Swiss Non-Profit Association · Est. 2025
Terra Dialogue advances open, solutions-driven conversations on climate and environmental protection — preventing polarisation from stalling progress.
"Climate protection must not become trapped between two extreme positions. Progress requires honest, pragmatic dialogue about the paradoxes we face."
Our Purpose and Mission
Terra Dialogue is a Swiss non-profit association dedicated to advancing pragmatic environmental communication — fostering the honest, evidence-based conversations that make real progress possible.
Climate and environmental protection too often gets caught between absolutist positions — tech optimism vs. nature scepticism, global ambition vs. local harm, urgency vs. accuracy. When dialogue collapses, so does action.
Terra Dialogue creates the space for a different kind of conversation: one grounded in facts, open about paradoxes, and oriented towards scalable solutions. We bring together practitioners, researchers, policymakers and communicators to move the field forward.
Our primary focus is carbon markets — a critical but contested mechanism for channelling climate finance to the Global South. We believe these markets, when done well, remain essential. And we believe honest dialogue about their flaws is what makes improvement possible.
Our Main Initiative
Carbon credits are the cornerstone of global climate finance, uniquely enabling large-scale action in the Global South. Yet the voluntary carbon market has been deliberately — and misleadingly — discredited. The Carbon Paradox initiative confronts this head-on.
Between 2020 and 2024, the voluntary carbon market — which was channelling around $2 billion per year to forest communities, climate projects and conservation across fifty countries — collapsed by roughly two-thirds. The collapse was driven not by science, but by a convergence of commercial interests, ideologically motivated journalism and poorly understood conflicts of interest.
The people who paid the price were the communities those projects protected: the grandmothers in Kenya whose boreholes ran dry, the rangers in Zimbabwe whose salaries stopped, the smallholders in Colombia whose livelihoods disappeared.
The Carbon Paradox initiative documents this story, builds the evidence base, and creates the dialogue needed to bring the market home — not back to its flawed past, but forward to a reformed future grounded in integrity, community benefit and real climate impact.
The Carbon Paradox is Terra Dialogue's flagship initiative — exploring the forces that undermined a functioning climate finance mechanism and the path to rebuilding it on solid ground.
Visit Carbon Paradox →Board
Terra Dialogue's four board members have worked together for nearly 20 years in impact investment and climate finance. All four co-founded both South Pole — Europe's first climate unicorn — and Terra Impact Ventures, bringing deep shared experience in building the carbon markets they now seek to reform.
RH
CG
MH
CD
Get in Touch
Interested in our work, upcoming events, or membership? We'd love to hear from you — and we're always happy to link up with allies.
We are a Swiss association (Verein) based in Zurich. Our work is open to members and collaborators who share a commitment to pragmatic, evidence-based environmental dialogue.
Membership
Terra Dialogue is open to individuals and organisations who support our mission. Annual membership: CHF 50. If you want to become a member, please send us a message via the form on the right.
