Carbon Conservation: The Sustainability Roadmap – Rio Tinto, Australia to Aceh, Indonesia

Dorjee Sun
CEO, Carbon Conservation

MOSAICQUE magazine takes privilege in featuring in its August 2015 edition Dorjee Sun – the trailblazer Australian, the unstoppable, kind-hearted, green entrepreneur who is passionate about saving the earth one step at a time, through his company Carbon Conservation.
Carbon Conservation grew out of Sun’s concern for the millions of hectares of rain forest destroyed each year in Indonesia. He knew that nonprofits alone weren’t going to stop tropical deforestation, which contributes as much as a quarter of the world’s carbon emissions. According to Dorjee, deforestation would only end when it becomes more profitable to keep forests than to turn them into logs or farms. The Kyoto Protocol doesn’t yet recognize avoided deforestation and Sun literally had to force himself at Thirteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP13) held in Bali, Indonesia to put his business on the map.

In April 2008, Sun brokered the world’s first commercial avoided-deforestation project, in the war-torn Indonesian province of Aceh, with Merrill Lynch stepping up to pay its villagers to protect 1.9 million acres (770,000 hectares) of pristine jungle in exchange for the value of the carbon locked inside the trees. In exchange, Merrill got carbon credits, which are also known as carbon offsets. These credits meet the quality standards set by a group called the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA), whose members include environmental groups Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy and the Rainforest Alliance, and companies as BP, Intel and SC Johnson.

Profile:
Dorjee is a social entrepreneur who has founded 11 companies with 2 acquisitions and 3 exits and assets sales [cvMail (2000), Elevate Education (2002), AsiaGroove (2004), Honey RoastedTV (2005), Joosed (2005), Carbon Conservation (2007), Carbon Agro (2009), Whogives (2012), SnapClip (2014), Freedoms (2014) and Home Group (2014)].

His experience in technology ranges from ecommerce where he has advised TESCO’s Asian CEOs and KUONI Travel on ecommerce innovation strategy, engaged to help with their internal hackathons. Advised Shopline a SME SaaS e-tail platform in Asia and started, operated and led Visa’s Bigger Better Sale recruiting 45K customers and 60 vendors in Singapore in just 77 days. He is advising a crowdfunding platform ‘StartSomeGood’ and ChangeTip a bitcoin tipping platform. He is a Director for Whogives the company deploying the world’s first commercial Google Glass public project, also the company deploying kindness and philanthropy project for Singapore’s Government, he is Chairman of Nexus Singapore. He previously owned AsiaGroove, at the time the biggest Asian youth community in Australia with virtual currency 5K gifts p/day and currently is a co-Founder and investor relations/ marketing for an innovative new mobile video animation app called Snapclip.

Dorjee is a founder and director of the Home Group which owns equity in companies that work in the areas of conservation, agriculture, philanthropy, technology and financial innovation. Dorjee is also a founder and director of Carbon Conservation which owns equity in large scale sustainability and carbon conservation projects globally with project partners and clients such as Rio Tinto, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Olam and Twitter. One such project in Aceh, Indonesia, won the Carbon Finance Deal of the Year award and was also the subject of an award winning documentary, “The Burning Season”, narrated by Hugh Jackman which explained how orangutan conservation and avoided deforestation could be tied in to generate alternative monetary incentives. The African Rainforest Conservancy honoured Dorjee with an Earth Day Award and by naming a newly discovered blue spotted species of chameleon from the Tanzania rainforest – the “Kinyongia dorjeesuni”.

His most recent undertaking is a solution for busy undergraduates called UNSWOT – a simple idea, an enabling digital platform, to engage the students face-to-face online with a conversation, a discussion, a debate on wide ranging issues such as challenges facing UN, Australian immigration policies, international obligations and climate change. Last month, this new idea was presented to University of North South Wales Vice Chancellor Ian Jacobs and 51 other Heads of Schools.

Dorjee has also been named one of TIME Magazine’s Heroes of the Environment, a World Economic Forum Global Leaders of Tomorrow, CPA Top 20 Business Leaders, one of Esquire Magazine’s 5 Gentlemen of Philanthropy, one of the Young Leaders by The Australian newspaper, he has won the Asialink Leaders Program Alumni Award, was named an Asia Society 21 Fellow, a World Cities Summit Future Leader, is the Chairman Nexus Youth Philanthropy Singapore Conference, on the board for the Nexus Youth Philanthropy Australia Conference and his work has been covered in Wall Street Journal, Fortune, TIME, Esquire, ABC, PBS, BBC, Discovery, CNBC, Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian and other media outlets.

Dorjee has a law degree, commerce degree and diploma of Asian Studies (Mandarin) from the University of New South Wales, studied at North Sydney Boys High. Growing up in Sydney he now shares his time between Singapore, San Francisco, Sydney and other project locations.