Playa-de-Oro Carbon Solutions

Please note: We are creating visual resources to have a combined elevator pitch in a week's time. An introductory video is supplied in the links section further below, and other references are avaailable to anyone who asks for them. 

“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” An impossibility if there are no fish. At the base, you have to teach a man to care for the lake where the fish should be living.

Guatemala is an incredibly diverse and biologically abundant country with ancient civilizations. And while it is now developing along a positive trajectory, there are still stains and tears in the social fabric because of a decades long civil war that killed well over 200,000 people when it ended in 1996. At that point in time the population was around 10 million, so over 2% dead. The population today is around 17 million. The destruction of human capital and infrastructure means that nearly half the children under five are malnourished today (2022) according to UNICEF and that percentage is reportedly much higher in rural areas. There are many reasons, obstacles, tragedies and excuses, but the only way to move forward is to put one foot in front of the other, and Guatemalans are some of the most resilient, hard-working, family oriented and even optimistic people in the world. They actively participate and engage in improving their outlook as the following experience illustrates:

Doug planted the seed of creating a park on a unique isthmus. He prepared the metaphorical terrain by going out, meeting people, and trying to explain what he was doing. He had renderings and binders and examples of playgrounds constructed with natural materials, like some of those found in Switzerland. This was important as it created a path forward and gave parents the ability to give their kids something on par with, or better than, one of the richest countries on earth. Doug then got his hands dirty, literally, by planting trees. It wasn’t easy at first. Equipment went missing and work got reversed, but Doug continued, and word got out. He had a volunteer day. And like a high school party where you don’t know who will show up, or how many people will show up the enthusiasm and hope Doug created with his simple (to understand) act of planting tree. The idea of actually creating a future park, a music venue, weekend cabins, walking paths, playgrounds and eventually hopefully a place to fish along Lake Amititlan inspired and gave hope. Enough hope such that over 30 young people showed up to help him plant trees and improve the land.

Our project in Lake Amititlan occurs on both the shore and in the water. Development in the water is different to the development on land. On land we hope to be a catalyst guided by the ideas of locals, and implementing what we know to be the world`s best land management practices: regenerative agroforestry. The local people know the land, they know where the needs are, they know what they want to see for themselves and for their kids, and we will help them implement their own vision. They will carry the project forward because there is too much work for any one person.

Development in the water consists of one singular goal, agreed to by all parties, that it needs to be achieved before any further steps can be discussed: Clean-up and remediation. There are many ways to do this, but funds are scarce. Our team proposes a solution that is both efficient and low cost.

Lake Amatitlan a largely forgotten lake located   11km from the Guatemala City international airport. It measures  11km long and is  33m at its deepest point.  Lake Amatitlan is a microcosm of the world-wide problem of waters polluted by overabundance of nutrients- from industrial, homeowner, agricultural, wastewater, and eutrophication sources.  200 years ago, Lake Amatilan was the primary source of (sea)-food to the greater metropolitan Guatemala City.  The last shrimps and lobsters in the lake disappeared in the late 1980s, and all fleet based commercial fishing disappeared probably over 100 years ago.

Our project is to build an ecological park with GHG research demonstration forests, water quality restoration, regenerated soils, ecologic restoration, aquaponics, and sustainable agro-ecoloy demonstration, educational, recreational, and production projects  inside and surrounding  an existing public park. All of our practices are designed to sequester carbon, educate the public and potential new users, and restore riparian and aquatic habitats- all problems that are found in large volume in and around Lake Amatitlan that can be solved by an integral development approach, where previous targeted one-solution approaches have failed across the country and in the specific locale in question.

For all intents and purposes, Lake Amatitlan is a complete biologic dead zone, that can be recovered for human and ecosystem inhabitants. More importantly, Guatemala itself has some of the world’s worst rates of land degradation, water pollution, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss. It is a formally registered megadiverse country, and stands to lose hundreds of unique and vital species over the next 30 years without interventions to create systems where humans can responsibly use, enjoy, and profit from the lands and waters and their resources.

https://www.prensalibre.com/gu...

Previous aeration solutions have failed because they actually generated more of the contaminated water than they cleaned. Traditional wastewater treatment plants are land and financial resource dependent, and a developing country like Guatemala cannot afford the infrastructure necessary for its rapidly doubling population. Ecologically fragile areas, like riparian habitats, face an onslaught of unsustainable use, pollution, and alarming species loss. All of these factors converge in the Playa de Oro project, making it an ideal microcosm to tackle a variety of ecologic problems that are based on socio-economic pressures that exploit the natural and human systems in a multitude of ways. Each one of these existing factors is further being amplified by climate change pressures, stressing the human and natural systems to complete collapse.

Clarifying additional information from the Revive water partners:

“Amititlan Lake is completely eutrophic. Some fish still live there, however the ecosystem has been all but destroyed. The wastewater treatment infrastructure in the country essentially consists of some pipes discharging into and destroying extremely fragile streams, if you’re lucky. In most places there aren’t even pipes to catch the runoff flowing into streams. Streams which then run into Lake Amititlan. The problem here is almost entirely technical and financial. There is a saying that it takes 5% of the energy to clean up the first 95% of the pollution and 95% of the energy to clean up the last 5% of pollution. Sometimes 1% and 99% are substituted. In the case of Amititlan the lake is filled with algae and nutrients. At night when the algae doesn’t have sun to photosynthesize, metabolism is driven by respiration and the water goes anoxic. The  best way to remediate the damage caused by the nutrients is to aerate the water and grow bacteria that aerobically feed on the nutrients and eat the algae. At the same time we propose creating a fish nursery.

Aeration is typically very very energy intensive/expensive. According to the EPA  aeration accounts for about 3% of energy usage in the US, or 100 billion kWh (7.5 billion dollars) p1008sbm.pdf (epa.gov) If we didn’t follow EPA clean water act rules, we might be able to do 95% of the cleaning for 5% of the money, and then let nature tackle the remainder (likely not entirely true for many reasons). For reference we would spend 0.375 billion dollars instead of 7.5 billion dollars. In practice, we will do as much as we can with the resources we have. Fortunately, we have two very good aeration technologies that we can implement. The Wirtz aerator, or spiral aerator, and the Kuxtal assembly. They both work differently:

Reverse Eutrophication and Sequester Carbon

Recovering an eutrophic waterbody begins inside Grow Pods. Grow Pods are porous concrete biofilm reactors, nourished by an aerated nutritious slurry, wicking gently, imperceptibly, through the biofilm, radially outwards, away from the center core. Grow Pods are positioned within an aerated down-flow, emanating from Kuxtals floating overhead. These aerated flows, rocky micro-habitats, and porous concrete provide 24/7 aeration, protection from sun, predators and fishermen and spawning habitat - mimicking both that quintessential shaded mountain stream burbling over fecund gravel spawning beds and reefs. Grow Pods, fitted with removable grow canisters filled with endemic sand and gravel and inoculated with target species, will grow almost any target recovery species, from seagrass to oysters.

Grow Pods share commonalities with reefs, bioreactors and aerobic biofilm membrane reactors. The direction of the Kuxtal’s flow, either bottom to surface or surface to bottom, determines whether Spinners pump sludge or algae, respectively, into the Grow Pods. The effect is the same: sludge / algae influent is subsumed by gene expressed biofilm; resident herbivores, daphnia etc., graze expanding biofilm and so on; until predators, too large to enter the Grow Pods and thriving within the Kuxtal’s aerated down-flow, consume whatever pops out from within the Grow Pods.

In order to revive a eutrophic waterbody, nitrogen and phosphorus must be removed from the influent, water and sludge. This is because phosphorus and nitrogen cycle between fertilizing algae growth and being released into the water as sludge flux.

The nitrogen cycle is broken by returning nitrogen to the atmosphere as N2 gas. In this system, nitrogen is oxidized to atmospheric gas - aerobically, anaerobically, and via an aerobic plus anaerobic phenomena, known as Biological Nutrient Removal.

Phosphorus, however, must be mechanically removed. A wastewater system removes phosphorus by collecting sewage in a wastewater treatment plant from which sludge is routinely removed, and then by settling phosphorus as sludge and removing the sludge. In deep oceans, the cycle is broken as cells sink below the euphotic zone. These phosphorus removal strategies are not applicable in most eutrophic zones.

Until the industrial revolution, fisheries were rate limited by nutrient availability; today, fisheries are rate limited by oxygen availability. This system is rate limited by nutrient availability - even in eutrophic zones. Nutrients, concentrated in an algae or sludge slurry concomitantly mixed with 50% air, release into a biofilm reactor (wherein the nutrients eventually become fish and other target recovery species) thusly avoiding open water aeration - open water chemistry is less efficient compared to biofilm redox kinetics because biofilm, an exopolysaccharide matrix, passes electrons within itself.

When nutrients are rate limiting: fish grow to the nutrients available; the more nutrients i.e., pollution there are, the more fish there are; the more fish are harvested the more nutrients are removed; the more fish are harvested the (permanently) cleaner becomes the water and; and CO2 is sequestered as harvested fish, shellfish etc.”

Regenerative land practices then `prevent current and future contaminants from reentering the lake while cleaning underground water systems and generating further food growing options and generating habitat for the region’s rich terrestrial biodiversity. Win-win combination of solutions.

https://www.instagram.com/revi...

Our solution uses an integral approach to ecologic restoration, that supports both aquatic and terrestrial climate-smart practices. It is based on a plot of land with direct access to the water of Lake Amatitlan, a current size of[1]  several hectares and the potential to expend to cover the surrounding area with an additional several hundred hectares of water and land.  These solutions are implemented by a collaboration between the innovative programs Revive and Alticultura, under the guidance of the established parent program Fundaeco, with 30 years as a major partner in Guatemala.

The restoration process starts on the aquatic side, with the Revive team’s low-energy intensive cleaning of highly polluted water, and then protects that water from future runoff pollution, provides local flood control solutions, and uses the cleaned water for a variety of regenerative production, biodiversity, and recreational uses.

Revive’s  water cleaning solution is a modified antique moving water powered spinner system. The spinner creates a cylinder of well-aerated clean and beneficial nutrient-rich water, replete with spawning and niche habitats for target species, within a relatively dirtier body of water such as an anaerobic dead zone, or channeled using a solar powered water pump to tanks and ponds for land-based aquaponics projects.  The technology is scalable, economic, and applicable to a variety of solutions for a variety of aquatic restoration projects, as outlined below. It is considered the world’s most economic solution for cleaning water contaminated with raw sewage and other biologic waste, such as much of Guatemala’s surface waters.

The system delivers broken down algae, sludge and nutrient contaminats  into what are known as Grow Pods.  Grow Pods share commonalities with bioreactors, reefs and aerated biofilm membrane reactors- they act like artificially created biologically intense ecosystems.  Grow Pods are made of porous concrete, and have an internal almost imperceptible flow moving outwards and a stronger aerated down flow from the Kuxtal over the Grow Pods.  The flows and the porous rocks mimic pre industrial mountain streams and tide flats.  Kuxtals can be fitted with removable grow canisters filled with endemic sand and gravel and inoculated with target species such as reefs, mangroves, reeds and oysters. 

The input to the Grow Pod/ Kuxtal system is algae or lysed sludge mixed with 50% air(for improved oxygenation over existing restoration techniques) and the output is that it feeds predator fish plus target species - oysters are an example of a target species that can be grown directly on this system[2] [3] 

The volume of the cylinder of water expands downwards by bio digesting sludge and grows in diameter as decomposing algae etc are quickly eliminated from within and around the cylinder, creating a reservoir of clean water inside a polluted body of water, with clear water on top where sunlight can penetrate and a recreated diverse aquatic habitat below with plants and all levels of species for the aquatic food chain. This process is further defined by the manufacturer below:

Grow Pods are a bioreactors and can also be considered aerobic biofilm membrane reactors.  The direction of flow Kuxtal floating above the Grow Pods determines whether Spinners pump algae or sludge into the Grow Pods.  The results are the same:  Biofilm metabolizes the influent, respiring Spinner pumped oxygen; resident herbivores, daphnia, etc., consume the biofilm, respiring Spinner pumped oxygen; and so on until predators, too large to fit into even the largest of the Grow Pods’ tapered tunnels and living in the Kuxtal’s aerated down-flow, consume whatever comes out from the Grow Pods respiring oxygen from both Spinner pumped oxygen and Kuxtal aerated down-flow.

Phosphorus and nitrogen cycle back and forth between sludge and algae.  The Kuxtal’s cavitation liberates nutrients and sends it into Biomesh including but not limited to the Grow Pods.

The spinners are aligned with the Kuxtal and so they send into the spinners whichever way the Kuxtal is flowing.

Because the spinner is 50% air by volume the grow pods cannot run low of ´dissolved oxygen, so the grow pod never grows too big.  And because the Kuxtal aerates around the grow pods even when it is flowing up, grow pods are always well aerated with plenty of food and with plenty of nocks and crannies to provide habitat for eels, sea grass, coral or other key ecosystem base species.”

The dissolved oxygen levels in the cleaned water are stable and high. The water can be used for aquaponics production, for swimming or recreational purposes, and for irrigation to terrestrial agriculture projects. The ecosystem restoration creates a biodiverse and robust carbon sink.

The second piece of our restoration uses Alticultura’s innovative regenerative practices to recreate healthy aquatic- terrestrial interfaces appropriate for the locale. These interfaces incorporate elements of sustainable income generation; atmospheric carbon fixing; riparian buffer restoration; passive and active solar energy use; biodiversity restoration; flood and drought protection; and public green spaces for human enjoyment.

The base technology to Alticultura’s solution is the measurable fixing of atmospheric carbon into soils and vegetation for multi-use projects. Traditional agriculture practices common in the region deplete 7-10 tons of soil per ton of product produced, and this soil and all its chemicals, organic biomass, and byproducts are what gets washed into aquatic systems, polluting them further. In high carbon systems like those found in tropical forests, riparian systems, and wetlands, the amount of carbon emissions lost to this process is staggering and vastly underreported. Each 1% soil carbon loss represents about 12 tons of CO2 emissions per acre per year, with a net loss of 27,000 of water filtration and cleaning capacity per acre per year. Switching to regenerative practices, which perfectly complement Revive’s water cleaning technology, has been proven to reverse these losses. Regenerative practices on tropical soils fix (a low estimate) 12-36 tons of carbon biomass per year, with a net gain of 27,000- 85,000 gallons of water retention per year and increased crop yields of 30-900% per square meter of production (as measured by Alticultura’s research as well as by international regenerative agriculture scientists). This water and carbon provides an economic base for blockchain technology, as do the combined aqquponics-agroecology practices.

The Amatitlan site is well-suited for the following regenerative agroecology solutions, that can be irrigated or created around the clean water technology:

• A pilot subterranean greenhouse system that reaches the water table, generates solar voltaic power, and uses passive solar and geothermal technology for the production of fish and crustaceans, with floating and hanging systems for rice, lettuce, and aquatic ornamental plants. This indigenous technology has also been modified by our team incorporates rainwater and runoff harvesting, and graywater recycling into its simple yet effective design.

http://www.entremundos.org/rev...

• Riparian buffer zones that control flooding and absorb runoff, with bamboo and restored wetlands plants. Bamboo would be harvested and sold for additional income, as well as used for onsite construction.

https://dep.wv.gov/WWE/getinvolved/sos/Pages/RiparianMagic.aspx#:~:text=Riparian%20buffers%20are%20the%20natural,nutrient%20input%20into%20the%20stream.

• Agrofrestry holistic animal and plant systems that create land for shade, sun and partial shade diverse agricultural production, bird and butterfly habitat, and natural ecologic restoration. This system can use both active and passive reforestation and management practices to maximize efficiency of labor. The combination of greatly improved soil microbiota, humidity retention, flood protection, access to clean irrigation water, and drought control means that production on these sites will be year-round and that products will be of high quality. There are hundreds of native and cultivated species that can be grown, seeded, or encouraged to reproduce naturally under this system. This in turn will attract probably around 300 bird species to the direct site, making it a haven for birding and ecologic species monitoring. Regenerative proactices pioneered by Allan savory are being adapted for application in Guatemala's ecosystems. 

• Pond areas with ornamental and cultivated plants, fish, and aquatic species. Using regenerative practices for these systems will prevent the ecologic disasters that plague traditional fish farming operations, and thus provide and excellent base for Community supported agriculture and farm to table projects with greater market value for the users of the systems.

These five outlined activities are expected to form the base of robust ecologic park that would be used as an educational center for expanding the practices to other sites that face similar pressures around Central America. The greenhouse and regenerative practices are also especially suited for use by women and youth, for their reduced labor inputs. A woman working by herself can manage a subterranean greenhouse with about 4 hours of labor per week, for example, with an estimated ROI of about 8 months due to the marked improvements to production over existing open cultivation practices or high-profile greenhouse designs. The techniques work by creating a sugar pulse in growing plants to feed soil microbes, driving rhizome and beneficial microbe growth that literally draw down atmospheric carbon while simultaneously digesting organic matter for long term storage and plant fertilizer. We then augment this process with complementary plantings, rotations, organic soli amendments, and biocarbon. We monitor using 11 easy to use and reliable visual inspection metrics. These practices produce immediate and measurable benefits to agricultural yields and quality; pest, drought, and flood resilience; temperature moderation and resilience to heat; quadrupled biodiversity of native and agricultural species; natural reduction of soil contaminants; natural ecologic succession; measurable carbon capture; and increased market value with a regenerative agriculture standard applied.

Playa de Oro itself is an  isthmus created by sedimentation carried in the Rio Villalobos to Lake Amatlitlan.  The immediate  community consists of roughly  200 families, and the   Catholic Church reports having 104 additional family members in Playa de Oro. These families would be immediately served by clean water technology; increased fish populations; CSA agriculture; aquaculture, forestry, bamboo, and agricultural raw products; farm to table restaurants; access to green space and recreation; and educational and recreational events hosted by the space. The space will also support local efforts for schools, a police station, and improved security measures.

Decades ago the area was a weekend community of waterfront second home villas and fishing. There is still local small-scale tourism, with around 300 people coming  to the existing public park on any given Sunday.  Subsistence fishing still remains, the daily catch being in the dozens of fish per day.  The Playa de Oro isthmus adjoins agricultural land, some of it being intensive production of peppers, coffee, and tomatoes.

In Playa de Oro itself there is little economy to  speak of, despite proximity to good ag land. The local economy has mostly collapsed due to environmental exploitation pressures. Our hope is to demonstrate what is possible and restore the sense of local pride, while providing a space that would be accessible to the 3+ million inhabitants of Guatemala City and to students and researchers from across the country and Central America.

The community is host to a number of the issues often seen in areas where a local economy has collapsed, and where indigenous persons have struggled to have their rightful contributions recognized by the local economic structures. There are high rates of illiteracy, malnutrition, alcoholism, vandalism and theft, among other issues. We often see a loss of pride when the environment degrades to the point that this one has. We believe that our program will restore a sense of pride, place, recognition, and deserved honor to the local people living there, and that the improvements we make will be of interest to the national and international community alike.  

There is an extreme dearth of opportunities for people of any level of education to access training, funding, promotion, venture capital, research opportunities, or other activities related to innovative technologies of any kind. There are next to no comprehensive environmental education programs, and basic scientific knowledge is not taught in most schools, especially in smaller communities. This project will help fill some of those gaps, and crate further opportunities for the research and development of innovative sustainable development solutions that provide adequate income, are values based, enhance human responsibility to the environment, empower human voice in local decision making, tackle real climate solutions, and generate human well being indices.

The umbrella organization Fundaeco, and its bilingual founder Marco Cerezo, has been working on integral water and development solutions for Guatemala for 30 years. Doug and Andrew on the Revive team have been pioneering the spinner/ Grow Pod technology for a decade and have run pilot programs in this exact locale, essentially creating the world’s most economic sewage treatment system and only clean water swimming and fishing area literally inside a polluted body of water.

Rachael and Jose Manuel and their associates on the Alticultura team have been researching and modeling climate change in Guatemala for 20 years and adapting innovative solutions for climate resilience for 20 years. They are the only group working on true integral climate adaptation leadership and education for Guatemala- integrating research, publishing, pilot technologies, and holistic climate-based solutions.

Both teams have proven that the technologies they are promoting, work, are scalable, and are transferable to other situations and applications.

Doug currently lives on the proposed project grounds   without a house, plumbing, etc in order to move this project forward.  The project is about two things, improving the lives of his  community members on the one hand, and deploying his  inventions by using an algae choked dead zone as a demonstration of how to sequester carbon dioxide and turn it into  delicious seafood - technology that we  believe will quickly and dramatically reduce CO2 while alleviating hunger and quickly and measurably improving lives of often marginalized communities living near polluted bodies of water. More than anything, the combination of aquatic and land restoration for human and ecologic benefit will provide some benefits very needed in communities like Doug’s- hope, self-determination, self-actualization, and a sense that what seems beyond repair, can in fact, be repaired and even improved. .

The project will build a beautiful agro-ecologic park that will draw in weekend visitors  from the capital with disposable and available income, availing locals the opportunities to sell fish, open restaurants, hotels etc.  The technologies will grow thousands of fish per day and eventually as the entire lake transforms, far more than that. The ecology and technologies themselves will draw students, ecologists, and researchers. Alticultura’s pending direct link to Savory International’s Regenerative Agriculture movement will move the park to be registered to serve, educate, and certify thousands of users from Panama to southern Mexico and the Caribbean. We will be one of the world’s first hybrid aquaponics and regenerative program. We will also be sequestering hundreds of tons of CO2 and striving for carbon neutrality in our operations. The park will also use active and passive reforestation techniques to completely restore forest, shrub, wetland, and field habitat that will attract a variety of biodiverse species and create sustainable tree products for revenue.

The project addresses the majority of the 17 sustainable development goals. Our team members have technical skills, vision, development expertise, teaching experience, experience developing and leading businesses, farm to table experience, and a strong commitment to serve. They have developed the technologies for this program out of pocket and by using small donations, and they sincerely care about the well-being of the people being served. The project leads live in small communities struggling with the challenges of the local smallholder and residents, and have developed excellent programs that address the core issues driving environmental degradation, climate vulnerability, and social unrest.

As mentioned before, support for innovative and/or integral solutions is very scarce in Guatemala. It is the country in the Americas with the lowest scientist : general population ratio, adaptive capacity scores are lowest in the Americas, and innovative solutions are almost always overlooked for funding, dissemination, and promotion in favor of traditional solutions that focus only on meeting base elements of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Our solutions are designed to tackle the roots of development and environmental challenges, some of the toughest of their kind found anywhere in the world. We want the support needed to help us build our programs to reach as many users as possible, and we want out solutions to be adapted and replicated. We believe we have models and technologies worth emulating, and that our work and research can be of great service to other areas bearing the brunt of combined globalism, population growth, and climate change pressures. We want venture capital support, but we also want our programs to be known to a wider audience. Both of our start up founders have struggled with barriers to bringing truly innovative solutions to a system that does not know how to support and reward social entrepreneurs, and we want to surpass those barriers and become a truly solvent and thriving operation that helps people and the environment. 

We do have catalytic solutions, and expect them to transform the human-nature relationship for Guatemalan markets. The following aspects of our approach are completely innovative, in some cases, for Guatemala, and in others, literally, at a global scale.

The wastewater treatment paradigm is sewer systems going into wastewater treatment systems in which sludge removal is a routine part of the process.  Sludge removal must be part of an effective modern wastewater treatment system because water pollution is removed as sludge (plus gas and water) and because removing  sludge is how phosphorus is removed - phosphorus must be settled and removed.  Aeration converts water pollution into sludge.  The sludge must be routinely removed before it releases nutrients into the water column.  Doug’s inventions would remediate wastewater in the de-facto sewer systems and wastewater treatment lagoons, ie rivers and lakes.  Carbon and nitrogen is removed biologically, and phosphorus is sequestered from the water as biofilm and biomineralization using his inventions.  Additionally, these valuable resources, carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus, can also be diverted into aerobic food webs occuring in bioreactors whose output is fish and target species such as oysters.

Doug Lewis’ spinner and Grow Pod model for sewage treatment, cleaning of polluted waters, and replication of living biofilm systems such as those found in mangrove roots or coral reefs. This technique is his own, is the most cost-effective model in the world, and exists in this particular form nowhere else. This model could be adapted for the highly polluted river systems of Guatemala, Lago Atitlan, and other places sadly choked by polluted water. His work can also greatly improve mangrove, wetland, peatland, and marine estuary conservation and restoration efforts. 

Rachael’s climate adaptation model and soil based carbon model. Her models are on the verge of being published for her master’s research, and are based on 15 years of field research and testing. She is one of only a handful of climate scientists putting an economic value on the real value of soil and its contributions to the water cycles. The models she uses are proprietary, and are her own, and do not require expensive laboratory analysis for monitoring and evaluation. Her climate development model is also innovative, seamlessly incorporating economic development goals, SDGs, climate change resilience, citizen voice, human well-being, and biogeographical, socio-political context in her projects, training, and work. Her program is one of two in the entire country taking this approach, and the only one at the moment using 40-year climate modeling as its basis for climate action. 
The link to the Savory Institute regenerative practices, that use carbon capture as the grounding for sustainable income generation. Both Revive and Alticultura’s programs tackle regenerative practices for, one for water, the other for land. These practices reduce GHG emissions while also being the only natural based practices in the world that can actually take CO2 out of the atmosphere and fix it into static sequestered systems in the ground and water. The Savory model teaches people at all levels to relearn the lost language of the land itself, and help the land heal and thrive, creating systems that can do the seemingly impossible- lower world atmospheric CO2 levels, restore contaminated and degraded lands, reverse desertification, control coastal flooding, sequester carbon 300 years in tropical soils, and restore water so polluted it seems all but dead, such as is the case with Lake Amatlitlan. 

The collaborative and open source nature of our programs. Guatemala and much of the research world is plagued by jealousy over results and lack of internal and external cooperation. We are designing this project to be a consortium of organizations working together to build synergies, reduce waste and redundancy, share resources, share information, and optimize results for our beneficiaries. 

Revive’s algae lysing technology lends itself very well to the creation of low-cost, non-extractive biofuels that do not require precious space in agricultural production. This can be leveraged at a later date to meet the project’s fuel needs or for sales for additional revenue generation. 
The project is going to use carbon capture estimates in soils, plants, and aquatic life; estimates for creation of actively and passively cleaned water; and biodiversity counts as the basis for creating blockchain value for consumers, investors, and carbon markets. It will also have the world’s first data logged reforestation site, where investors, donors, and volunteers can find and monitor the exact trees or other vegetation they directly helped plant. 

Doug recently permanently reacquired the land after running his pilot and then losing access. He needs to secure the land from poaching, illegal logging, and theft; plus clean the decades of trash that have accumulated on the land. Our first goal thus is to clean the land in preparation for building the infrastructure, planting trees, implementing holistic grazing, and building awareness of our programs; and then build a fence and basic security systems for necessary protection. 

As support builds for our programs, through the second half of 2022, the impact goals are to use crowdfunding and blockchain investment via platforms such as what3words and trees, combined with data loggers, to plant hundreds of trees of dozens of appropriate species in the existing park lands. Land for reforestation will be prepared through holistic grazing for added carbon credit and increased reforestation success rates (they go up 90% using regenerative practices over just sticking a tree in the ground). These crowd funded and blockchain technologies will be valued based on carbon rights. The regenerative practices themselves will require investment in basic mobile or electric fence technology to move animals around to graze where and when we want them to. We will focus on areas for bamboo production, start a riparian buffer zone for protection of the site from hurricanes, and cultivate species with a high market and soil nutrient value. 
The easiest technology pieces to implement in the first year will be the underground walipini greenhouse for solar power generation, on land fish farming, agricultural production, local irrigation, and CSA and farm to table ingredient and food sales, while we expand the regen program and build the capital for setting up a full spinner array. Basic lodging, operations, and public use infrastructure will be started in this year, as will the training of Doug’s team and public in climate leadership, integral program development, and social entrepreneurship. 

For the second year, reforestation and ecologic restoration will continue, and program expansion will commence. A spinner array will start producing the revenue needed for investing in the creation of hiking trails, picnic areas, floating park sites and walkways, aquaponics and ornamental fish ponds, and an onsite restaurant. As Grow Pod production and land-based production ramps up, we will develop and apply a regenerative production standard and develop a marketing plan for products. Environmental education programs for public, schools, and universities will be implemented, and we will present our solutions across the country. 

For the third year, we hope to be registered as a Savory regenerative hub, and continue efforts to reforest for native trees, shrubs, herbacious plants, and migratory and endemic species. These advances will more than triple our regular and occasional visitor base, allowing us to accurately identify and log species at all times of the year. Recreational opportunities will be expanded, and we will continue to provide quality products and environmental programs, while encouraging local people to develop their own small businesses that take advantage of the return of fishing and tourism as the water is cleaned and repopulated, as we build more attractions such as swimming areas and butterfly gardens and houses, quality café foods, etc. 
By the fifth year, we will be linked to local, regional and international schools and programs for teaching ecology and technology to students in high quality programs; we will be receiving visitors year-round for recreation and enjoyment of the natural surroundings, we will be selling designs and training on patented and proven technology and solutions, and we will have a line of demonstrated carbon neutral, climate-smart products with a nice market share. Based on similar models in other areas, we can expect to attend to roughly 150,000 visitors per year as a very lowball estimate- generating values based local employment options for our own staff and locals, residencies and internships, and a multitude of other sustainable livelihood pieces. 

Kg of fish, shrimp, lobster, shellfish etc harvested per day compared to pre-project baseline

CO2 sequestered in the harvested seafoods, using cameras, fish finders and near daily interviews with scales with fishermen will track increase if fish harvest.  Doug already knows the few remaining fishermen; they will be delighted to participate by weighing, counting, photographing and uploading the data, especially if we give them phones and or wifi.

 visitors from the general public compared to pre-park baseline, cameras and counting

Money generated from park concessions and entrance fees to the mt bike trail, floating BMX and skate park and lookouts.

CO2 sequestered in trees and other vegetation etc in the park each tree, being uniquely identified in a what3words square, will be measured on video once per year and the resultant increase in carbon from the year before will be sold - linked to the tree.  In other words, somebody can buy the carbon stored in a specific tree, likely for a few pennies, and visit that specific tree using their cell phone and what3words.

Geospatial data loggers moving radially away from the system at two depths, in the benthic zone and 1m below the surface, will track system generated changes. CO2 sequestered in soils

Biodiversity counts- aquatic, migratory, terrestrial inventories of species and registries

Gallons of water cleaned and recycled to healthy standards

Sustainable income and regional employment generated through the project

Number of individuals educated on our technologies, for climate change leadership, and/or in biodiversity appreciation

Number of individuals who create their own sustainable aquaponics and/or regenerative agriculture solution based small or medium businesses

Number of larger businesses and organizations that adopt our practices

Number of students and scientists we assist with research projects

We have identified 8 core issues that make communities vulnerable to climate change pressures. Among them, a. living in areas of fragile ecosystems b. economy based on natural and human exploitation, c. gender inequality, d. high rates of migration e. bad land use decisions, f. low adaptive capacity, g. indifferent or uninformed local governance and h. changes happening too rapidly for adaptation.

We thus facilitate true, stable and lasting change by creating programs that have three main goals: 1. build human capital, knowledge, and adaptive capacity 2. directly address the socio-economic pressures that are driving climate vulnerability by creating viable alternative solutions to destructive practices, and 3. empower people to build their communities as places where their children actually want to live, and where there is space for both human and non-human species to co-exist.

We do this by applying a revolutionary development model that addresses all 17 SDGs, considers all sides of the carbon cycle, considers local geopolitical context, and generates non-destructive income while empowering people. Our model analyzes five core factors for every project: a. income generation potential b. human responsibility to soils, aquatic systems, air, terrestrial ecosystems, biodiversity and carbon emissions c. empowerment of voice and participation in developing solutions d. human well-being indices and e. local context. Our desired impact drives our process, we always start by asking “why?” Why are we investing our time and resources into this? Why should others invest in us? Why should people listen to what we have to say? Why do we deserve a seat at the table?

The integral agro-ecologic restoration solutions proposed by Playa de Oro Parque Ecologico use the following machine or equipment-based technologies: 

-Revive’s River Spinner, Kuxtal, and Grow Pod technologies convert sludge and algae, and other water contaminants into artificial biofilms that regenerate natural aquatic habitats akin to mangrove roots, coral reef systems, oyster beds, and other natural systems that are incredible for carbon capture and preserving biodiversity. The system requires moving water to function. When used in the Playa de Oro river systems they require no electrical inputs in order to work. If we place them on land or move the water to land based systems, we will need to use basic electric motors that can be easily run by solar panels for active or gravity powered irrigation systems. 

The algal waste from the lake water can also be converted into methane with this technology. 

Alticultura’s subterranean greenhouse model will be fitted with solar panels to run the water pumps, shade fish ponds inside the system, provide LED lighting for optimal plant production, and run most of the electricity needs for the park; a graywater recycling system that uses sand, gravel, and charcoal; a rainwater catchment system that will be used to irrigate plants and fish ponds, floating panels on the fish ponds for plant production; and a unique design that uses energy from passive solar and passive geothermal to maintain air humidity, moderate temperatures, and recreate microclimates of the Guatemalan coast for warm water and land production. Fish wate water will be used for plant production inside the greenhouse and to irrigate outside fields. Because they use solar radiation and passive geothermal, they maintain steady temperatures and are immune to most climate shocks, including extended drought, cold snaps, ash fall from volcanoes, hail storms, and nighttime drops in temperature. 

The following natural based technology solutions will be employed:

Regenerative animal use and holistic to fix atmospheric carbon, clear plant waste, mow, improve reforestation indices, push natural succession and native plant seeding for agroforestry, increase soil humidity, protect water systems from runoff, and improve agricultural yields, quality, and production times. These practices will measurably increase soil carbon, biodiversity, and resilience to climate shocks. Three of the six applications identified for Guatemala, a. small family farm systems, b. watershed and reforestation improvements, c. climate resilience in coffee production, and d. reducing harmful impacts from plantation style production systems, can be modeled here at Playa de Oro using extremely low-cost techniques with returns in as little as 6 months. 

Creation of riparian buffer zones, which are extremely high carbon capture systems that can clean metal, biological, and chemical water and soil contaminants, and provide flood control during extreme rain events, tropical, storms, and hurricanes; protecting the park infrastructure and surrounding communities alike. We will use a combination of bamboo species for income generation and construction with appropriate native plant species, and use regenerative practices to prepare the land and help maintain the areas for optimal production. 

Alticultura’s Petricor project adaptations for improving soils will be used where appropriate, especially for small scale food crop and agroforestry production. They use minimal inputs of animal waste, urea, yeast, wheat germ, and milk sugars to replicate Bokashi style microbe activity for 25% of the cost; Brazilian Amazon activated biochar technology to fix nutrients and create carbon and self-replicating microbe sinks that can last 300 years; and year-round cover cropping and production to stimulate the land to fix more carbon and become drought resilient. 

All of the systems mentioned are carbon-fixing solutions, and the group intends to use value added Blockchain technology from calculated carbon sequestration and ecologic restoration of systems degraded by human misuse, to increase the value of the system above simply being dependent on income generated by the practices themselves. The following factors will be considered for calculating added intrinsic value:

a. tons of biomass in living aquatic species
b. REDD++ calculations for calculating carbon captured in systems that can be classified as forests
c. Rachael’s model for accurately calculating soil carbon capture on non-forest agro-ecological lands, including wetlands and agroforestry sites
d. Said model can also calculate water cleaned by natural filtration
e. value of water actively cleaned by the spinner technologies 
f. value added from increases to biodiversity at the site 

Many of these items are difficult to account for in traditional economic development models, thus leading to the creation of exploitive systems that created the severity of issues found at Lake Amatitlan. We think that blockchain and crowdfunding can finally make a living tree, healthy soils, clean water, and robust biodiversity ideas that will be worth investing in as much as other carbon reducing market-based technologies. 

Revive and Alticultura are NGO hybrid organizations in the final stages of legalization, operating in collaboration with established organization Fundaeco for creation of program expansion and synergies for results. Alticultura will be a registered NGO within 2 months, as Guatemala does not legally recognize a hybrid social entrepreneurship structure. revice will follow suit shortly thereafter. Bith organizations are fully vetted for this project by Fundaeco. 

We are a team with core leadership trained in and dedicated to active inclusion and celebration of human diversity. We have a strict non-discrimination policy for race, class, gender, religion, sexual orientation or identity, marital status, nationality, and age. We will make reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities. We have a policy of protection for our female and youth staff members and program users, and do not collaborate with persons known to have been unsafe for others.

The Fundaeco team contains hundreds of Guatemalans and international workers of varying ages and backgrounds. The Revive team is a consortium of local and international players. The Alticultura team is trilingual, local and international, and led by a woman with two women board members. Three board members and one cofounder are indigenous. One board member is a youth. We actively recruit team members who are not only subject matter experts but who also have demonstrated conscientiousness towards diverse team members and program beneficiaries. We strive to make our programs affordable to those who need them the most, and use sliding scales for program fees to help promote access. 

Our business model will serve regional communities in a variety of useful ways.

It will build on an existing aquatic that, prior to contamination, attracted hundreds of thousands of users. Part of the system will remain free to enter, making the programs accessible to all persons, regardless of income or class level.

The hybrid NGO and for-profit portions of the program will provide benefit to local residents, tourists to the site, investigators who study there, and local and regional consumers. Services will include but are not limited to:

-clean water technology for millions of users, including options for bottling or providing water for refilling water bottles

-high quality socially and environmentally responsible fish, crustaceans, and agricultural products safe for human consumption and nutrient rich

-recreational opportunities for families, groups, events, and individuals, with access for disabled persons where possible; including walking, BMX, swimming, café restaurant, farm market, art and photography, butterfly gardens

-high quality science, climate change, environmental, community leadership, and technology educational and research programs for school children, growers, scientists, ecologists, birders, and small business generation

-sustainably grown and harvested firewood, bamboo, wood building materials, and other tree products

We will use a combination of income streams to generate the revenue necessary to fully implement, manage, scale up, and disseminate our program.

First, we are taking a program, not just project based, approach to implementing our solution. We are considering our short and long term results, our central vision, our mission, our informational resources, our team and equipment needs, and where income can come from to support these fantastic people and our environment.

Our program will produce raw materials and transformed products of high market value and that have high demand- fish, shellfish, mussels, bamboo, wood, firewood, clean water, meat, milk, eggs, fruits, nuts, herbs, vegetables, coffee, and dozens of other products possible. We are starting the growing of these products as soon as we have the land secured.

The program will create a clean, beautiful environment that hundreds of thousands of people of all walks of life will want to visit, for recreation, learning, eating and drinking, relaxing, photography, art, picnicking, and research. Some services will be free of cost, others, will have fees associated with them. These services will emerge and grow with time, creating a truly special place unique within the entire country.

The first pilot in lake Amatitlan generated thousands of fish, biodredged 6m of sludge revealing gorgeous black volcanic sand.  Our system will scale these technological  breakthroughs creating black volcanic sand beaches next to new and mature biodiverse forests with docks and will bring hundreds of new park visitors.

 The program will help clean water that serves millions of people, and sequester carbon that is currently causing climate for the entire world. Thus, we believe firmly that it is time to invest in paying for solutions like ours that solve problems instead of creating them. Such programs are well suited to emerging blockchain technologies for investing in social and ecological justice and crowdsourcing efforts. We have already started crowd funding on some aspects of the program, and will ramp that up through the year to continue indefinitely.

Our program uses innovative technologies that are well-suited for funding by major donor programs investing in emerging solutions, like Ashoka, Gates Foundation, the World Bank, the British Embassy, the Savory Institute, major universities, and others. As we write this grant, a team from Virginia Tech, on the ground in Lake Amatitlan, is interested in collaboration between our technology and theirs. We are researching granting options by other institutions as well.

Our program is well-placed to qualify for USAID 2022-2023 that was recently approved, after a near 4 year hiatus, for solutions that feed people, clean environments, lend themselves ot research, and that generate local employment solutions that tackle core issues of poverty, climate, change, instability, and migration. We hope to fully fund the installation of three spinner/ Grow Pod solutions, salaries for our team, land cleaning and preparation, the greenhouse, and the regenerative agriculture program within two years via these channels.

Our program can tap into REDD++ and carbon market initiatives currently operating in Guatemala, such as projects and programs run by MAGA, CONAP, INAB, UICN, and others giving money for reforestation.

Our program is designed to value biodiversity, to calculate carbon stored in soils and aquatic systems, and to tackle other elements of quality of life otherwise not found in traditional cost-benefit and carbon footprint models. This will provide additional draw for eco-tourism, and will also provide further incentive for blockchain, crowd funding, and Nature Conservancy type investment and protection. We plan to place a carbon value of intermediate valuation, and around $75 per ton, and use this as a basis for estimating true value of benefit from our programs to attract investors. By including carbon and human well-being indices in our evaluations, we will avoid the empirical value only based approaches to development that drive exploitive systems, overcoming much of the deserved criticism of the shortcomings of traditional development programs.

Also suitable to linking local school programs for science and environmental education enrichment for school students. Similar programs reach 50,000 students per year, and are supported by the schools or ministry of education. We will have complementary grade and high school level educational programs, programs for university students, programs for adult professional learners, programs for adult continuing education, and programs for the general public. All of these can generate revenue.

Our program is well positioned for public education networks, such as TED, podcasts, and other platforms. We will explore all options. 

Fundaeco has been a very successful USAID and other agency backed grant funding recipient for 30 years, with a proven track record. They work on a large in successfully funded programs for Living Seas, Women, Green Cities, Youth, Ecotourism, Community Development, and Biological Corridors. This project will be an expansion of their work into freshwater systems for urban communities. 

Rachael has previously successfully written several grant proposals inside and outside of Guatemala for $1000 to $150,000 each. She has crowdfunded $40,000 over 6 years and invested her own savings, earnings, time, rental land, and energy to perform the independent research behind Alticultura, and is in the final stage of legalizing the entity as a fully functioning NGO. She has previously managed development projects for the Guatemalan Altiplano totaling $365 million USD in value, a $3 million animal biotechnology research program, and was coordinator for the University of Connecticut’s world renowned sustainability research program. Alticultura successfully received two competitive grants for greenhouse construction for $1000 and $2000, respectively, and has potential to be linked to the 32 Volcanes blockchain program for social investment. Her work with Alticultura received the Delaware Valley University Alumni Award for 2019. 

She has started a pilot farm to table café in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, and is writing a cookbook based on using local ingredients for international recipes. She offers paid courses to roughly 2 dozen students per year in climate leadership and integrated program development, a number she could easily triple if she had adequate funding for a salary that meets basic living expenses. She produced 15 lbs of product per week in her 20x 40’ walipini pilot model and her student had even greater success with his model. She grows food in the dry corridor year round and has paid programs that teach growers how to turn degraded soils into living black earth in as little as 5 weeks. Her expertise on climate and migration has contributed to articles published by the New Yorker, the Pulitzer Center, Reuter’s and others shaping economic policy. She has lectured in two languages to thousands of people and also publishes creative writing based on the human-nature interface. 

She has petitioned to create Central America’s first regenerative agriculture certification center, which will bring participants in to be trained and generate $5000 per trainee for the organization. The program will be expected to serve 500,000 over 10 years, and she has been investing small donations and her own PT work income to turn her own rental land into year-round production suing carbon capture techniques, helping at the moment support 3 families and the farm to table café. She is also building two new underground greenhouses for agroecology in the highlands with grant support directly from the Ministry of Protected Areas. 

Doug’s pilot on Lake Amatitlan produced the world’s first clean body of water inside a polluted body of water. He has secured the support to purchase the land for this project. He is a Principal Investigator with The National Science Foundation.  He won the Guatemala Science grant for 2019, but could accept it because it requires matching.  

The Spinner, which is the world’s only river powered aerator, demonstrated how money can be saved by using de-facto sewer systems and by using the flow of the river to generate aeration, saving money on electrical costs of wastewater treatment. The first pilot eliminated 6m of sludge and produced fish, demonstrating a substantial savings of sludge handling costs of traditional wastewater treatment plants. His previous work with bamboo companies received tens of millions in revenue much of which stemmed from products that his companies were the first in the world  to develop.