many companies to report standardized sustainability information. source
Triple bottom line — A framework that measures performance across three dimensions, people, profit, and planet, rather than profit alone. source
Greenhouse gas inventory — A quantified list of greenhouse gas emissions and sources for an organization over a set period. source
Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions — A classification of emissions covering direct operations, purchased energy, and the wider value chain respectively. source
Battery electric vehicle (BEV) — A vehicle powered entirely by an onboard battery and electric motor, with no internal combustion engine. source
Total cost of ownership — The full cost of an asset over its life, including purchase, fuel, and maintenance, used to compare investment options. source
California SB 253 — The Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, requiring large companies doing business in California to disclose Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. source
California SB 261 — The Climate-Related Financial Risk Act, requiring large companies to report their climate-related financial risks. source
Veritree — Technology platform that verifies tree planting and reforestation with ground-level data.
Invia Travel Germany — E-commerce travel platform offering package trips across Central and Eastern Europe.
Rappel — Software company helping lean sustainability teams measure emissions and build decarbonization roadmaps.
Project Drawdown — Nonprofit that researches and ranks climate solutions, recommended for following the field.
Nature Tech Collective — Membership platform tracking startups, companies, and trends across the nature tech ecosystem.
Climatebase Job Board — Listings for roles across the climate sector.
Martina Potlach on Climatebase — For follow-up on Veritree, nature tech, and MRV.
Peigi Rodan on LinkedIn — For follow-up on corporate sustainability and ESG in travel.
Jordan Niell on Climatebase — For follow-up on greenhouse gas accounting and decarbonization, or reach him at jordan@rappelclimate.com.