The Understory - a podcast where nature restoration gets real

Recorded live at The Nest during Climate Week NYC 2026, this episode brings together Adam Met, co-founder of Planet Reimagined and a member of AJR, and Monica Medina, former U.S. Special Envoy for Biodiversity and Water Resources, to ask the question the climate conversation keeps stepping around: if nature is a third of the answer, why does it get treated like a footnote?In this episode:Why America's forests already work as a climate solution, and why their impact will rise or fall depending on

A forest is built by millions of separate decisions, made over timescales longer than any career, election, or fund life — while the climate moves underneath them the whole time.That movement has done two things at once. It has made forests more valuable, because they are among the largest carbon solutions available to us. And it has made them more fragile, at a speed and reach nobody in forestry has seen before. We are leaning on forests harder than ever, at exactly the moment they are least able

Everyone agrees the climate movement needs young people, and everyone agrees the next generation will live with the consequences. So why do the rooms where the decisions get made still look the way they do?In this episode, recorded live at London Climate Action Week, hosts Dr. Sweta Chakraborty and Jad Daley dig into an uncomfortable irony — a gathering of tens of thousands convened to solve the climate crisis, where most of the people in the room are neither young nor from the communities most

Everyone agrees reforestation needs to scale, and everyone agrees private capital has to be part of the answer. So why is it still so hard? In this episode, hosts Dr. Sweta Chakraborty and Jad Daley dig into the gap between what corporate buyers and investors require and what the communities actually stewarding the land can offer — and what it takes to build a bridge that works for both sides.They're joined by two people who've spent careers closing that gap from opposite ends: Hindou

Earth Day started in 1970 with twenty million Americans, a bipartisan coalition, and no carbon agenda. It gave us the EPA, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act. So why does it feel like the environmental movement has spent the last two decades narrowing — not expanding?Recorded live at EarthX in Dallas on Earth Day 2026, this episode brings together some of the most credible voices in American conservation to ask the question most people in this space won't say out loud: has the

The Understory is a podcast about restoration where practitioners can real talk — no polished conference-stage performances, no organizational spin, just honest conversation about what's working, what isn't, and what it will actually take to reforest the world the right way.

What if everything we're doing to restore the world's forests is missing the point?At every COP, every Climate Week, every major nature summit — the panels are the same, the talking points are the same, and the hard questions never get asked. In this first episode, Jad Daly and Sweta Chakraborty introduces The Understory: a podcast built for the people who are ready to talk about what's actually happening on the ground.Why are we talking about forests without talking about forestry? Why