The company’s positive momentum is on the rise. With Fernandez at the helm, in 2023, the company signed a landmark agreement to provide Microsoft with up to 1.5 million carbon removal credits and in 2024 negotiated another ambitious deal with Google, with the tech giant agreeing to purchase 50,000 metric tons of carbon removal credits by 2030. 

In April, Mombak announced it had raised $30 million in its Series A funding round. It plans to use the funding to plant 12 forests across roughly 50,000 acres in Brazil—an area about three times the size of Manhattan.

“What’s really rewarding about this work is that these projects remove more carbon from the atmosphere than any other project type—but that’s not all they do,” says Fernandez, who now serves as executive chairman. “They increase biodiversity and create high-quality jobs and economic development in Brazil, all while providing companies like Microsoft and Google the opportunity to become net-zero.”

Fernandez answered TIME’s survey on the state of the climate movement:

What is the single most important action you think the public, or a specific company or government, needs to take in the next year to advance the climate agenda?

I strongly encourage the Brazilian government to accelerate its astute efforts to build Brazil into the world’s largest carbon removal exporter. We cannot prevent the world from heating out of control without a massive new global industry that removes billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year. Data shows that Brazil has greater carbon removal potential than any other country, through highly scalable methods like reforestation, enhanced rock weathering, biochar production, and agroforestry.

The Brazilian government has already laid the groundwork by providing low-cost financing to local companies like Mombak. In the coming year, I hope to see the Brazilian government expand lines of financing, accelerate government concessions to reforest massive public land areas, and increase carbon removal demand from state-owned companies. These initiatives position Brazil’s economy competitively and enable it to contribute to the climate agenda in a way that no other country can.

What gives you hope about the future of the planet?

Climate action is economically rational. Yes, it will cost trillions of dollars to limit climate change. But the social and economic costs of letting the world heat out of control would be far higher. If we are economically rational, we will both dramatically reduce CO2 emissions and dramatically scale up removing CO2 from the atmosphere that was already emitted.

Some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated investors are betting on precisely this thesis. For example, investors like Bain Capital, AXA, the Canadian Pension Plan, and the World Bank have invested over $150 million into Mombak’s projects that remove carbon from the atmosphere by reforesting the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. These investments generate attractive financial returns. Climate action is simply becoming good business, and that makes it increasingly scalable.

If you could stand up and talk to world leaders at the next COP, what would you say?

Please accelerate the regulation of global carbon markets. Stimulate countries and companies to invest more and sooner in carbon removal. The stakes are high: If the carbon market doesn’t grow dramatically then we simply will not have carbon removal at scale, meaning we simply will not limit warming to 1.5 degrees, 2 degrees, or whichever target you believe in.

We already have good progress on structuring the UN “Article 6” global carbon market, and forward-thinking governments and companies—like Singapore and Microsoft—are leading the way with significant investments in carbon removal. Now we can and should accelerate, and only government regulations can drive the speed of acceleration that we need.