Nick Wobbrock, FTMBA 15 - Investing In Climate Resilience and Adaptation by Protecting Natural Infrastructure
Our guest on this episode is Nick Wobbrock, Co-Founder and COO at Blue Forest Conservation, a mission-driven, non-profit organization, leveraging financial innovation to create sustainable investment solutions to environmental challenges. Their flagship financial product, the Forest Resilience Bond (FRB), deploys private capital to finance forest restoration projects on private and public lands to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. We are also joined by Brandi Pearce, faculty in Management of Organizations, and the Faculty Director of Teams@Haas. She is also a leading expert on High Impact Teaming.
Nick is a licensed civil engineer who developed drinking water and sanitation infrastructure in the US and internationally in Honduras and Malawi. Prior to joining Blue Forest, he worked as a consulting engineer for Brown & Caldwell, for the U.S. Peace Corps, and for Doctors Without Borders. Nick presently sits on the Board of EOS International where he continues to support communities in Honduras from his days in the Peace Corps.
In this episode. Nick tells us a little bit about his background, his professional career in the water space, the reasons he pivoted into forest conservation, and how he did it by going to business school and founding a startup.
He also talks about Blue Forest Conservation, its mission and goals, how people can help support their organization's visions, and some of the greatest successes and challenges in developing their team with a sustainability mission.
Episode Quotes:
Why Nick decided to go to business school and chose Haas
"I realized my heart was a little less with the pipes and the pumps and the engineering design and more wanting to think about the overall problems and root of those problems that we were trying to solve. And I thought, where might I be able to advance my passion for sustainability and technology and systems that can help drive that sustainability? And business school seemed like a logical next step for me, whether it was going to be grounded in technology development or sustainability in some fashion. I saw that Berkeley and the Haas program, especially with the Berkeley Energy Resources Collaborative (BERC) and a lot of the collaboration across the university, had a lot of opportunities around sustainability, energy, water, and technology."
How people can help support Blue Forest Conversation
"Pretty familiar, but voting is one. Elevating the opportunity with your elected officials that represent your utility board about the need for resilience of the watershed that supports your utility."
Challenges and joys in working with the Blue Forest team
"I'm so grateful for where the team is now. We're 16 people, with quite a few PhDs, some in geospatial science, some in forest hydrology modeling, communications experts, finance experts. Foresters are crucial, and we have a couple. And some of the challenges is that we come with a different set of language around how to make this very necessarily interdisciplinary solution work. It's a challenge internally unless we recognize that in credit culture for slowing downtime together. No question too simple. Because finance and forestry and hydrology have a lot of different backgrounds and domains of knowledge.
But when you recognize that interdisciplinary nature, I think, actually, it's turned into one of the joys at Blue Forest, is there's something that everyone on our team can teach everybody else that person uniquely has knowledge about. And working on a culture that celebrates that is, I think, something we're doing well, but something we want to make sure we continue to emphasize."
What Nick admires in a leader
"I love seeing a leader that waits to speak, especially, if, in their leading role, people might want to defer to their thoughts first. But if that leader instead pauses, makes sure there is room for everyone else's voice, largely because you're going to learn a lot of things, but also, because that is inclusive and makes space for people. And I probably admire that, in part, because it's something I work on, too. When I get excited about a topic, it's hard not to want to share your thoughts and your passion for that and your excitement for that, and to balance that with space and room for collaboration and contributions from new and experienced and everyone in between is the type of leader I would like to be and aspire towards."
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