India’s capital, Delhi, gets just 259 hours of a combination of clean air and comfortable temperatures in a year. That’s about 11 days in an entire year. And we’ve learnt to live with this reality.

In fact, India’s climate paradox is a strangely disarming one. We’re unintentionally injecting aerosols (pollution from coal emissions, fossil fuel burning, crop burning, etc.) into the atmosphere to block sunlight and cool the land. Even our current relatively cool temperatures are an illusion. (We’ve written about this paradox).

There are solvable problems, and then there are ones that need stronger solutions. Every harvest season, we burn agricultural waste. Stalks, husks, stubble — around 750 million tonnes of agri waste every year, making it one of the largest agricultural waste streams on the planet.

Farmers have a short window to clear their fields before the next planting. One in two Indians earns a living from the soil. So, burning the fields and planting again is a matter of survival.

But this open burning can be prevented. In fact, this presents a ripe opportunity for an agrarian-first India to harness its waste and turn it into carbon sinks.

That’s the promise of biochar. The Alchemy of Ash.

We built a simple, visually stunning microsite to make climate science accessible and informative. It’s an ELI5 (Explain Like I’m 5) on the problem, the science, and the work behind it.

If you like what you see, please give us a shout-out on socials. We need more climate believers, and this work helps us all do better.

Remove CO₂ →

— Adithya, Alt Carbon

By Chandhana Sathishkumar

In middle school, I decided to spend my life's net worth in saved-up coins. The plan pretty much carried itself out when a thallu vandi labelled 'Arun' in bright red letters began showing up at my school gate. For many months I bought ice cream after school almost every day, often enough to even have an open tab with the Arun anna. It always went the same way. I hand him a combination of coins totaling ₹10, a vanilla cup peels open and, by the third spoonful, the surface catches a sheen as the sun takes over. By the sixth, a rivulet escapes the rim, and then there is no going back.

There is something really inconvenient about how quickly ice cream melts in the Indian summer. Not because melting is surprising. Of course it melts. The disappointment is how little time it takes to give up. The product sold today feels like it was never designed for the place it lives in.

Ice cream here moves through heat, only briefly interrupted by refrigeration. Consider the journey of an ice cream tub. It leaves the factory in a refrigerated truck to reach the distributor, from where it goes to a petti kada freezer or a street vendor’s cart, eventually to reach the customer’s home on a bike ride. Each step offers an opportunity for heat to creep in. Repeated cycles degrade its quality even if the product remains frozen.

Ice Cream as a Material

Counter to its name, ice cream isn’t just frozen cream. It’s a multi-phase material held together just long enough. The texture depends on the size and arrangement of these phases.

The first thing holding ice cream together is ice itself, which shares the same lattice structure as regular ice called Ice I. For ice cream to feel smooth, these crystals need to stay under about fifty microns, roughly half the thickness of a sheet of paper. When ice cream melts and refreezes, water molecules deposit onto existing crystals. You might have experienced this as a grainy tasting ice cream.

The second phase doesn’t freeze at all. It is a concentrated sugar solution that stays liquid even below zero. Sugars are excluded from the growing ice and concentrate in the serum, forcing water molecules to reorganize around it rather than lock into place. Without this unfrozen layer, ice cream would freeze into a solid block. The syrup keeps ice cream scoopable.

Find answers in the complete article:

Read the full article

Alter Magazine's Issue #5 is the story of what it would take to build an ice cream designed for the Indian summer, from the material science of ice crystals and fat networks, to global solutions like Turkish dondurma and a Ladakhi monastery's soft-serve setup, to Unilever's 2023 patent release. This is a portrait of pleasure engineered for heat.

We hosted the launch of Issue #5 at Art of Delight, Residency Road, Bangalore, and simultaneously in San Francisco. The Bangalore evening opened with The Great Ice Cream Quiz and closed with a liquid nitrogen demonstration by our Chief Scientist, Dr. Sambuddha Misra, unveiling three flavours specially made by Art of Delight for the occasion: matcha tea, Thai tea, and Dorje lemon honey tea. Chandhana Sathishkumar, the writer behind Issue #5, joined the San Francisco conversation on what it takes to build pleasure for a billion people who live in the heat.

Alter Magazine hosts a launch event for every new issue, an evening where the ideas on the page find a room to breathe. Subscribe to our Luma to stay up to date with the latest.

Issue 5: Designing a Summer Ice Cream for India, written by Chandhana Sathishkumar, edited by Fahad Hasin, scooped, churned & built by Alt Carbon.

Read Here

🔰 Largest ERW Delivery

We're the world's largest Enhanced Rock Weathering company by total verified issuance. 9,566 tonnes of CO₂ removed, certified under Isometric's Enhanced Weathering Protocol. Third consecutive delivery, each larger than the last.

That's roughly the annual emissions of a small AI data centre running 24/7, pulled from heritage tea estates, rice paddies, and farmland across Darjeeling and the Terai, stored in ocean chemistry for over 10,000 years.

We run 2 labs. Shonku Labs sits inside the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. D-CAL is a 15,000 sq ft facility in the Himalayan foothills, processing over 100,000 samples a year.

This delivery required 12,000 ICP-OES analysed soil samples, processed in 8 weeks. ICP-OES is the technique used to analyse meteorites and validate semiconductor-grade metals with parts-per-billion precision.

For context: Europe’s LUCAS Soil Survey collected 20,000 harmonised samples, coordinated across 25 EU member states, hundreds of surveyors, years of planning. We generated 60% of that from a single project in Darjeeling.

🫱🏾‍🫲🏼 Working with Microsoft

Microsoft signed a multi-year deal with us this month for up to 36,920 tonnes of removal from the Darjeeling Revival Project. Their first enhanced rock weathering purchase from Asia. Shrey and I grew up playing Age of Empires on a Windows PC, and partnering with Microsoft is something we'd wanted ever since we started the company.

Microsoft is the largest buyer of carbon removal in the world, and the deal also provides them the opportunity to purchase additional volumes from us after successful delivery and verification milestones.

Microsoft has bought more carbon removal than any company on earth, and the demand and verification standards it set early built the market the rest of us grew into. Most buyers are earlier on that path.

To address this, we are launching the Alt Explorers Program — an executive education and immersion program tailored for Sustainability teams at leading companies. The program will dive into our ERW and Biochar projects as live case studies, covering the science, technology, and operations behind our work.

Write to me at sparsh@altcarbon.com to participate.

🏔️ Latest at Alt Carbon:

• To celebrate recent wins, Alt Carbon team drove down to Bandipur for an offsite safari.
  
  

  Bandipur is 874 sq km of forest at the trijunction of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala, where the Deccan Plateau meets the Western Ghats.
  
  

  During our evening safari, we spotted a variety of animals — Gaur (Indian Bison), sambar deer, chital (spotted deer), peacocks and elephants. A woodpecker working a dead trunk 10 feet from the jeep. Our naturalist told us 193 tigers live here. But the closest thing we found was footprints. Near the end, some of the team caught sight of a leopard!

  

  We stopped at Poojari’s on the drive out: a Mangalorean seafood dhaba on the Mysore-Bangalore highway that people drive 4 hours specifically to eat at. Pomfret, anjal rava fry (seer fish, rolled in semolina until the outside shatters), rawoos (Indian salmon).
  
  

  We’re hiring across Indra Dhanush, Shonku Labs, Iris, and Climate Studio. Open roles here.

  

• The race to frontier AI adds 24 to 44 million tonnes of CO₂ per year. Carbon in the atmosphere is already at its highest in 3 million years.

  

  I wrote about this in Climate Tech in the Age of AI. We believe AGI is what gets us to nuclear fusion, better fertilizers, cleaner construction materials, and carbon removal at scale. The carbon load of building it means removal has to happen now, in parallel.

• The Bengal Renaissance gave India Raja Rammohan Roy’s social reform, SN Bose’s quantum mechanics, PC Mahalanobis’s statistics, JC Bose’s Earth Sciences, Rabindranath Tagore’s literature, Abanindranath Tagore’s art, and Satyajit Ray’s cinema. Within that same century, the 1943 famine took 3 million lives. We launched a new microsite for the Bengal Renaissance Project this month, tracing that history to make the case for biochar as a new beginning for Bengali soil.

  
  Chinmay from Climate Studio wrote about what went into the design. The central scene places 13 figures, each a pillar of the Renaissance, inside Jorasanko Thakur Bari, the Tagore family home built in 1784: our answer to Raphael's School of Athens, set in the house they would have actually known. The Art Nouveau motif running through the site was a deliberate choice: it emerged at the same historical moment as the Bengal Renaissance, from the same refusal to let modernity erase craft.

  

🚀 Alter Magazine

• In 1939, Jawaharlal Nehru visited Rabindranath Tagore to ask if Jana Gana Mana could become India's national anthem. A statistician was in the room. That statistician, P.C. Mahalanobis, would go on to build the system that let a newly independent nation of 350 million people see itself clearly for the first time.

  
  We launched Issue #4 at The Takshashila Institution, Bangalore. The panel brought together Narayan Ramachandran, Co-Founder of Takshashila, who has spent his career moving capital, talent, and ideas across Morgan Stanley, RBL Bank, and TeamLease; and Pramit Bhattacharya, researcher at Data for India, who has spent years making India's public numbers sharper and harder to ignore, and is now writing a book on the very history of national accounting the issue talks about. Moderated by Hiya Jain, the writer behind Issue #4 and a fellow at the Roots of Progress Institute.

  

  Issue #4, “The Making of Indian Statistics,” follows how India built, then lost, and is slowly rebuilding the infrastructure of national self-knowledge. In 1950, nobody knew what the average Indian ate, earned, or whether they had work. Policy ran on guesswork. Mahalanobis changed that: the National Sample Survey knocked on thousands of doors and asked, item by item. Harold Hotelling, then among the foremost statisticians in the world, wrote that no sampling technique developed anywhere could “compare in accuracy” with what he’d built.

  

  Read here

🌎 In the World of Climate

• Anthropic just became the first AI startup to join Frontier, the carbon removal coalition, contributing to a new $915 million tranche that nearly doubles its total commitments to $1.8 billion.
  
  

  Frontier was founded by Stripe, Google, and Shopify to pre-buy removal from projects that can actually deliver. It’s now tightening to fewer, larger bets on gigaton-capable approaches, with contracts running 8 to 10 years and out to 2040. To date it’s put close to $700 million into 50+ projects for 1.8 million tonnes.

  

• El Niño is highly likely to return this year, and it’s arriving on a planet already hotter than during any previous episode.

  
  The last cycle (2022-2023) triggered a rice export ban in India, drained the Panama Canal to record lows, and sparked a dengue epidemic. Forecasters are watching closely: India is already in a brutal heat wave, with below-average monsoon rainfall expected ahead.

BNP Paribas commodities strategist Jason Ying is watching LNG flows: rising AC demand across Asia could divert cargoes from European gas storage, leaving the continent short heading into winter. Monash University climate scientist Andrew Watkins calls El Niño a "risk multiplier" for the extreme weather already being recorded.

🇮🇳 Good Reads from India

• Low magnesium was 3 times more common in summer than winter. Low sodium up 59%. 1 in 3 Indians showed concentrated urine during the heatwave months.
  
  

  Plum’s Ganapathi Ramanathan and Head of Healthcare Prayat Shah ran analysis on 22,167 health checkups across the country, looking for what the heat does to the body before it announces itself. By April, all 50 of the world’s hottest cities were in India. 8 biomarkers shifted in parallel, each with a documented physiological explanation.

  

  The fatigue, brain fog, and muscle cramps most people write off as "just the heat" are measurable in blood chemistry. Dry, hot interior states carry the biggest dehydration burden. Humid coastal heat is more dangerous: high humidity stops sweat from evaporating, raising core temperature faster than a dry heatwave at the same reading.

🛋️ What We're Reading

• Pope’s Encyclicals
  
  

  An encyclical is the Catholic Church’s highest teaching document: a papal letter sent to every Catholic on earth. 1.4 billion people. The last one focused on climate had its principles written into the preamble of the Paris Agreement.
  
  

  Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas in May this year. It’s 42,000 words on AI, human dignity, labor, and the cracks unchecked technology opens in society. The central argument is “AI needs to be “disarmed,” freed from systems that concentrate its power in a few hands.” It explicitly flags the environmental cost of data centers, cites Laudato Si’ in its intellectual lineage, and was presented at the Vatican alongside Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah.

  

  Pope Francis wrote about climate in his encyclicals. Laudato Si' (2015) was the first papal document to make the environment the center of Catholic moral teaching, framing climate as a civilizational question. Laudate Deum (2023) was the crankier follow-up, written 8 years later after watching governments fail to act, it cited IPCC data directly and named the US by name.

• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
  

  Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Potawatomi Nation. Braiding Sweetgrass is the book she wrote about what plants have to teach us, and about what gets lost when a culture stops listening. She asks whether science is the only valid way to know the natural world, then answers it by doing both at once: rigorous field botany and Potawatomi oral tradition, braided together.

  

That’s a wrap from me. ✌️

To discuss Planetary Intelligence, hit me up at sparsh@altcarbon.com

By Hiya Jain

In June 1933, a new statistics journal, bearing the name Sankhyā, was founded by Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis [PCM] in Calcutta. The name was deliberate as the editor’s note explained in the first issue: “As we interpret it, the fundamental aim of statistics is to give determinate and adequate knowledge of reality with the help of numbers and numerical analysis. The ancient Indian word Sankhyā embodies the same idea.” Sankhyā is Sanskrit for number – but also, by philosophical extension, for adequate knowledge. This was the program that Mahalanobis was to champion.

The first five volumes illustrated an ambitious and independent agenda comprising forty theoretical and eighty-seven applied papers. These articles were a formalization of the newly founded Indian Statistical Institute’s (ISI) mission: to remove guesswork and produce precise estimates for hard-to-track problems in a fragmented, still-developing country. Where previously questions such as ‘how much jute is really grown in Bengal’ and ‘what is the yield per acre in any given season’ would have been answered by the subjective patwari system (of village revenue officials looking at a field and providing an estimate by eye), this was replaced with techniques like stratified random sampling and crop-cutting experiments.

“It is both the duty and the pleasure of the editors of a statistical journal on the verge of its centenary to offer a very hearty welcome to Prof. P.C. Mahalanobis and his colleagues who have launched Sankhya and its first part (June 1933) reflects great credit on all responsible… The editorial committee have set themselves a high standard. Their colleagues in London will watch the progress of Sankhya with hopeful interest.”

- Journal of the Royal Statistical Society

But the ISI did more than apply existing statistical methods to Indian problems – it developed new ones. Mahalanobis' most distinctive methodological innovation was high-quality interpretation of a network of sub-samples: instead of drawing a single sample from a population, you draw two independent sub-samples processed by separate field teams, so that any divergence between results immediately flags a non-sampling error. The resulting estimates could then be compared. Sampling theory tells you how far apart two such estimates should fall by chance alone and any divergence beyond that benchmark has to come from somewhere else – investigator bias, recording errors, inconsistent application of instructions. This converted non-sampling error into a quantity that could be measured, traced back, and corrected between rounds. Harold Hotelling, then among the foremost statisticians in the world, eventually wrote that “no technique of random sample has, so far as I can find, been developed in the United States or elsewhere, which can compare in accuracy with that described by Professor Mahalanobis.”

This is the story of how India built, then lost, and is slowly regaining the infrastructure of national self-knowledge. The ISI under Mahalanobis was, for a quarter century, one of the most productive research institutions in the developing world – a place that attracted first-rate mathematical talent, developed novel survey methods, and generated the data on which an entire nation's economic planning depended. It was also, by design, a fragile institution dependent on a unique set of circumstances. When those conditions disappeared, the system disappeared too, with consequences that are only now becoming fully clear. How did a laboratory with a first-year budget of ₹238 ($2.5) produce all of this to begin with? And why couldn't it last?

Find answers in the complete article:

Read the full article

Alter Magazine's Issue #4 is the story of how India built, then lost, and is slowly rebuilding the infrastructure of national self-knowledge. In 1950, nobody knew what the average Indian ate, earned, or whether they had work. P.C. Mahalanobis changed that, building the system that let a newly independent nation of 350 million people see itself clearly for the first time.

We hosted the launch of Issue #4 at The Takshashila Institution, Bangalore. The panel brought together Narayan Ramachandran, Co-Founder of Takshashila, who has spent his career moving capital, talent, and ideas across Morgan Stanley, RBL Bank, and TeamLease, sat alongside Pramit Bhattacharya, researcher at Data for India, who has spent years making India’s public numbers sharper and harder to ignore, and who is now writing a book on the very history of national accounting that the issue traces. Moderating was Hiya Jain, the writer behind Issue #4 and a fellow at the Roots of Progress Institute.

Issue #4: The Making of Indian Statistics, written by Hiya Jain, designed & built by Alt Carbon

Read here

📭 Introduction

In April, we delivered 2,500 Isometric-certified carbon removal credits to MOL. Largest-ever delivery of ERW credits certified under Isometric’s Enhanced Weathering Protocol. Our 2nd consecutive delivery to the same partner, 5 months after the first.

That’s roughly 3,500 one-way flights from Delhi to Tokyo, pulled from the atmosphere and locked in ocean chemistry for over 10,000 years.

2 years ago this was a moonshot. The default advice was to hire overseas teams, route samples to labs in the US or UK, build from the outside in. We went the other way: our own labs in Darjeeling and Bangalore, a science team trained in-house, the full stack built in India from scratch. Most people thought we’d gone mad. Honestly, there were moments we thought so too.

The 2,986 credits behind this are a relay across 4 teams.

Indra-Dhanush identified tens of thousands of acres of land, moved basalt from crushers to farmers, and coordinated sampling across every parcel. Shonku Labs processed 12,000 samples in-house; Iris built FELUDA, the digital stack tying land, logistics, lab data, and credit math together; and Climate Studio translated the science into a language the world could trust.

Offline x Alt

We hosted Offline x Alt Carbon: Off Grid Darjeeling earlier this month, a 2-day visit led by Dhruv Sharma, the current CEO of AngelList, and Utsav Somani, AngelList's co-founder and one of Alt Carbon's earliest believers.

Day 1 opened on the fields. We took the group through a live field tour of the Darjeeling Revival Project, walking them through how our team collects soil samples and extracts pore water from the ground (the two primary measurements that tell us how much carbon a field has sequestered).

From the fields, we moved to the Darjeeling Climate Action Lab, India's leading Earth Sciences facility and our answer to Bell Labs.

The evening ended at Nobojagoron, our biochar facility in Bengal. Climate Studio, led by Adi and Amritha, put on a full light and sound show inside the plant: 10 projectors, a large factory floor, and a show built around the Bengal Renaissance Project, Alt Carbon's initiative to make India the Biochar Capital of the World.

The next day we headed to the Second Chance House at Selim Hill, then hiked up through the Gitanjali section of the estate. Midway through, we stopped to taste the teas coming straight from those gardens.

The night ended on the fields. Our first Full Moon Harvest of 2026: a Flower Moon, Buddha Purnima. Harvest began with a puja to Shiva Chandrashekhara, the moon-bearer, a ritual that has anchored Selim Hill for generations. "Dui Path, Ek Suiro" (two leaves and a bud): found by lantern light, plucked with a flick of the wrist.

Reminds me of Buddha’s Flower Sermon: he picked up a flower and smiled. Faiz sahab would agree, years later:

guloñ meñ rang bhare bād-e-nau-bahār chale
chale bhī aao ki darjeeling kā kārobār chale

(Translation: Let colors fill the flowers, let the fresh spring breeze blow; won't you come, so that Darjeeling's work may carry on)

🏔️ Latest at Alt Carbon:

• Amritha and I wrote about how you design a magazine ad from scratch. The brief: tell a story of Indian progress for the Works in Progress audience. What followed was weeks of rejected concepts, from the India Tech Stack rendered as miniature painting to an inversion of the School of Athens, before SN Bose unlocked everything. Bosons change the world by gathering. So do ideas.

  

  A huge thank you to Works in Progress for featuring Alter Magazine!

  Read the blog here and check out Amritha’s video here.

• Our in-house geochemist Arya wrote about the instrument at the heart of our measurement process: the Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometer. A single drop of cave water can reconstruct 23,000 years of Indian Ocean rainfall. The same machine fingerprints carbon in our Darjeeling soil samples and traces it back to its origin. Matter remembers where it's been. The IRMS just knows how to ask. Read the full piece here.

  

🌎 In the World of Climate

• On April 27, every one of the planet’s 50 hottest cities was in India, with average peak temperatures across the list hitting 44.7°C (112.5°F).

  
  Banda in Uttar Pradesh topped the chart: a daytime high of 46.1°C (115°F) and a night-time low of 34.7°C (94.5°F). AQI, the air quality platform that compiled the data, said there’s “no modern precedent.” Climatologist Maximiliano Herrera called it “among the top if not the top harshest April” on record, with dozens, possibly hundreds of April heat records broken.
  

  April is not India’s hottest month.

  
  The Indian Meteorological Department is already forecasting a below-average monsoon for 2026. Heat index values in central and eastern India could hit 60°C (140°F) later this month.

  
  Read here.

  

• A Harvard white paper finds northern India has been cooling in winter since 1980, masking the greenhouse warming already baked in.
  

  
  The Salata Institute released a 51-page multidisciplinary report this month on India’s heat exposure. Peter Huybers finds that aerosols from crop-residue burning and irrigation-driven evapotranspiration have suppressed winter daytime temperatures across the Indo-Gangetic Plain by up to 0.53°C since 1980. As India’s National Clean Air Programme reduces particulate matter and groundwater depletion slows irrigation, both suppression effects are expected to weaken. Heat action plans calibrated to historical averages in northern India are, by the report’s account, underestimating future exposure.
  

  
  Two other findings: only 8% of India’s households have AC, against 380 million people in heat-exposed labor. And parametric heat insurance, currently being piloted at scale, pays out after the heat wave ends. Workers can’t afford to skip work on the chance a threshold might trigger. The authors call it hazard pay.

  Read the full report here.

  

🛋️ What We’re Reading

• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
  

  
  A species of uplifted spiders inherits a terraformed planet and spends 1,000 years building language, mathematics, and theology, while the last humans orbit overhead, looking for somewhere to land. Tchaikovsky spends 600 pages making the spiders the more sympathetic civilization. A novel about what civilization actually is, and who gets to claim it.

  

• A BBC Future piece, written for Attenborough’s 100th birthday. Stephen Dowling traces everything back to Cherry Kearton, a Yorkshire farmboy who became probably the world’s first professional wildlife photographer by hiding inside a hollow wooden ox to get close to birds. He made the first-ever recording of a bird in the wild. A 7-year-old Attenborough saw his 1930 penguin film and decided he wanted to travel the world filming animals. The rifle camera that Kearton built by hand in his shed still works.

  

  Read it here.

🌱 Abundance Index

• A shipping container-sized device, powered entirely by waste heat and sunlight, pulls 1,000 litres of clean water a day from desert air.
  
  

  Omar Yaghi won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for building metal-organic frameworks: molecular sponges with more surface area per gram than a football field. His company Atoco has turned that into a machine that works at 20% humidity with no grid connection and no brine discharge into the ocean. Caribbean islands that currently import water from the mainland after each hurricane season are testing it.

  Yaghi grew up in a refugee community in Jordan. In his Nobel banquet speech, he described the whisper that would move through his neighbourhood: “the water is coming.” The government truck arrived once a week or two. He’d run to fill every container he could find before the flow stopped. He spent the following decades building a material that turns air into water.
  
  

  The constraint it removes: fresh water has always required a river, an aquifer, or a functioning grid. 2.2 billion people currently lack safely managed drinking water. The same reticular chemistry also underlies Yaghi’s direct air capture work: a material from his Berkeley lab captures essentially all CO₂ from ambient air passed through it, what he calls the best commercially viable DAC material currently in existence.

That’s a wrap from me. ✌️

To discuss Planetary Intelligence, hit me up at sparsh@altcarbon.com

📭 Introduction

The Indra Dhanush team has been on the gas pedal since the start of this year. They're working closely with Puro.earth to get our Nobojagoron biochar facility audited, as we gear up for our first biochar credits very soon.

On the ERW side, our Darjeeling Revival: Monsoon Harvest project is now validated by Isometric, joining the MOL x Alt Carbon project, which has been delivering since Nov ‘25. The Monsoon Harvest validation involved submitting the largest ERW dataset Isometric has received to date. A bigger delivery is lined up for later this month. More on that in the next edition.

The Climate Studio team was in Bagdogra last month for a special project. Or as Adi would put it, something is cooking. We can’t wait to share this with you soon.

Before joining me, they made a stop in Kalimpong. Chinmay drew this painting of a bungalow he came across there.

I was fascinated by what Adi told me about the place. The bungalow is called Niharika. The British built it in the early 1900s when they were developing Kalimpong as a hill station. By 1920, it passed to a family of Indian vakils and judges. And then, for decades, it became home to two sisters who traced their lineage to Sardar Muhammad Ayub Khan, the Afghan prince who routed the British at the Battle of Maiwand in 1880. Born in India, in exile. They never once set foot in Afghanistan.

Kiran Desai wrote them into The Inheritance of Loss as a pair of Afghan princesses in Kalimpong. The house eventually fell apart (graffiti on the walls, pigeons in the rafters) before someone restored it during lockdown.

🏔️ Latest at Alt Carbon:

• We hosted Aayush Chadha from ARIA (the UK’s answer to DARPA, backed by £800 million in government funding for high-risk research), Gayatri from Karya, and Paras from Lossfunk for an evening at IISc Bangalore, bringing together deeptech founders and investors from across the city. A second panel had Arnav Bansal from Lagrange Point, Pratik from Accel, and Shrey talking about why deeptech is difficult, from timelines that spook traditional venture to the gap between lab results and field-ready products.
  
  

  One question that landed well: if budget were no constraint, what would you solve for? Gayatri said better climate and air quality. Paras said understanding how the human brain works. Aayush said room-temperature superconductivity.

  

  That question is a thought experiment for most rooms. At ARIA, it’s the actual mandate: £50 million per programme director, freedom to fund ideas most institutions would call too speculative.
  
  

  ARIA’s third cohort of programme directors opens in August 2026 (apply here).

  
  Relatedly, DRDO Chairman Sameer Kamat recently argued that India needs its own version of this model, where R&D is treated as investment and failure doesn’t trigger a CAG inquiry.

• Mint ran a long-form feature on our work this week.
  
  

  Reporter Shadma Shaikh‘s piece, “How Climate Startups Are Turning Carbon Into Gold,” opens in Dubgachi village, Darjeeling, where farmer Subhonanda Singha spreads basalt dust across his paddy fields. The story covers how Mitti Labs, Varaha, and Alt Carbon are doing the hard work of rebuilding trust in India’s carbon credit market, after years of low-quality, avoidance-based credits damaged India’s reputation globally.
  
  

  The piece gets into the integrity question sitting at the heart of ERW: can you prove, after the fact, that carbon was actually removed? Read the full piece here.

  

🌎 In the World of Climate

• Three carbon markets, three directions. Japan's mandatory emissions trading system kicks in this April, pulling 300 to 400 of the country's largest emitters (roughly 60% of national emissions) into binding reporting for the first time.

  

  In Europe, the opposite: Brussels is planning an "emergency brake" on its ETS, a mechanism that keeps carbon credits in the market that would normally be cancelled, capping how high prices can surge. The Iran war has driven energy costs up and member states like Austria, Italy, and Poland have been pushing for relief. Carbon prices have already dropped from ~€90 to €74/tonne as traders priced in the weakening. Spain opposes the changes.

  

  And China, in its latest Five-Year Plan, set a new carbon intensity target of 17% reduction by 2030, down from the 18% it narrowly missed. The fine print: Beijing changed its counting methodology to include industrial process emissions for the first time, letting it report 17.7% where independent analysts calculated closer to 12%.
  
  

  Carbon pricing that bankrupts domestic industry before alternatives are ready helps nobody. There’s a real case for calibrating ambition to economic capacity.
  
  

  Nearly 150 companies and investors signed an open letter urging EU leaders to hold the ETS line. A credible carbon price is what pulls investment into the transition. Weaken the signal and capital finds other places to go. Japan seems to have read that playbook. The question for China and Europe is whether they’ll build the same discipline, or whether the next cycle will require an even harder correction.

  

🇮🇳 Good Reads from India

• India launched a carbon market portal at Prakriti 2026, with formal trading in carbon certificates expected to begin within 4 months.
  
  

  Union Minister of Power Manohar Lal announced the portal at the International Conference on Carbon Markets in New Delhi last month. We covered how India’s new carbon market is structured, who gets regulated, and why it’s different this time in Parvat Say #18. This is the next step: the actual plumbing going live. Read more here.

  

• How India’s climate diplomacy actually works.

  
  

  Karthik Nachiappan’s memo for the Council on Foreign Relations traces how India shifted from a defensive, equity-first posture at COPs to something more strategic: selectively engaging multilateral processes while separately locking in finance, technology, and market access through bilateral deals with the US, Japan, the EU, and the Gulf. India still invokes equity and Common but Differentiated Responsibilities, but now uses them to negotiate flexibility rather than deflect responsibility. The real action increasingly happens outside the COPs, through the G20, BRICS, the Quad, and bilateral climate partnerships that tie decarbonisation to industrial policy, supply chains, and energy security.

  

🛋️ What We’re Reading

• “And So I Roar“ — Abi Daré on Climate Fiction, Nigeria, and the Girls Who Carry It
  
  

  Abi Daré won the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize in 2025 for And So I Roar, a sequel to The Girl with the Louding Voice. In this Bloomberg Zero episode, she talks about writing a climate novel without intending to: “Every time my axe hit the artery of the vein, climate change bled.” The book follows a 14-year-old in rural Nigeria over 24 hours as drought, superstition, and patriarchy converge. Daré’s observation that climate fiction as a genre is only now becoming legible enough to have a shelf. Worth your time. Listen here.

• CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for centuries. Methane clears in about a decade.

  
  If human methane emissions from agriculture, waste, and fossil fuels stopped tomorrow, atmospheric methane could return to preindustrial levels within 10 to 20 years, preventing roughly 0.5°C of warming. A February 2026 paper in Science found the atmosphere’s ability to clean itself is declining, while biogenic emissions keep rising.
  

  The two gases run on different clocks. Cutting methane buys time within a generation. CO₂ requires centuries of natural drawdown or active removal. Methane is the fastest lever we have, and we’re pulling it too slowly. Read the full Aeon piece here.

  

🌱 Abundance Index

• Sodium is roughly 400 times more abundant in the Earth's crust than lithium. It's in seawater, in salt flats, in ordinary rock. In 2025, CATL started mass-producing batteries from it. Their Naxtra line hits 175 Wh/kg, operates from -40°C to 70°C, and already passed China's latest national safety standard. BYD commissioned a 30 GWh production line. Global sodium-ion shipments reached 9 GWh last year, up 150% from 2024.

  

  Sodium is lithium's chemical cousin: it shuttles ions between electrodes in the same way, charges and discharges through the same basic architecture. The differences are in what you mine. Lithium extraction is water-intensive and concentrated in a few countries. The best lithium batteries require cobalt (much of it from artisanal mines in the DRC, where child labour is well documented) and nickel (environmentally destructive to extract on land). Sodium-ion batteries skip all three. Their electrodes use iron and manganese. Their current collectors use aluminum instead of copper. Researchers at Chalmers University found sodium-ion batteries perform much better on mineral resource scarcity and match lithium-ion on climate impact.

  

  The trade-off is energy density: sodium-ion stores about 30% less energy per kilogram, which means shorter range in cars. For grid-scale storage, where weight is irrelevant, that trade-off disappears. Storing intermittent solar and wind is one of the hardest infrastructure problems in the energy transition, and lithium supply can't scale fast enough to cover both EVs and the grid. Sodium can take the grid, freeing lithium for the applications where density actually matters.

• The Church of England’s clergy pension fund (£3.5 billion AUM) will vote against board directors at NatWest, Santander, and HSBC over what it calls a “material backtrack” on climate commitments.
  

  HSBC watered down its 2030 interim targets for oil and gas in November. NatWest and Santander softened fossil fuel financing rules in February. Voting against directors is usually a last resort, but the Church board’s case rests on governance integrity: when strategy shifts quietly, directors should face scrutiny at the Annual General Meeting. Denmark’s AkademikerPension is taking the same line at the same three banks.

  Read the FT piece here.

  

That’s a wrap from me. ✌️

To discuss Planetary Intelligence, hit me up at sparsh@altcarbon.com

📭 Introduction

Two teams have been running flat out this past month.

Shonku Labs, our science and R&D team, ran 3 shifts around the clock for the past 2 months. The instruments they operate (ICP-OES, if you want the acronym; machines that vaporise soil in plasma flames hotter than the surface of the sun, then read the light signature to tell you exactly what’s inside) barely stopped.

The result: 12,000 analysed soil samples, collected across different agro-climatic regions.

My brother pointed out the scale of this: Europe’s LUCAS Soil survey, one of the largest harmonised soil datasets in the world, collected around 20,000 samples across the entire EU in its original 2009 campaign. Our team hit 12,000 in a fraction of that time. Shrey wrote about it here.

(If you’re curious how these instruments actually work, Arya from our team wrote a walkthrough in this blog.)

Indra Dhanush, our operations team, has been on a similar tear. Longer trials every week, each one pushing the system harder than the last. Valves, pipes, feed rates, reactor temperatures: the engineering problems compound the further you scale. The team has been pulling overnight shifts to keep the runs going. Check out more here.

That's where we are this month. Now onto the rest.

🏔️ Latest at Alt Carbon:

• Throwback to August ‘25. Last summer, we hosted a group of friends from the US on what we called the “Discovery of India Trip”. They came through Delhi, Bangalore, and up to Darjeeling, spending time at the tea fields, meeting founders, and sitting with policymakers.

  
  Charles Yang, who writes the Substack, Rough Drafts, published a sprawling travelogue comparing India and China across geopolitics, tech, and culture, co-written with Arjun Ramani. Alt Carbon makes a cameo (our Bangalore office poster wall got a shoutout!).

  
  The whole piece is worth your time. Read it here.

  

• How do you turn a pinch of soil or a cup of rainwater into a carbon removal number?
  

  Our in-house geochemist Arya Tilak walks through the instruments inside our labs that make it possible: from plasma flames hotter than the surface of the sun, to machines that can trace the journey of a single raindrop from ocean to cloud to field. If you’ve ever wondered what measurement looks like on the ground, this one’s worth your time.
  

  Read it here.

  

• The CapTable wrote about Darjeeling’s tea estates to understand what Alt Carbon is actually doing there: spreading basalt, measuring soil, issuing Asia’s largest ERW carbon credits. The estates have spent a decade watching yields fall, weather shift, and cheap imposters flood the shelves with their name on the packet. A great primer on what we do and why we do it.

  
  Read the complete article here.

  

• The UK’s frontier research agency, Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), is coming to Bangalore this month, and Alt Carbon is hosting.
  

  ARIA is the UK’s equivalent of DARPA: a £800M government agency with a mandate to fund moonshot science. We’re bringing together a small group of founders, researchers, and investors for an evening of panels on AI for Science and accelerating Indian deep tech, followed by a tour of Shonku Labs.
  

  Spots are limited, register here.

  

🌎 In the World of Climate

• Fifteen years after Fukushima, Japan just restarted the world’s largest nuclear plant.
  
  TEPCO powered up the first of seven reactors at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa last month. Japan imports virtually all its fossil fuels, renewable buildout hit a 17-year low in 2024, and data centres are pushing electricity demand up. To hit the government’s 20% nuclear target by 2040, nearly all 21 eligible reactors need to come online. Most were built in the 1970s-1990s. That’s a narrow path.
  
  This year also marks fifteen years since the Fukushima disaster, and HBO released the documentary Fukushima: A Nuclear Nightmare. A reconstruction of the 9 days that gave Japan’s energy planners their hardest problem.
  
  You can read The Economist’s full piece here.

• Airlines have under 2 years to offset their emissions under CORSIA. The credits aren’t there.

  
  32 million are available. IATA says the programme needs at least 200 million. Countries hosting carbon projects must approve credits for export — and most can’t, without cannibalising into their own Paris targets. Only 10 have done so. Kenya’s Koko Networks, a clean cookstove company, went bankrupt in January after the Kenyan government wouldn’t sign off on its credits. Rwanda, Malawi, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka are facing the same bind.

  
  The supply gap is real, and it won’t close without new, high-quality credits being generated at scale.

  
  Read the full piece here.

  

🪶 Spark Birds

In Darjeeling, as the first flush approaches, the tea gardens are waking up. The bushes have that particular bright green they only get in March.

Darjeeling is also a birder’s city. Over 600 species pass through or nest here. The Rufous-necked Hornbill. The blood pheasant. Fire-tailed sunbirds in the tea estates at dusk. People fly across the world to stand on our hillsides with binoculars.

I came across a lovely piece this month: Searching for Birds, a data journalism project tracking what Americans Google about birds. Of nearly 700 North American species, only 98 generate meaningful public search interest. The birds most in need of conservation are almost entirely absent from the list.

We pay attention to what's spectacular. The quiet, essential, slowly-disappearing stuff barely registers. Climate action has the same problem. A lot of what we do at Alt Carbon is trying to build the "spark bird" moment: the one encounter that makes someone stop, look, and want to know more.

🛋️ What We’re Reading

• The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin

  What if cutting down a forest was a kind of murder? Le Guin wrote this in 1972 about a small forested planet whose people dream in shared sleep, and logging companies arrive to strip it bare. 52 years later, it reads like field notes.

  

• Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller

  David Starr Jordan spent his life cataloguing fish species. Then the 1906 San Francisco earthquake hit, shattered his specimen jars, scattered years of work across the lab floor. He got up, re-labelled everything, and kept going. Miller uses that stubbornness to ask something harder: what do we do with order when chaos keeps winning? Part memoir, part science history, part gut-punch.

  

🌱 Abundance Index

• What if the best oceanographers in Antarctica weren’t human?
  

  Weddell seals fitted with satellite-linked sensors are diving beneath ice sheets no ship can reach — collecting temperature, salinity, and depth data through the brutal polar winter. Part of a study running since 1968 with over 23,000 tagged individuals, these seals are living proof that understanding the planet sometimes means collaborating with it.
  

  Read the full story here.

  

• Soil stores an estimated 2,500 billion tons of carbon, making it the planet’s second largest carbon reservoir after the ocean. And scientists at Northwestern University just figured out why so much of it stays put.
  

  A common iron mineral called ferrihydrite, found near plant roots, traps organic carbon using a nanoscale patchwork of positive and negative charges on its surface. This lets it bind a wide range of organic molecules through multiple bonding strategies at once. Iron oxides like these account for over a third of all organic carbon found in soils. The chemistry of minerals holding carbon in place for decades, even centuries.

  A reminder that the ground beneath our feet is doing far more heavy lifting than we give it credit for. At Alt Carbon, our Darjeeling Revival Project works with a different piece of that same soil chemistry, using Enhanced Rock Weathering to lock away CO₂ through crushed silicate minerals. We built an interactive walkthrough of how our labs and field sites in Darjeeling track this process, from crushed silicate to captured CO₂. Explore it here.

• Zeke Hausfather’s “AI-augmented scientist” was one of the better essays I read this week.

  AI raises the ceiling on what one scientist can do. Zeke describes using it to write code for climate model runs, wrangle messy datasets, and build climate visualisations and dashboards that would have taken far longer by hand. The bottleneck is still judgment: what to test, what to trust, and what deserves a closer look.

  

That’s a wrap from me. ✌️

To discuss Planetary Intelligence hit me up at sparsh@altcarbon.com

📭 Introduction

Most months at Alt Carbon follow a familiar rhythm. I am usually the one on the road, moving between meetings overseas, while Shrey holds the fort across Bangalore and Darjeeling, close to the labs, the land, and the facilities.

This month, we switched places.

I spent most of January in Darjeeling, running trials with the biochar team at the Nobojagoron facility of our Bengal Renaissance Project. It was a month of being fully on the ground.

Shrey, meanwhile, was travelling overseas, visiting labs and manufacturers as we think about the next phase of equipment and capability building for Darjeeling-Climate Action Labs (D-CAL).

While we were trading notes from opposite ends of the world, one message from Shrey stood out. So I convinced him to write it up.

Here’s Shrey, from Omaha.

January in Omaha is unforgiving. The cold slows everything down.

I spent a day visiting Elemental Scientific’s headquarters, with Dan and Paul. For over two decades, they have been quietly building critical infrastructure for analytical labs, especially in sample introduction and automation for ICP MS and OES systems used across semiconductors and pharma. And now in CDR MRV.

What stayed with me was the environment. You walk in and realise you are surrounded by accumulated problem solving. Patents lining the walls, each one marking a very specific technical decision made, defended, and refined over time.

It was a good reminder that the most durable work in deep tech is usually invisible. No noise, no announcements, just people staying with hard problems longer than others are willing to.

I kept thinking about that on the way back, especially in the context of what we are building at Alt.

It felt like a good nudge to get our own IP work on paper. xD

🏔️ Latest at Alt Carbon:

• Soil sits at the centre of everything we do.
  
  The science of Enhanced Rock Weathering is written into it. From the first baseline samples we take in the field to the final analysis inside the Darjeeling Climate Action Lab (D-CAL). Understanding soil is essential to how carbon removal is measured and verified.
  
  We’ve built a new microsite to explain this journey: The Magic in our Labs

• At the 175th Anniversary of the Geological Survey of India, Alt Carbon received a shoutout from Dr. Vikram Vishal of IIT Bombay.

  
  The event brought together India’s top geoscience leadership, from the Union Minister for Coal and Mines and GSI’s Director General to international researchers and academic partners from institutions like Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, the United States Geological Survey, the British Geological Survey, and Geoscience Australia.
  
  Here is a short video from the session:

🚀 Alter Magazine

• We launched Alter Magazine Issue #3 at the Vimor Museum of Living Textiles.

  
  We invited Pavithra Muddaya, founder of the museum and a sari designer who works closely with weaving communities across India. She touched upon how the museum emerged from long-term engagement with craft and educated us on the role of the weaver as they turn raw material into living art.

  

  We were also joined by Devika Krishnan, who has spent over 35 years building the Goodearth Heritage Foundation where she is working on improving rural women’s livelihoods across textiles, pottery, and other artisanal sectors.

  
  Issue #3: Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines follows the sari from loom to lab. Written by Nivedita Kousik, it captures how AI, microbial dyes, and digital provenance intersect with a thousand-year-old craft of traditional Indian garment— the sari.

How India Will Structure Its Carbon Market

For the first time in a long while, India’s carbon markets feel intentional.

Not because a market has suddenly switched on, but because its architecture is finally being laid out in public. The recent sectoral roadmaps released by NITI Aayog, the Government of India’s policy think tank, for cement, aluminium, and MSMEs are not climate manifestos. They are operating manuals. They tell us who will be regulated, how performance will be measured, and where market incentives are meant to do the heavy lifting.

At the core of this system is a simple idea: instead of capping absolute emissions, India is building a rate-based compliance market. Emissions are judged per unit of output, not in aggregate. This matters in a growing economy. It allows industry to expand while still pushing every factory to become cleaner over time.

Who is regulated (and who is not)

The system applies first to obligated entities. These are large, energy-intensive industrial facilities that fall under mandatory emissions-intensity targets. Think cement plants, aluminium smelters, and eventually other heavy industries.

Each obligated entity is assigned a benchmark. Emissions per tonne of cement. Per tonne of aluminium. Performance is assessed annually against that benchmark.

If a facility performs better than its target, it generates domestically traceable compliance carbon credits (CCCs).

If it performs worse, it must buy credits to cover the gap or pay a penalty that is a multiplier of the going rate of carbon credits at the moment.

This is where the market comes in.

Credits can be purchased from two places:

• other obligated entities that have outperformed their targets,

• non-obligated entities, meaning project developers and actors outside the compliance pool, as long as their credits meet national standards.

This dual supply structure is deliberate. It creates liquidity early on and allows project developers to plug into the compliance system.

What’s Different This Time

The most encouraging shift is how India is going about methodically building its carbon market.

Both Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) and the Sustainable Futures Collaborative (SFC) have been clear on this point: markets fail when rules are unclear, institutions are fragmented, and participation is uneven. It’s encouraging to see how these hurdles are being tackled by policy design.

And you can see this in how the transition is being financed. Carbon markets are not being asked to do everything on their own. Alongside market design, the government has proposed a ₹200 billion ($2.2 billion) programme to scale carbon capture and storage across hard-to-abate sectors like cement, steel, and refining.

Why now?

There is also an external reason this architecture is taking shape now. As India advances FTA negotiations with the European Union, carbon accounting is becoming a condition of market access. Mechanisms like the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) are effectively globalising carbon pricing. For Indian exporters in sectors such as cement, aluminium, steel, and chemicals, carbon is now a domestic regulatory concern AND a critical trade variable.

The impact of CBAM is going to be real. If emissions are not measured, priced, and reduced at home, they will be taxed at the border. In that sense, India’s compliance carbon market is a strategic response to trade and competitiveness. By building credible domestic benchmarks, MRV systems, and carbon pricing infrastructure, India retains control over how carbon costs are discovered and absorbed, rather than importing them through foreign regulation.

In practice, carbon markets become a way to meet external constraints on India’s own terms.

🌎 In the World of Climate:

• The United States Congress has stepped up its bet on carbon removal. Recent appropriations direct tens of millions of dollars toward carbon removal research, pilot deployments, and federal procurement programs. Read more here.

  

  More than the dollar amounts, the signal matters; carbon removal is starting to be treated as climate infrastructure, not just a discretionary offset.

• Japan’s largest emitters are already buying carbon credits, ahead of regulation.

  
  Major Japanese industrial companies have begun purchasing carbon credits on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s voluntary carbon market, even before the country’s mandatory emissions trading system comes into force. Exchange officials say demand is being driven by companies preparing for compliance, as well as firms retiring credits early to meet internal climate targets within the current fiscal year.

  

  Read the full Bloomberg story here.

🛋️ What We’re Reading

• When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut

  

  A haunting, nonlinear meditation on the twentieth century’s greatest scientific minds and the moral costs of discovery. Labatut traces how breakthroughs in physics, mathematics, and chemistry often emerge alongside obsession, madness, and ethical collapse. It is less a history of science and more an inquiry into what happens when human reason outruns human wisdom.

• Home in the World by Amartya Sen

  

  A quiet, reflective memoir from our side of the world on belonging, identity, and the many meanings of home. Moving between Santiniketan, Bengal, and the wider world, Sen reflects on how place, language, and intellectual inheritance shape a life.

🌱 Abundance Index

• Data centers are among the most energy-hungry buildings ever constructed. Almost all of that energy leaves the building as heat, and almost all of it is wasted.

  
  In parts of Europe, this waste heat is already being piped into homes, swimming pools, greenhouses, and district heating networks. As compute scales, the question shifts from whether we can afford this infrastructure to why it is not designed to give something back.

  
  Read the column here.

• What if one of the biggest constraints on food isn’t water or land, but the angle at which sunlight hits soil?

  
  By subtly reshaping semi-arid terrain so crops grow only on the cooler, moisture-retaining sides of gentle slopes, marginal land could become productive without new inputs. The idea is simple enough to sound implausible, which is exactly why it’s worth reading.

  

• In 2025, the Indian government used AI-based weather forecasting to predict the onset of the monsoon up to 30 days in advance and delivered those forecasts directly to 38 million farmers via SMS and voice messages. Built by blending multiple AI models with decades of meteorological data, the system helped farmers make better planting and crop decisions during an unusually erratic monsoon season. Read the complete article here.

  

That’s a wrap from me. ✌️

To discuss Planetary Intelligence hit me up at sparsh@altcarbon.com

By Nivedita Kousik

The Living Loom

Six months ago, under the glittering chandeliers amidst the joyous hum of family chatter in the AVM Rajeswari mandapam, I was married. It was the same bustling, festive hall in Chennai that had witnessed my sister’s vows a year and a half before, and thirty-two years prior, my parents'. The air, thick with the scent of jasmine, tube roses, and sandalwood incense, hummed with the celebratory melodies of the nadaswaram.

The garment I wore was more than a spectacular costume or cherished heirloom. An exquisite sari is living, moving art; a handwoven narrative of nature and culture that captures the pulse of life itself. It holds shimmering whorls of color and history, a powerful lineage passed from mother to daughter. It is a gift so profound that even when consumed by fire, it leaves behind only silver and gold, continuing to clothe and protect its wearer to the very end.

For a millennium, the Kanchipuram silk sari has been a form of wearable wealth. Upon a canvas of mulberry silk, a bestiary of mythical creatures like the lion-headed yali and the divine swan, the annam, stand guard beside towering temple gopurams rendered in thread.

The cornerstone of its magnificence is the zari. In its authentic form, this thread is a feat of precision: a central core of silk is tightly wound with a flattened strip of pure silver, then dipped in gold. It creates a flexible, gleaming thread that gives the fabric the weight and luster of jewelry.

This construction gave rise to a ritual that is both pragmatic and profound. In times of crisis, a grandmother could take her old saris, burn away the silk, and melt down the remaining zari. If the sari was genuine, the fire would leave behind a solid bar of silver and gold, a wearable insurance policy. It was a legacy that was liquid.

But today, the liquidity of the legacy is evaporating.

To understand the magnitude of the crisis, one must look towards metallurgy. A traditional antique sari, the kind my grandmother might have worn, contained zari that was approximately 80% pure silver and 1.5% gold, with silk making up the remaining core. It was heavy, soft, and possessed a deep, non-tarnishing luster. Today, even the “Pure Zari” sold in high-end emporiums has been diluted to roughly 45% silver and 0.5% gold to keep prices palatable in an exploding commodities market.

Worse still is the rise of the “Imitation.” If you were to burn a sari purchased from a modern emporium today, you might witness a different, darker chemistry. As the silk burns away, you would find no silver bar, but a brittle, blackened copper wire, or worse, the synthetic dust of a hollowed-out promise - a polyester filament coated in plastic film and lacquer. This fake zari is lighter, harsher to the touch, and chemically unstable; it will tarnish and fray after a dozen wears. The Kanchipuram sari risks becoming a ghost of its former self, its value degraded until all that remains is an inheritance of ash.

This material degradation is merely the physical symptom of a much deeper existential rot. To understand it, you must leave the wedding hall and travel seventy-five kilometers southwest to the town of Kanchipuram.

Here, in the government-run Silk Park—a sanitized, high-ceilinged attempt to provide weavers with a dedicated workspace—the air is stirred by industrial fans and the rhythmic thump-and-clatter of the Jacquard loom. It is a sound that for generations was the heartbeat of the town, emanating from the walls of every house.

You can read it in all its visual glory:

Read the full article

Alter Magazine’s Issue #3 is a story of handlooms to code, from AI design systems to microbial dyes and digital provenance, understanding physics without manuals, to motifs that behave like language, and colour that is grown rather than extracted. This is a deep-dive into a craft that’s stood the test of time.

The opening sequence of the article began as a spinning female figure, imagined by our Creative Director, Amritha, as a quiet loading motif and a soft tribute to Alter’s first issue on Begum Rokeya. Drawing from references ranging from The Ghost in the Jacquard to digital passports, Yalis, and the Picasso Problem, the page established the rhythm of the piece. From there, we traced the choreography of the loom, moving deliberately from form, back to process. The final fluttering saree was painted from scratch, closing the loop between making, motion, and meaning.

Our third issue is about how the future of saris is interwoven with the fabric of technology. Written by Nivedita Kousik, and designed by the Climate Studio team at Alt Carbon.

Read Here

📭 Introduction

Namaste.

On behalf of Alt Carbon, I wish you and your family a very Happy New Year.

We closed December by building key foundations for the year to come. From scaling Indra Dhanush, Chanakya, Shonku Labs and Climate Studio, we expanded our teams and grew as an organisation.

We scaled our tech stack — FELUDA — and had multiple dry runs at Shonku Labs, our R&D facilities inside the Indian Institute of Science. Hotruns, calibration, and early data filled the month with the sound of progress.

We also produced our first batch of biochar at our Nobojagoron plant!

🏔️ Latest at Alt Carbon:

• Last month, Alt Carbon was invited to speak at DeCarbon Tokyo 2025.

  With policy momentum building and corporate appetite growing for reliable credits, DeCarbon Tokyo 2025 brought together key players across the industry to dissect carbon market trends across Japan, the Asia-Pacific, and worldwide.

• The Darjeeling Revival Project is a symphony of soil and science.
  

  It’s a first-of-its-kind effort to unite climate action with cultural and ecological restoration. A coming together of deep tech and nature, cutting-edge algorithms and nature’s oldest healing method.

  This is our flagship Enhanced Rock Weathering project, but more importantly, it's the story of our reviving Darjeeling’s tea estates. Click here to read this visual tale of hope and revival, designed by Climate Studio’s Chinmay and narrated by a 154-year-old house.

• Art should not live behind glass. It should be something you can pick up, turn over in your hands, and mould it until it feels like yours. This past month, we conducted our first design hackathon—to create a poster for the new Alter Magazine essay on the development of India’s Space Tech industry.

  

  Here’s the winning submission!

  

🚀 Alter Magazine

• Issue #2 of Alter Magazine is now live — How Did India Conquer Space?

  We’re endlessly fascinated by space. Nothing illustrates the canvas for scientific progress quite like it. So when Khushi Mittal pitched us this piece, we were beyond thrilled.
  

  The essay covers enormous ground, going from JFK’s speech that turned NASA into the most ambitious organisation in the world, to Pakistan launching the Rehbar-1, to Vikram Sarabhai and his dreamers at Thumba, all the way to today, when India boasts of more than 200 space-tech startups like Skyroot and Pixxel. To know more, click here.

  This is the story of how India’s spacefaring ambitions leaped from scarcity to abundance. You can read it here.

• Folks at Pixxel were kind enough to host the launch event at their Spacecraft Manufacturing Facility. Kshitij and Khushi hosted a lovely fireside chat, where they spoke about their respective journeys as founders aiming for the sky. We also had Devmalya and Samay join Khushi for a panel discussion on innovation, deep-tech, and the early-stage founder experience.

  

🌎 In the World of Climate:

• Australia will soon receive the world’s first officially recognised climate refugees—from Tuvalu. The Falepili Union Treaty grants Australian residency to 280 Tuvaluans every year.
  

  Falepili (or fale pili) is a Tuvaluan term for looking after your neighbour.
  

  “The tiny country of 11,000 people, perched halfway between Australia and Hawaii, represents a test case for how governments will respond as climate change drives displacement.”
  

  Read the full story here.

  

• Frontier has signed an agreement with NULIFE GreenTech to remove 122,000 tons of CO₂ between 2026 and 2030.
  

  Many agricultural and industrial sites produce raw biowaste—grease, sludge, oat hulls, etc. It is firstly, a logistical nightmare to haul. Left in piles or spread on fields, biowaste releases greenhouse gases on decomposition.
  

  NULIFE’s hydrothermal liquefaction turns biowaste into a dense bio-oil, which is then stored in underground caverns for long-term removal. The liquid is also easier to transport, enabling scale across geography.

  

  In 2025, we inaugurated Alt Carbon’s Bengal Renaissance Project’s pilot facility Nobojagoron with a similar focus on permanence, where agricultural waste is converted into biochar—a stable form of carbon designed to remain locked away for centuries.

🔖 Good Reads From India

• Delhi’s winter smog has a familiar source: crop burning.
  

  India generates nearly 600 million tonnes of agricultural residue each year, much of it burned in the open—fueling North India’s annual air-quality crisis.

  But we might have a promising solution for productively utilising agricultural waste: CSIR scientists have developed bio-bitumen, converting crop residue into road-building material and reducing the need for open burning. You can read the full article here.
  

  The same principle is at work in Alt Carbon’s Bengal Renaissance Project. At Nobojagoron, our pilot biochar facility, agricultural waste is utilised to produce biochar, locking away carbon dioxide for a long time while keeping residue out of the fire.

  

• In 2024, climate disasters uprooted 45 million people. The choice between braving deadly heat and losing family income is the hardest for women in developing countries, 92% of whom work in the informal economy.
  

  In India, a local women’s trade union—SEWA—has designed an innovative insurance model that allows workers to stay safe without sacrificing income. You can read a report from ClimateWorks here.

🛋️ What We’re Reading

• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

  A lone astronaut wakes up light-years from Earth, memory erased, tasked with saving humanity. It’s a love letter to problem‑solving—propelled by chemistry, humour, and one unforgettable alien friendship.

  

  Written as a sequel to The Martian, this book builds on Andy Weir’s sci-fi style of resourceful, isolated astronauts solving crises.

• Exhalation by Ted Chiang

  

  This is a stunning collection of nine stories that tug at the boundaries of physics, free will, time travel, memory, and the meaning of life. Each story feels like a thought experiment, as if Chiang is probing the reader to think of paths they’d take when faced with a set of circumstances.

  Highly recommend!

🌱 Abundance Index

• Author Leah Zani was fascinated by a sideyard garden in her childhood. She saw corn husks and potatoes, and wondered—how did the world grow?
  

  In this essay, Leah Zani argues that we’ve inherited this beauty from plants, who paint with fruits and smell.

  

• Interplanetary life is a sure-shot conversation sparker in any group of the scientifically curious. It’s been discussed in scientific communities for decades. But that conversation has hardly gone beyond curiosity and moonshot ideas. Not anymore.
  
  Read the full story—spanning curiosity, entrepreneurship, and astrobiology’s modern evolution—here.

  

• According to energy think tank Ember, renewable energy has surpassed coal as a source of electricity worldwide.

  

  In 2004, it took the world a full year to install 1 gigawatt of solar power capacity. Today, twice that amount goes online each day.
  
  China is setting the pace for technological prowess powering a cleaner world. This year, renewables helped bring the growth of greenhouse emissions to a virtual standstill in China. Read the full article here.

That’s a wrap from me. ✌️

To discuss Planetary Intelligence hit me up at sparsh@alt-carbon.com

In 1962, Pakistan beat India to space.

Today, we know India as the nation that landed on the lunar south pole for less than the cost of a Hollywood movie—but, for a brief period, the technological vanguard of South Asia was Karachi, not Delhi or Bangalore.

When Pakistani theoretical physicist Abdus Salam approached President Ayub Khan in 1961 with his vision for a space program, the country had won independence from British colonial rule only fourteen years prior. Pakistan had little industry, only modest universities, and almost no aerospace infrastructure. But Salam, who would later become Pakistan’s first Nobel laureate, understood timing better than anyone.

Just months earlier, President John F. Kennedy had stood before Congress and declared that America would “land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth.”

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade,” he said, “not because it is easy, but because it is hard.”

That single promise transformed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from an experimental agency into a machine racing the clock. Designing Apollo meant more than building a giant rocket: NASA had to map the upper atmosphere and ionosphere so precisely that they could predict how much drag a spacecraft would feel, how radio signals would bend across the globe, and how tiny navigation errors would accumulate over dozens of orbits.

Over the Indian Ocean, NASA’s maps failed. They had a huge blind spot over a vast region, with almost no measurements of high-altitude winds or ionospheric behavior. To understand the implications, imagine trying to sail across the ocean with parts of your map missing, and no idea how the winds behave. Your compass still works, your sails still catch the wind, but the moment you enter the blind spot, you don’t know whether the breeze is nudging you gently forward or shoving you sideways. Apollo faced the same problem in orbit: a few invisible pushes in the wrong direction could turn into a hundred-kilometre miss when it mattered the most.

To fix that, NASA needed a coastal partner on the western edge of the Indian Ocean where it could launch sounding rockets—small, single-use research rockets that carry instruments up to the edge of space for a few minutes before falling back. These would release glowing sodium clouds, turning that empty column of sky into hard data about winds and the upper atmosphere.

Salam realized that if Pakistan partnered NASA, it could skip a decade of trial-and-error and walk straight into the space age, hand in hand with America. He established the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO) under the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) that same year.

A handful of young engineers, including future SUPARCO chairman Salim Mehmud, were packed off to NASA’s Goddard and Wallops Flight Facility to learn atmospheric sounding, rocket assembly, and tracking instrumentation. When they returned to Karachi, they brought back crates of Nike-Cajun rocket hardware, stacks of technical manuals, and a sense of mission far bigger than their years.

In June 1962, Pakistan’s scientists assembled and launched Rehbar-1, a solid-fuel rocket that soared 130 kilometers above the Sonmiani coast, in southern Baluchistan. The name “Rehbar,” meaning “the one who leads the way” in Urdu, was symbolic of the nation’s pioneering status.

This launch made Pakistan the fourth Asian nation to enter the space race after the USSR, Japan, and Israel.

With continuing American support, Pakistan established a rocket manufacturing plant, launched hypersonic rockets, and laid the groundwork for a civilian satellite program. Pakistani scientists trained at the Goddard Space Flight Center while Apollo astronauts visited Karachi and Lahore. Pakistan launched rockets into space 200 times between 1962 and 1972.

India’s first sounding rocket would only launch sixteen months after Rehbar-1, but Pakistan’s early momentum proved short-lived.

As the 1970s dawned, Islamabad’s focus shifted to nuclear ambitions and to countering internal challenges, and the space program lost its privileged status. In 1974, even as India tested its nuclear device, Pakistan amended its constitution to prohibit members of Salam’s religious community, the Ahmadiyya, to refer to themselves as Muslims, and introduced several forms of discrimination against them.

Salam, unwilling to serve a state that had turned on him, resigned from all official posts and left the country. The exile of the founder and principal advocate of the country’s national space agency hollowed out not only its intellectual leadership but also its ability to attract foreign collaboration, training, and funding. Meanwhile, India leaned into Soviet support by accessing tracking stations, launch opportunities, and propulsion expertise.

The space race between India and Pakistan was effectively over.

Subscribe now

Alter Magazine’s Issue #2 is the definitive history of how India conquered space. Featuring Abdus Salam & Vikram Sarabhai, fishing villages and rechristened churches, racist cartoons and indefinite sanctions. And, above all, a story of dreamers, believers, and achievers.

Sparsh and Adithya stumbled upon the ₹2 note during a late-night call. A relic of the past, it was a fascinating piece of paper, and it had to find a place somewhere. Issued in 1976, the ₹2 Aryabhata note commemorates the moment India first touched space. It is a gentle reminder that even the smallest denominations can carry astronomical dreams. We’ve turned this into a printed postcard, which you can pick up when you visit us at Alt HQ.

Our second issue is a walk through the history of India’s rise in space. Written by Khushi Mittal, edited by Prem Panicker, and designed by the Climate Studio team at Alt Carbon.

Read Here

📭 Introduction

221.

November 2025 is a milestone month for us.

This month, we issued 221 Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) credits via our Enhanced Rock Weathering pathway to Japanese shipping giant, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, marking Asia’s largest ERW delivery to date.

What makes this significant is the speed — we moved from signing a multi-year offtake agreement to delivering verified CDR credits in just eight months. Rigorous, durable, and rapid carbon removal at scale is finally within reach.

We celebrated our first delivery at The Middle Room, Bengaluru’s slick new listening bar. Listening bars were inspired by Japan’s Jazu Kissa (jazz cafes). At Middle Room, we chomped on some Naga Pork - a plate is worth the trip alone - and spoke about 1950s Tokyo, where coffee first combined with Coltrane.

Cricket is a religion in India. Given our first delivery was a spiritual experience, we had to play some cricket after three gruelling months. I missed it all of course, but the team clearly did not miss me.

🏔️ Latest at Alt Carbon:

• Carbon delivery is the single-most important event in Alt Carbon’s journey. Yet, we often get asked what carbon credit delivery means. Adithya has written an ELI5 (explain like I’m 5) blog breaking down the significance of delivering CDR Credits, why it matters, and the importance of velocity for climate action.

• This month, we also launched Alter Magazine — new literary writing on science, tech and progress from South Asia. Our first issue, The Secret History of Indian Sci-Fi, is written by Gautam Bhatia, one of India’s leading Sci-Fi authors.
  
  Gautam’s article traces Indian Sci-Fi back to 1905, when Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, a Muslim feminist from Bengal, dreamt up “Ladyland” — a world where women run science, politics, and public life. The talented team at Climate Studio designed a teaser to launch the piece. 👇

• We’re clearing the decks for the launch of Issue #2 — a story of India’s rise in space. It’s written by a sharp, young founder and we can’t wait to share it with you soon.

  

  We’re co-hosting the launch event with Pixxel. If you’re in Bengaluru and space-tech interests you, we’d love to have you over. Register here.

• Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) accelerates nature’s oldest carbon removal process. Click here to discover how we’re creating corals from clouds.

🌎 In the World of Climate:

• Isometric gets CORSIA Approval: According to the International Air Transport Association, by 2050, airlines around the world will need a volume of around 500 million tonnes of carbon removals annually to reach net-zero emissions.
  
  CORSIA mandates airlines to offset their emissions from international flights through the use of verified Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) credits. Following the ICAO approval, Isometric can now offer CDR credits to airlines. Read the full report here.

  
  Alt Carbon’s CDR credit issuance to MOL is also verified and certified by Isometric.

• A Bull Run for CDR: Big Tech’s investment into carbon removal credits has now exceeded $10 billion. It’s one way to offset the emissions from burgeoning data centres, especially in a booming AI-first world.
  
  This tug of war between industry-compliance and operational consequence has led to a point where demand for durable carbon credits has overshot supply. For example, Patch has reported that while 33% of the demand for credit requests through their platform were for biochar, it made for less than 20% of the sales.

  
  Read the full report here.

  

🔖 Good Reads From India

• Rohan Chakravarty, a cartoonist from India, offered cheeky commentary on the outcomes of COP30.

  

• Our heartiest congratulations to our friends at Varaha on raising a successful round from Kering-backed investment fund Mirova. In 2025, almost $100 million was invested into Indian CDR startups. Earlier this year, Alt Carbon too raised $12 million in seed funding to scale our projects across South Asia’s most productive farmland.

  

🛋️ What We’re Reading

• Butter by Asako Yuzuki - a thrilling story inspired by a real Japanese murder case where gourmet cook Manako Kajii allegedly seduces and kills lonely businessmen with her irresistible stews. This book has given me a window into Japanese culinary history and culture in a truly unique way.

• The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes - In this sprawling, deeply-reported history that follows the science, politics, and personalities behind the splitting of the atom, I have learnt about how our own work using mass spectrometry is so deeply tied to innovations being made on the Manhattan Project. Easy recommend!

🌱 Abundance Index

• “What’s stopping us from building for abundance?” Author Benjamin Wallace-Wells picks through recent patterns in United States to find answers. Wallace-Wells also references Ezra Klein’s seminal book, ‘Abundance’ to reinforce his key argument. The obsession for moral perfection is holding back true growth — a narrative we discuss a lot at Alt Carbon.

  

  Our tagline is “Create Abundance.” We’re convinced that fuelling science and technology is the way to fight our way out of some of the planet’s most pressing issues. Shrey and I wrote about this when we raised our seed round, and this is a topic I’m passionate to discuss. Link to the blog here.

• This year’s Nobel Prize in Economics went to Joel Mokyr— this was basically a Nobel for the Progress Studies movement. Mokyr’s big idea is that history moves when ideas move. He shows how the Industrial Revolution was a factor of its scientific and literary societies, its flair for publications and sharing ideas. You can read what makes him so great here.

  

  One of Mokyr’s big early insights, first appearing in Lever of Riches, was that many inventions could not be predicted by economic factors. Just increasing the market size can lead to improvements, but not innovation. Breakthroughs came when we dug deeper into how we understood the world. Read the full article here.

  Mokyr also argued for collaboration and knowledge-sharing. This article takes the example of a scientist and a craftsman, both experts in their field, coming together to create a thermometer.

That’s a wrap from me. ✌️

To discuss Planetary Intelligence hit me up at sparsh@alt-carbon.com

“One evening I was lounging in an easy chair in my bedroom and thinking lazily of the condition of Indian womanhood.”

With this prosaic-sounding sentence begins a story first published in a 1905 issue of the Indian Ladies’ Magazine, printed out of Madras (now Chennai). On reading the opening, a contemporary reader might have thought that they were in for a genteel story of manners (whether in the comic or tragic mode), or a fictionalised memoir.

They would soon discover their mistake. Within a few sentences, the narrator – along with someone she takes for her friend, “Sister Sara” – steps out into the world of “Ladyland”, a place “free from sin and harm.” In Ladyland, men are relegated to a male version of the zenana (called the “mardana”), play no part in public life, and to be “mannish” is to be “shy and timid like men.”

Initially disoriented, the narrator soon takes to this new world with gusto – until the last sentence of the story, when “I somehow slipped down and the fall startled me out of my dream. And on opening my eyes, I found myself in my own bedroom still lounging in the easy-chair!”

The author of the story was Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. The story was titled “Sultana’s Dream,” now commonly accepted to be the one of the first significant works of Indian science fiction [“SF”] in English.

Defamiliarisation

Crucially, from the second paragraph of the story – where the mysterious stranger who looks like “Sister Sara” appears out of thin air – “Sultana’s Dream” engages in a classic SF technique: what the contemporary Russian critic Victor Shklovsky would call “defamiliarization”, and what, many decades later, the science fiction scholar Darko Suvin would famously call “cognitive estrangement.” The technique takes a world ever so familiar, but put just so slightly out of joint by taking one of its foundational underpinnings (in this case, patriarchy), and altering that. To Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s (male) contemporaries, though, it would have been something more than that. It would have been a world made from their worst nightmares, a world alien and terrifying: another effect that SF often tries to achieve.

Beyond effect, and at the level of theme and subject, “Sultana’s Dream” does two things that place it firmly within the SF tradition, albeit more as a “forerunner” – or a “foremother” – of that tradition rather than as a participant.

First, through an act of creative world-building, it interrogates and overturns existing social relations (in this case, patriarchal social relations). A decade later, Charlotte Perkins Gilman would do something similar in her novel Herland, with its isolated society free of men altogether.

In the decades to come, writers such as Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and Octavia Butler would articulate increasingly sophisticated critiques of gender and patriarchal social relations, sometimes at the intersection of race and class. This is the tradition of SF as engaged social critique, and “Sultana’s Dream” stands at the beginning of it all – not just in India, but worldwide.

Secondly, “Sultana’s Dream” envisions a utopian society where technology has solved the problems of violence, labour exploitation, and just about everything else. In Ladyland, war and crime have been eliminated, socially reproductive labour replaced by machines (which is why the men remain in the mardana and the women spend their time crocheting and cooking for pleasure), weather and climatic extremes have been regulated by advanced technology, and transport undertaken through hydrogen-powered aircrafts (this was written two years after the Wright Brothers flew for the first time). This is the tradition of techno-optimistic utopian SF, which would grip English-language SF writing a couple of decades later, and remains an integral part of the genre even today.

“Sultana’s Dream”, then, is a work of proto-SF, anticipating many of the themes that would go on to shape the genre in the 20^th century. Yet the story did not spring forth from a vacuum. Speculative imaginings had long been integral to the emerging-modern literary landscape of the Indian sub-continent. Tapping into older narrative forms – the epic and the dastan – but shaped by colonial political economy, the growing influence of the sciences, and a burgeoning print culture, these works formed the nucleus of an early-modern sub-continental tradition of speculative fiction and its many branches, including science fiction.

The linguistic vehicles of this tradition were primarily Urdu and Bengali. Just twenty-five years after the Revolt of 1857, there was the publication of Tilism-e-Hoshruba, a hoary epic-dastan now consolidated into a single Urdu text. While Tilism-e-Hoshruba belongs to what we would today call the genre of fantasy or even magical realism, in Bengal there was a more direct turn to science.

Presaging a literary style that would become prominent in post-Independence India, some of the earliest works of Bengali SF were written by scientists: Jagdish Chandra Bose’s Niruddeshar Kahini (“The Story of the Missing One”), later expanded into Palatak Toofaan (“Runaway Cyclone”), written in 1896, where a cyclone is stopped by a bottle of hair oil, is an outstanding example.

There was enough output of Bengali SF for a process of retrospective taxonomy: kalpavigyan, they called it (and still do), a word that crudely translates into “science imagination.

Subscribe now

If you’ve ever wondered: “Is there such a thing as Indian Science Fiction? And if so, what makes it Indian?”

This essay is a starting point, a museum tour, and a reading list. To read the full essay, written by , edited by , and designed by the Climate Studio team at Alt Carbon, click here.

Full Essay

Alter Magazine is a monthly publication bringing to the world new literary writing on science, technology, and progress from South Asia.

A quarter of humanity live in the Indian subcontinent, undergoing one of the fastest economic & technological transitions in history. While the subcontinent faces its own existential crisis, from the social alleviation of poverty to managing the deluge of climate change, it’s also pioneering the codes underlying new payments infrastructures and the rockets enabling us to become a multi planetary species.

This year’s Economics Nobel Laureate Joel Mokyr’s big idea is that history moves when ideas move. He shows how the Industrial Revolution was a factor of its scientific and literary societies, its flair for publications and sharing ideas.

Before we had a nation-state in India, we had journals, pamphlets, weeklies: producing new ideas, organising knowledge and distributing it.

In the 1800s, Raja Rammohan Roy (one of India’s most important public intellectual and social reformer) launched 2 magazines: Sambad Kaumudi (in Bengali) and Mirat-ul-Akhbar (in Persian). This started the Bengal Renaissance.

Following on these footsteps, there was a burst of intellectual entrepreneurship— Bal Gangadhar Tilak launched Kesari and Mahratta, Bipin Chandra Pal started the newspaper Bande Mataram, Rabindranath Tagore revived Bankim Chandra’s monthly Bangadarshan, Maulana Azad penned the Urdu pamphlet Al-Hilal, Gandhi launched multiple weeklies during his life.

The Indian freedom struggle wasn’t just a story of marches, jails, and speeches. It was a story of ink, words, and ideas that led us to a special midnight in August, 1947.

The future is happening here, once again. It calls for a platform for India’s scientific and literary communities to birth, debate, and publish new ideas. Alter Magazine is dedicated to providing ink, paper, and screen pixels to these intellectual entrepreneurs imagining alternative futures.

Every month, we will publish one long-form, deeply researched, and beautifully designed piece. Each story will shift how readers see our vast and diverse subcontinent, bringing to you contemporary geniuses, cutting-edge ideas, and pathbreaking discoveries. This is a living journal documenting the dreams and dilemmas shaping our subcontinent’s aspirations for progress, the attempt to blend together tradition & technology to undertake development, capturing the region’s herculean effort to undertake advancement not just for itself, but to help write the next chapter of long-term planetary evolution.

We believe that a world of abundance is possible. It requires audacious thoughts & imaginative action— led by scientists, reasoned by philosophers, imagined by artists, implemented by technologists, debated by citizens and realised for everyone. Alter Magazine will document the stories and pursuits of all those working towards this shared vision — answering the question posed by one of India’s founding fathers at the stroke of the midnight hour.

Watch out for Issue #1: The Secret History of Indian Science Fiction.

https://altermag.com

📭 Introduction

This edition of Parvat Say is all about Alt Futures 2025— South Asia’s leading Carbon Removal Summit!

Some milestones before we get to the summit highlights, we’re Asia’s first ERW company to be validated. This is the most critical step in carbon delivery. Project validation involved careful review— from literature and protocols to labs and farmlands, from basalt deployment dosages to soil characteristics. Next up: Deliveries!

During Alt Futures 2025, we brought the Bengal Renaissance Project out of stealth. Our first biochar plant is called Nobojagoron (Bengali for Revival) and the first pyrolysis machine is named the Begum Reactor— after the pioneering Bengali writer Begum Rokeya; more on her in Issue 1 of Alter Magazine coming up soon.

We’ve already sold the next 3 years of inventory. A symbol of just how fast Carbon Markets are scaling.

We also inaugurated the expanded Darjeeling-Climate Action Labs (D-CAL). Built in just four months and now spread across 15,000 sq ft at Kamala Tea Estate (Bagdogra), D-CAL is our home base for field science. By 2026, it will handle 100,000 samples a year and support everything from carbon removal to advanced earth sciences.

Alt Futures 2025

Bengaluru Leg

Alt Futures hosted 650+ people in Bengaluru. We stitched together VCs, policy makers, buyers, operators, scientists, and founders into panels and discussion to shape the actions from the Global South.

We are making a new design charter for deep-tech, applied sciences, & an Indian Abundance agenda.

Explore how ERW creates Corals From Clouds for yourself here!

From spaces that sparked action to partners who make it real: it was a pleasure to host Bharati Balakrishnan, Country Head at Shopify—our very first customer through Frontier. Support from early buyers like Shopify has helped us scale the Darjeeling Revival Project from idea to impact.

“I guarantee you- in 3 years time, India will become the largest supplier of durable Carbon Credits in the world.” - Antti Vihavainen, Co-Founder, Puro.earth.

Through workshops led by the likes of Pixxel Space, BeZero Carbon, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Puro Earth, and panel discussions with the leading experts, Alt Futures brought the world to India. To showcase the opportunity for CO₂ removal that lies in the subcontinent.

Our North Star: Alt Carbon is building Planetary Intelligence; using carbon markets and through Carbon Removal we are developing soil, river, crop, and weather intelligence — to undo planetary damages.

Darjeeling Leg

We brought 50 of the world’s leading scientists, technologists, and carbon removal buyers on the foothills of the Himalayas.

Also captured on this thread. 🧵

The Darjeeling Leg started with a sunset hike through Selim Hill Tea Estate’s famed Gitanjali section— an ode to Rabindranath Tagore, a friend and frequent visitor to the estate. A voyage through tea bushes stolen from China, spiders and cobwebs surviving in this organic oasis, & tea flowers hosting a universe of life.

From there we moved under the full moon, harvest began with a solemn puja to Shiva—Chandrashekhara, the moon-bearer—a timeless ritual that anchors Selim Hill.

“Dui Path, Ek Suiro” (two leaves and a bud): found by lantern light and plucked with a flick of the wrist— every step brings together decades of practice and secrets, held sacredly at Selim Hill tea estate.

Returning back to the Second Chance House, our keynote speaker, Dr. Gautam Menon (Professor of Physics & Biology, Ashoka University) took us on a tour-de-horizon on the history of Indian Science, imagining what the future of science led nation-building looks like.

Alongside Professor Menon’s fireside chat, we also hosted our partners the Japanese shipping giant Mitsui OSK Lines & Mitsubishi Corporation to discuss how we can scale the Japan-India Climate Corridor— a key development for climate action.

Day 2 of the Darjeeling leg began at Ajeeb Dastaan House, inside the Kamala Tea Estate.

A tea tasting for Carbon Credits’ buyers from across the world. Here to witness the ajeeb dastaan of Darjeeling— a land at once both magical and in crisis.

Followed by a field trip to witness Enhanced Rock Weathering in action, inside the tea estates of Darjeeling. A saga of advanced geochemistry, oceanography, and agronomy.

For more check out this thread. 🧵

🏔️ Latest at Alt Carbon:

• We’ve launched a new page that explains Enhanced Rock Weathering—how common rocks help pull CO₂ from the air and lock it away (our “corals from clouds” story). Explore here.

Credits: Illustrations by Chinmay Pathak and staging by Manish Basargekar.

• We are also launching a monthly journal of ideas, Alter Magazine. Each story shifts how our readers see the world. The future is unfolding in the Sub-continent, and we’re documenting how it’s being imagined and brought to life.

  
  Bringing to you alternative imaginations of the future— anchored by the lives of individuals whose dreams have colonised their reality. Progress is intimately tied with culture.
  
  Join us for the launch party on the 22nd of November in Bengaluru! Register now.

  

📖 What We Are Reading:

• The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming: Hamming distills his famed graduate lectures into a compact guide to “learning to learn”: how to choose important problems, cultivate breadth without losing depth, and communicate ideas so they actually change a field. He threads big-picture lessons through case studies from the digital revolution and computing/AI to teach a style of thinking that compounds over a career.

• Designing for the unknown. A conversation with futures designer Nick Foster (ex-Google X) on escaping four ruts of futures thinking—could/should/might/don’t. He skewers “numeric fiction,” KPI tunnel vision, and fetishized prediction, arguing for ethics, narrative, and the “future mundane”: prototyping everyday systems for technologies that don’t exist yet. A crisp primer for climate builders on what to pursue, what to pause, and what to never ship. Listen to the full podcast here.

🌱 Abundance Index

Rolex — Perpetual Planet

Launched in 2019, Perpetual Planet backs scientists, explorers, and communities to protect oceans, wild places, and biodiversity. The newest chapter, Perpetual Planet Ocean Expeditions (with National Geographic), is sending 20 Explorers across all five ocean basins to map change and co-create solutions with coastal communities.

Why it matters (through Dr. Sylvia Earle’s lens)

In a short film with Dr. Sylvia Earle, the ocean is both warning and waypoint—threats mount, but the path is clear: science + storytelling + local stewardship. Her Mission Blue network spans 160+ Hope Spots, pushing protection from ~3% toward 30% by 2030—proof that protecting the blue heart brings abundance back.

Our coral build

Carrying that spirit from sea level to the hills, we built a coral micro-reef for Alt Futures—a small, modular piece meant to teach, to spark conversation, and to depict what we are saving through our works.

That’s a wrap from me. ✌️

Want to talk about Planetary Intelligence, hit me up at sparsh@alt-carbon.com

📭 Introduction

Namaste, I’m Kc. I’ll be your host for this edition of the newsletter. One month ago, I joined Alt Carbon to lead Chanakya, our strategy team. After seven years abroad, from the city lights of Paris, through Somaliland’s deserts, to the icy silence of Kyiv winters, moving back to India has been a beautiful homecoming.

For me, this first month has been all about rapid, deep learning - whether it’s chemistry or complex supply chains. I’ve nearly filled my black diary with notes overflowing from the margins. You know you’re at Alt Carbon when your week involves touring factories to scrutinize agricultural residue, internalizing weathering equations (I can finally tell my cations from my anions), mapping supply chains to unit economics and, of course, figuring out which movie deserves the spotlight at #FilmClubWednesday.

For Alt Carbon, this last month has been all about building a home for ourselves. We are thrilled to have moved into our new office and lab at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore. To celebrate, we hosted an office warming party on 9th August 2025, which brought together founders, investors, and thought leaders to inaugurate our new space. One of the most beautiful spaces in the office is this stunningly detailed map of our operations. The map showcases the different agro-climatic zones in West Bengal, represents the exact plot areas we work on in North Bengal, and calls out our key projects and the river networks that transport the CO2​ we remove.

Sparsh also co-hosted the Discovery of India trip alongside Arjun Ramani and Arjun Soin, leading a group of 20 friends from across the globe on an immersive journey through Delhi, Bangalore, and Darjeeling. Together, they engaged with leaders from Indian politics, visionary tech founders, and civil society changemakers, with site visits to the offices of Pixxel, Karya and Alt Carbon. It was a privilege to introduce some of the world’s brightest minds to India’s rich diversity, inherent contradictions, and vast opportunities. Highlights included an exploration of Darjeeling’s tea gardens, a session on the history of jazz in India, and insightful conversations with both the Leader of the Opposition and the Speaker of the Lok Sabha.

🏔️ Latest at Alt Carbon:

This month on our blog, we’ve taken a closer look at two core pillars of our work: the science on the ground and the financing that fuels it.

1. In “Soil, Shovels, and Suspicion: The Quiet Work Behind Soil Sampling,” Mayank explores the meticulous, often challenging process of collecting soil data, which forms the scientific backbone of our carbon removal verification. This is the second part in a series of stories from the field and shows all the on-ground complexities we deal with in removing carbon. You can read the full blog here

2. In “The Future of Financing is Green Capital,” Adithya explores the evolving world of climate finance and the critical role that green capital plays in scaling durable carbon removal solutions like ours. “Follow the money” — an evergreen phrase. You can find the full piece here

As part of our Community efforts we organize a football tournament every year in Darjeeling. This year’s tournament had a footfall of more than 10,000 people from neighboring tea gardens and 16+ teams participated. It was a carnival!

Beyond work, we're also building our culture. Our new film club recently kicked off its first '#FilmClubWednesday,' where we gathered for post-work pizza, popcorn, and a movie. We started with the tender true-story, Sing Sing, starring Colman Domingo. If you have any solid film recommendations, send them our way!

🌎 In The World Of Climate:

1. In a landmark move for the industry, Germany has committed €476 million to carbon removal initiatives. This significant investment is designed to stimulate the market and provide long-term support for various carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies, signaling a new level of state-backed confidence in the sector's role in achieving climate targets. You can check out the full story here.

2. China has transformed itself from a follower in the clean energy space to a global leader and innovator. According to a New York Times report, the nation's strategic industrial policies and massive investments have allowed it to dominate key green technology sectors, a shift with significant implications for the global green transition.

3. Despite recent headlines suggesting a corporate retreat from climate action, a new analysis points to a different trend: “greenhushing,” where companies are quietly getting on with the job of decarbonization without making a fuss. While some firms like BP and HSBC have dialled back public commitments, a PwC report found that of 4,000 firms, 37% actually became more ambitious with their climate goals last year. This quiet perseverance suggests that many businesses now see decarbonization as beneficial to their bottom lines, regardless of the political climate. You can read the full analysis here.

   

🔖 Good Reads from India

1. In a significant move to deepen bilateral ties and accelerate climate action, India and Japan have signed a Memorandum of Cooperation to establish a Joint Crediting Mechanism (JCM). Operating under Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement, the JCM will facilitate Japanese investment and the transfer of advanced low-carbon technologies to India. The resulting carbon credits generated from these green projects will be shared between the two nations, creating a win-win that helps both countries achieve their climate targets. You can read the full press release here.

   

   

📖 What We Are Reading:

1. The underrated economics of land with Mike Bird - Works in Progress Podcast: Mike Bird discusses how land, often overlooked in economic debates, plays a central role in shaping economic outcomes, inequality, and political power. The episode explores complex issues like Chinese housing prices and the impact of land policy in major Asian cities, offering a crucial perspective for any climate solution that is intrinsically tied to land use.

2. How to start an advance market commitment - Works in Progress Magazine: Nan Ransohoff heads Climate initiatives at Stripe. This is an old piece, but a compelling read on the mechanics of Advanced Market Commitments (AMCs), a financial tool designed to stimulate innovation and scale new technologies like those in the carbon removal space. Mandatory reading for everyone who joins Alt, and we love the breakdown and simplicity in which Nan writes this fantastic article.

3. Foundation by Isaac Asimov: Our team has started reading this classic of science fiction, which chronicles the collapse of a galactic empire and a secret foundation of scientists attempting to shorten the ensuing dark age using predictive mathematics. The book's exploration of long-term, systemic thinking resonates with the challenges of our own work.

4. Machines of Loving Grace by Dario Amodei: An insightful piece from the CEO of Anthropic where he argues that while much public discussion focuses on the risks of powerful AI, its potential for radically positive change is equally underestimated. The essay envisions a future where advanced AI, if developed and used responsibly, could compress a century’s worth of scientific, medical, and social progress into a single decade, dramatically improving human well-being, provided we prioritize positive-sum outcomes and global access, while vigilantly managing risks.

🌱 Abundance Index

1. There is a clear and powerful signal of growing corporate commitment to climate action, with the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) reporting a 227% increase in companies setting comprehensive climate goals. This dramatic acceleration in corporate climate planning indicates that businesses are moving beyond pledges and are now implementing structured, science-based strategies for decarbonization. This trend is expected to significantly boost demand for high-quality carbon credits and removal solutions, providing a critical catalyst for the entire CDR industry.

2. On the conservation front, a hopeful success story comes from Natural England, whose Species Recovery Programme is helping bring threatened wildlife back from the brink. Through a partnership-based grant scheme, the program funds crucial projects that restore habitats and protect vulnerable species, showcasing a successful model for nature recovery. You can read about the success story here.

3. At the intersection of technology and climate, carbon removal leader Charm Industrial is now using Anthropic's AI model, Claude, to enhance their operations. By helping their team rapidly analyze complex technical documents and streamline processes, Claude is enabling Charm to scale their bio-oil sequestration technology more efficiently. This partnership showcases the immense potential for advanced AI to be a force multiplier in the fight against climate change. You can read the full case study here.

   

🗓️ Save-The-Date!

In case you missed it: Alt Futures — India’s leading Carbon Removal Summit, is back with it’s next edition! We have 35 days more to D-day!
Join us at IISc Bangalore, a beacon of excellence driving transformative research and collaboration. We have a stellar line-up of speakers from Microsoft, Isometric, Mitsubishi and so many more! You DO NOT want to miss this year’s biggest assembly of the leading folks working on solving the planet’s biggest challenges.

Our Advisory Board:

To save-the-date click here!

📭 Introduction

Our Darjeeling Dinners have piqued interest from many. Behind-the-scenes, we have many folks helping and orchestrating these events. One of them, is my mother — Roma. The Climate Studio team wanted her to write this edition. Over to one of the pillars of the Alt family.

Namaste from the foothills of the Himalayas!

Monsoon has always been my favourite season; a time when the hills would traditionally perform their own Raag Malhar. But this year has been different. We're experiencing what I call the hot tawa effect (Leidenfrost effect), raindrops hit the ground and immediately turn to steam, leaving the earth dry and thirsty. It's a clear sign of how climate change is affecting even our traditional weather patterns here in the hills.

On the bright side, the drier weather has given the team more time to work on expanding the Darjeeling Climate Action Lab (D-CAL).

While we’ve been busy focusing on expanding our labs, Sparsh has been travelling, and shared this wonderful painting from Tarsila do Amaral — a painter who imbued Brazil’s modernistic aesthetic as a joyful counter to the colonial style that was the predominant expression at the time. On that note, i’d love to hear your interpretation of the painting. To us, it’s a reminder of our partnership with the shipping company MOL Group, pioneering the scaling of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) through the Darjeeling Revival Project.

This painting is titled, “Abaporu”. What do you make of it? Leave a comment!

During his visit to Brazil, Sparsh bumped into Julia, co-founder at Terradot. He tells me that despite having a pact that they won’t talk about work, within a few minutes, they were exchanging notes on scaling Enhanced Rock Weathering in the Global South. This was at the wedding of yet another climate pioneer, Laura (Co-founder, Residual Carbon), whom he originally met at our conference last year. Which reminds me, have you registered for Alt Futures 2025?

We are also prepping Darjeeling for the Discovery of India Trip, happening earlier in August, more on that in the next edition.

🏔️ Latest at Alt Carbon:

1. KC, our new colleague, brings a unique perspective from humanitarian front lines in Ukraine, Somalia, Bangladesh, and Kenya. After years of crisis response, he was searching for his own "Manhattan Project" something that addressed root causes rather than symptoms. KC explains what drew him to tackling Enhanced Rock Weathering in Darjeeling's tea estates. Read his story about why he chose climate action.
   
   If you are also looking for your “Manhattan Project”, we might have something for you — check out our job board.

   

2. Inspired from the FT piece from our last edition, Adi dives deep into how the world's largest funds—from Norway's $1.8 trillion oil fund to Singapore's Temasek—are wrestling with climate risk in their investment strategies. A fascinating look at how money really moves when the planet's future is on the line. Read the blog here.

   

🌎 In The World Of Climate:

1. The world's highest court has delivered a seismic ruling: states can now be legally pursued for failing to act on climate change, with major historical polluters facing potential reparations worth billions. The International Court of Justice unanimously declared that climate obligations are legally binding under international law, not voluntary commitments. Read the article here.

   

2. The 2026 World Cup across North America is set to become the most polluting tournament ever — generating 9 million tonnes of CO₂, nearly double recent averages. With 48 teams, 104 matches, and flights spanning an entire continent, it's like putting 6.5 million cars on the road for a year. Sometimes the beautiful game isn't so beautiful for the planet. Read more here.

   

3. Pakistan's monsoons just killed 250+ people and stranded thousands of tourists; officials call it the worst flooding since 2022's catastrophe that left 1,500 dead and 30 million homeless. Despite becoming a 'climate financing test case,' promised billions from rich countries never materialized, leaving millions still in tents. When the atmosphere holds 7% more water per degree of warming, every rainy season becomes a lottery nobody wants to win. Read more here.

   

4. Climate losses have hit $6.6 trillion over 12 years in the US alone; more than the Great Depression and rivaling the 2008 financial crisis. With 60% of global disaster losses uninsured and protection gaps reaching 90% in countries like India, we're staring at a systemic risk that makes banking crises look manageable. When climate change becomes bigger than financial meltdowns, every conversation changes.

🔖 Good Reads from India

1. A groundbreaking study of India's carbon offset projects reveals the winning formula: deep community engagement and sustained economic benefits lead to 48% higher tree cover and lasting forest restoration. While half of projects failed due to short-term thinking, the successful ones in Araku, Bagepalli, and Sundarbans show how carbon credits can drive real environmental gains when communities are true partners, not just laborers. Read the full article by Sahana Ghosh.

   

2. Lakshadweep's coral reefs have lost 50% of their cover since 1998, despite surviving three major bleaching events with decreasing mortality each time. The brutal math: recovery rates plummeted not because more corals died, but because fewer were left to die. A 24-year study reveals that even the most resilient reefs can't outrun the relentless pace of marine heatwaves. Read more here.

   

📖 What We Are Reading:

1. Chennai's fishermen speak a secret language at sea; with nine wind directions instead of eight, where East becomes the true north and stillness has its own word. S Palayam, a retired fisher, shares this beautiful maritime dialect passed down through generations, holding weather wisdom no satellite can capture. When ancient knowledge meets modern climate science, sometimes the most sophisticated technology is the human tongue. Learn more here.

   

2. Ezra’s latest podcast debunks myths about the death of the climate movement. With 2 of my favourite climate commentators, Jesse Jenkins (Professor, Princeton University) & Jane Flegal (Executive Director, Blue Horizons Foundation; ex Frontier) dissect the future of the Decarbonisation Movement for the US (as well as the geopolitical and financial arguments in favour of it). Highly recommend!

3. Plunge into the wild world of scientific discovery with “The Man Who Tried to Fake an Element” for a fantastic dinner-time watch. With excellent visual storytelling and a great history of the element race, coupled with astute commentary on science-based geopolitics, this short documentary shows how ambition and rivalry drive scientists to the edge of possibility and, sometimes, over the line. Expect unexpected breakthroughs, a masterclass on the process of discovery, and a scandal that shakes the heart of modern chemistry.

🌱 Abundance Index

1. India just hit 50% of its electricity capacity from non-fossil fuels—five years ahead of its 2030 Paris Agreement target. Adding 28 GW of solar and wind in 2024 alone, the world's most populous nation is proving that rapid decarbonization and economic growth can dance together. When ambition meets execution at scale, deadlines become suggestions. Read the full article here.

   

2. China and the EU just issued a joint climate statement pledging to 'demonstrate leadership' ahead of COP30, with cooperation on carbon markets and green technologies—including carbon dioxide removal. With the US withdrawing from Paris again, the world's two largest trading blocs are stepping up on renewables and CDR deployment. When geopolitical rivals find common ground on climate, that's diplomacy working. Learn more here.

   

3. Green investing is facing headwinds from poor returns and a hostile political environment, causing many to retreat. But a counter-trend is emerging, led by individuals like, the Walmart heir, Lukas Walton, who is deploying his $15 billion family office to fight climate change. This signals a critical shift where agile family offices are becoming a last line of defense for climate action. Read here.

   

Thanks to Ishan and Adithya, it's been fun writing this month's edition of Parvat Say. Would love to hear feedback, comments. I'm at: roma@alt-carbon.com

🗓️ Save-The-Date!

India’s leading Carbon Removal Summit, is back with it’s next edition!
Join us at IISc Bangalore, a beacon of excellence driving transformative research and collaboration, to be part of India’s leading carbon removal summit—Alt Futures!

To save-the-date click here!

📭 introduction

This month has been a riot for the senses, the soul, and let’s be honest… the waistline.

We hosted brilliant teams from MOL and two more partners for field visits in Darjeeling.

And when the table is laid with aloo posto, kasha mangsho, nolen gur sandesh, and steaming momos and sel roti, — what rational mind can resist?

The conversations stretched late into the night. The laughter echoed through tea valleys. And just as we thought the visit couldn’t get any more surreal, the Great Indian Hornbill decided to grace Second Chance with its presence. A flash of yellow and black across a misty morning sky.

I was delighted to welcome back our Science Lead, Dr. Saurav Ganguly back to Darjeeling. Dr. Ganguly is a post-doc fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. He had been stuck in Israel due to the conflict with Iran, after his institute sustained a direct missile attack. Due to the Indian Missions in Israel & Egypt, Dr. Ganguly has returned safe & sound back to Darjeeling!

🏔️ latest at alt carbon:

1. Last month, we were featured in the BBC! Shrey spoke on, 'The Climate Question' podcast about turning Darjeeling's tea estates into carbon sinks. The conversation was structured around why scientists and entrepreneurs are pouring billions into researching new ways of storing carbon dioxide. Can using rocks in India and research on kelp in the UK help? Tune in and find out.

2. Last week, I had the opportunity to speak at the multi-stakeholder workshop hosted by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation in New Delhi on mobilizing carbon finance for climate-resilient agriculture. The project developer roundtable brought together by FAO and NABARD to discuss how we can make agriculture more climate resistant.

3. India is facing an unsettling yet urgent climate paradox. Adi in his latest blog piece talks about how India’s aerosol pollution, while temporary cooling the land, is simultaneously poisoning millions and masking the true scale of warming. Check it out here.

   

4. Amphibians are vanishing from our forests, and their silence tells a story we can't afford to ignore. In his latest piece, Aryan shares his journey from the Aravallis where he learned to "hear what he once overlooked", the secret songs of frogs that serve as nature's climate alarm bells. These creatures, with their permeable skin and temperature-dependent lives, are biological barometers showing us exactly how our planet is changing. The prognosis? 41% of amphibians globally are showing climate stress, yet during the pandemic, Delhi's frogs staged a remarkable comeback.

   

🌎 in the world of climate:

1. Norway's massive $1.8 trillion oil fund just admitted something startling: climate change could destroy nearly 20% of their US investments. While most investors whisper about climate threats, Norges is publicly modeling loss to US holdings and pushing for science-based targets across their portfolio. Read more here.

   

2. When Apollo 13's astronauts faced deadly CO₂ buildup, they MacGyvered a solution with duct tape and spare parts. Now Earth needs its own desperate fix, and scientists are proposing planetary-scale hacks that make space missions look simple. Sometimes the most elegant engineering is knowing when to stop digging. Check out this piece from the WSJ.

   

3. A climate-agriculture study just delivered alarming news: even when farmers adapt perfectly; switching crops, adding irrigation, embracing new tech, global food production still drops 4% per degree of warming. Tracking 12,000 regions and the six crops that feed two-thirds of humanity, researchers found adaptation barely helps; reducing losses from 12.7% to just 11.2% by 2098. Every fraction of degree matters now.

   

🔖 good reads from India

1. Delhi residents can breathe clean air AND enjoy comfortable temperatures for just 259 hours a year (that's 3% of their lives). Meanwhile, Bengaluru enjoys these basic conditions for most of the year. When opening your windows becomes a luxury reserved for 11 days annually, it's time to rethink how we design our cities.

   

2. Rohan Chakravarty, cartoonist and illustrator, who hails from Nagpur featured a piece in his “Green Humour” about something near and dear to his and all of our hearts; mangoes. Maharashtra's prized Alphonso mangoes have been facing a significant production drop due to warm winters that disrupted flowering cycles. When your favourite fruit becomes a luxury, climate change hits close to home.

   

3. India is building a 700-kilometer green wall around the world's oldest mountain range to stop desert winds from reaching Delhi. The Aravalli Green Wall is part of a massive plan to restore three critical ecosystems and sequester 3 billion tonnes of CO₂ by 2030. Maybe they heard what Aryan had to say. Sometimes the oldest solutions are hiding in the newest plans. Read more here.

📖 what we are reading:

1. Google published it’s environment report indicating how it has cut its data center emissions by 12% last year even as AI drove their electricity use up 27%. And just five of their products helped others avoid 26 million tons of emissions, which is actually more than Google's entire carbon footprint. Google seems to be acknowledging what many of us suspected: hitting ambitious climate targets while racing ahead with AI is going to be harder than anyone wants to admit.

   

2. At the ripe age of 27, I recently picked up Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and have been so endeared by the spirit of adventure, curiosity, and courage that it represents. Through the Little Prince’s travels and questions, the book reminds us of the importance of seeing beyond the obvious and nurturing wonder for the world around us. I find the Little Prince to ultimately be a voyager and an innovator— a happy distraction from the day to day life of removing CO₂.

   

🌱 hope in the time of climate change

1. Step inside a new building in Burkina Faso and it feels like entering an ancient temple—cool, elegant, built from local clay that costs 70% less than concrete. African architects are quietly revolutionizing how we build for a warming planet, using termite mounds as inspiration and proving that the most sustainable solutions often come from the most unexpected places. Sometimes looking backward is the fastest way forward.

   

2. Tiffany & Co. just turned their most valuable asset, that iconic blue color, into a $100 million ocean conservation pledge. By mapping countries whose ocean waters match 'Tiffany Blue' and shifting ad spend from luxury products to coral reef protection, they're proving brand colors can be more than just marketing. Sometimes the most powerful climate action comes wrapped in the most unexpected packages.

3. Saudi Arabia's NEOM committed 30 million carbon credits by 2030 from region’s first voluntary carbon market platform— VCM, creating massive new demand that will ripple across global climate projects. When a historically hydrocarbon-dependent economy makes this scale of commitment, it signals something fundamental is shifting.

   

4. Patricia Seaba's cabbages kept exploding, literally bursting like balloons in her South African fields. The culprit? Too much water, revealed by a simple $50 device that uses color codes to show soil moisture. Now her farm uses 40% less water while producing better crops. Learn more here.

   

That’s a wrap from me. ✌️
Hit me up at: sparsh@alt-carbon.com

🗓️ save-the-date!

India’s leading Carbon Removal Summit, is back with it’s next edition!
Join us at IISc Bangalore, a beacon of excellence driving transformative research and collaboration, to be part of India’s leading carbon removal summit—alt futures!

To save-the-date click here!

📭 introduction

It’s been about two months since I’ve been back in India. From Japan to Singapore to the West Coast and now in the East Coast, I’m writing this edition of Parvat Say with one thing in mind: really spicy momos and a longing to be back in the hills. This is a special edition because we have some significant milestones to share, and it’s been a productive two months touring some of the most exciting Venture Capitalists (more on this in a few months) and builders in climate action.

🏔️ latest at alt carbon:

1. We raised a $12 million seed round to accelerate Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) from the Global South. The round was led by Lachy Groom, with participation from existing investors. The capital helps us accelerate our mission. Here’s a blog post from Shrey and me on the fundraise, detailing our manifesto, operating principles, & and plans for the future.
   
   Here’s what Lachy had to say about us:

   

   
   Capital gives us momentum. Back to work. Oh, we’re hiring. Help us scale climate action from India? Job Board

2. Another big news! We just got featured in the Financial Times for our work on Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) in Darjeeling’s tea estates. ERW is picking up steam as a powerful, science-backed way to remove carbon, especially in places like India. It's not simple (lots of soil testing, data, and field work), but we're working on the nuts and bolts.

   

3. Buffett, Climate, and the Ark We Build: With Warren Buffet stepping down, Shrey’s latest blog reflects on Buffet’s quiet pivot from climate skeptic to accidental climate capitalist. As extreme weather and insurance losses rise, Buffett’s late-career nod to Pascal’s Wager, that even a small risk of catastrophe warrants bold action, feels especially relevant. A timely read for capital allocators navigating an age of disruption.

   

4. Our operations team has been hard at work; from sourcing, deploying, scoping new lands to lab analysis. My colleague, Mayank, shared a fantastic story about the most important weapon in our mission: basalt.
   'The journey of basalt' is an ode to a humble rock that has the potential to reverse decades of climate inaction. Read his story — here (if not already)

   

5. Earlier this month, I had the chance to speak at the APAC CDR Summit 2025 in Singapore on a panel titled, "Unlocking the Potential of Enhanced Rock Weathering," alongside Viral Vora, from Mati Carbon and was moderated by Alvin Lee from Puro.earth. We spoke about the accelerating momentum for ERW across Asia, from Mati’s XPRIZE win to our own off takes with Mitsui O.S.K. Lines and NextGen CDR. A big thank you to Alvin and the Puro.earth team for putting this important conversation together, and for inviting us to be part of it!

   

6. Last week, we hosted a dinner in collaboration with Eion and Puro.Earth in New York on the sidelines of Carbon Unbound East Coast 2025. We had the pleasure of hosting folks from All Nippon Airlines, Morgan Stanley, Standard Chartered, Idemitsu, ING and many more.

   

My big takeaway: There is a major supply gap in the market. Top bankers told us that clients are clamouring for high quality, affordable projects. Beyond the sci-fi ocean and DAC stuff. But there just isn’t enough integrity bound credits out there!
Accompanying the meals, we served a few questions to our guests, one of them was “What is the craziest or most provocative CDR idea you’ve heard of lately?”. The answers ranged from electrifying oysters for ocean fertilisation to using torpedoes to bomb the ocean floor with carbon, to raising the seabed using poop to cactus farming for egg white substitutes. The one that I brought to our dinner was Astrocool’s idea of using lunar dust to create a shade for the planet.
P.S. Write to me if you’d like to discuss these.

🌎 in the world of CDR:

1. European airline emissions are projected to exceed pre-pandemic levels this year, hitting 195.2 million tonnes of CO₂, a signal that aviation’s decarbonization is falling behind. Despite net-zero pledges and pressure from Brussels, carriers are lobbying to delay sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) mandates, citing high costs and low supply. Current EU carbon pricing schemes also exempt long-haul flights, letting the most polluting routes, like London to New York, off easy.

   
   “The sector continues to dodge the true cost of its pollution.” — Krisztina Hencz, Aviation Policy Manager, Transport & Environment

   

2. A Carbon-Negative Kit for the Kop: To mark 20 years since its legendary Champions League comeback in Istanbul, Liverpool FC has launched the world’s first carbon-neutral football jersey, in partnership with American carbon capture company 1PointFive. Each shirt’s production emissions will be fully offset using 1PointFive’s Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology, which physically removes CO₂ from the atmosphere and stores it underground. The kit is embroidered with “European Champions, Istanbul 2005” in gold, blending sporting nostalgia with frontier climate tech. We’re in the early days of seeing more such collaborations between climate action companies.

   

3. The Demand Curve for Carbon Removal: The case for carbon removal is scientific, but the market still isn’t. In a recent piece from the World Resources Institute, experts lay out what’s needed to scale demand for durable CDR: clearer government mandates, corporate accountability beyond net-zero pledges, and credible standards that distinguish between temporary offsets and permanent removal. Voluntary markets alone won’t get us to gigaton scale. What’s needed is public procurement, enforceable compliance targets, and recognition that removals are not a substitute for reductions, but a necessary complement. We need climate actors to shift the frame: from offsetting guilt to investing in climate infrastructure.

🔖 good reads from India

1. Earlier this month, our Chief Scientist, Dr. Sambuddha Misra was invited to

   The Hindu Huddle, an influential forum dedicated to critical conversations shaping our future. This session delved deep into innovative strategies for addressing the climate crisis, highlighting practical solutions and the pivotal role technology and scientific innovation play in carbon dioxide removal. Dr. Misra spoke about how we are pushing the ocean to absorb more CO2. Read more about this here.

   

2. Despite finalizing a long-awaited Free Trade Agreement with the UK, Indian exporters of carbon-intensive goods like steel and aluminium face looming tariffs of up to 35% under the UK's upcoming Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), set to roll out in 2027. The FTA, which allows 99% of Indian exports duty-free access, notably excludes CBAM, leaving $775 million worth of goods exposed. India had sought carve-outs for MSMEs and proposed a rebalancing mechanism, but both were denied. Experts warn of a serious asymmetry: while UK goods enjoy free entry into India, Indian exports may soon face steep climate-linked taxes.

   

📖 what we are reading:

1. The Return of the Dire Wolf: Long presumed extinct and long misclassified, the dire wolf is emerging from both the fossil record and our cultural imagination in a new light. Recent breakthroughs in ancient DNA analysis reveal that the dire wolf was not a grey wolf’s oversized cousin, as once believed, but an evolutionary loner, so genetically distant it could not interbreed with other canids. First appearing in North America around 250,000 years ago, it thrived alongside saber-toothed cats and mammoths before vanishing at the end of the last Ice Age. Its dramatic reclassification challenges long-held assumptions about species, survival, and what extinction actually erases. In revisiting the dire wolf, scientists are not resurrecting a beast but unearthing a stranger story, one where the past keeps rewriting itself.

   

2. Fungi on the Frontlines of Climate Risk: As the planet warms, fungal pathogens are emerging as an overlooked and potentially devastating threat. New research shows that Aspergillus fumigatus, a lung-infecting fungus already linked to millions of deaths annually, could expand its range by 77% by 2100 under high-emission scenarios, exposing millions more to risk. Once confined to compost and soil, species like A. fumigatus and A. flavus are evolving to survive in human body temperatures, aided by rising global heat. As mycology struggles for funding and 90% of fungal species remain scientifically undocumented, the fungal frontier may become one of the most unpredictable battlegrounds of climate change.

   

🌱 hope in the time of climate change

1. The World’s Top Carbon Buyer Is Thinking in Gigatons: In just the past month, Microsoft has significantly deepened its position as the world’s leading buyer of carbon removal, signing a series of landmark offtake deals that span the most promising engineered and nature-based solutions. It committed to 6.75 million tonnes over 15 years from the AtmosClear BECCS facility in Louisiana, its largest single-facility agreement to date; and signed with CO280 for 3.685 million tonnes from carbon capture at a U.S. pulp and paper mill. It also backed Terradot with a 12,000-tonnes enhanced rock weathering deal and expanded its BECCS-based partnership with Stockholm Exergi to a total of 5.08 million tonnes. In parallel, Microsoft announced a 5-year offtake with Carba for 44,000 tonnes of removal via biomass pyrolysis. Microsoft is truly building a gigaton portfolio.

   

2. Climeworks in the Cross-Hairs: Heimildin recently accused Climeworks’ Orca and Mammoth plants of capturing “only a fraction” of their advertised capacity and emitting more CO₂ than they remove, portraying the enterprise as technologically faltering and financially tenuous. Hours later, climate scientist Cyril Brunner issued a point-by-point rebuttal, emphasising that Heimildin confused aspirational targets with guarantees, mis-mixed heat and electricity figures, and overlooked the firm’s openly published life-cycle accounting and advance-purchase model that finances scale-up.
   And, as Bloomberg’s Akshat Rathi notes in his recent interview with co-CEO Jan Wurzbacher, even while trimming 10% of its workforce amid policy headwinds, Climeworks remains the best-funded pioneer in direct-air capture, still expanding the world’s largest DAC modules and anchoring a technology for gigaton scale removals later this century.

   

That’s a wrap from me. ✌️
I have a plan to revive Tesla’s sales. Should work?
Hit me up at: sparsh@alt-carbon.com

📭 Introduction

This is my last day in Darjeeling. I’m on a month-long “work-trip” across SF, Japan & Singapore— meeting customers, policy-makers and… well… friends (let’s see if Shrey or my team reads this). It’s been a fun month building a team and talking endlessly about climate action. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, writing and talking about Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s towering new book — Abundance.

In a nutshell: It’s the manifesto we need — one that marries industry, government, & academia, to the cause of climate action. It’s a rare stand against the the progressives who are ineffective, and the autocrats who take extreme positions. The politics of abundance is also a manifesto for how we think of progress and climate action at alt carbon. At the risk of rambling on, I shall leave it at that (but, i’m always here for a debate, hit me up)

🏔️ latest at alt carbon:

1. We’re co-hosting a special dinner on April 22nd with Flux Carbon, during the SF Climate Week. We’re bringing together a high-context group to unpack what it takes to build permanent carbon removal at scale. Expect perspectives from the Global South, meaningful conversations, and—yes—tacos on us. We're excited to be joined by leaders from InPlanet, McKinsey, Terradot, Isometric, Mitsubishi, Puro.earth, Residual Carbon, and Carbon Herald, among others.
   
   If you’re interested in attending, please do register - here

2. A photo comparing Indian startups vs Chinese ones went viral last week. It’s a pretty provocative picture emphasising priorities between the two countries. Shrey had a lot to say, and his take garnered attention on why we don’t talk enough about deep tech in India. The takeaway: real impact is forged in labs, fields, and foundries —not headlines — and we’re looking for builders who want in. Needless to say, we’re hiring.

🌎 in the world of CDR:

1. In ParvatSay #9, we didn’t mention a big announcement from Adam Wolf, Founder and CEO at Eion Carbon —who visited us in Darjeeling. Well, the cat is out of the bag now. Frontier has facilitated an offtake with Eion worth $33 million. HUGE congratulations to Adam and team for remarkable work. Frontier buyers will help remove 78,707 tons of CO₂ between 2027 and 2030. Eion uses Olivine to help weather Co2 in their Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) work.

   

2. Hafslund Celsio is transforming its Oslo waste-to-energy plant into Europe's first retrofitted carbon capture facility. Starting in 2029, the plant aims to capture 100,000 tons of CO₂ annually from waste incineration.
   The real deal:This project could pave the way for retrofitting around 500 similar plants across Europe, potentially removing up to 400 million tons of CO₂ per year by mid-century. The team and I have been fascinated with this interesting new pathway and its ability to scale rapidly. It’s a big win for carbon removals.

   

3. Deutsche Bank's Green Mirage, A €25M Lesson: In May 2022, Deutsche Bank faced a significant reckoning when German authorities raided its offices and those of its asset management subsidiary, DWS, under suspicion of greenwashing. The investigation was sparked by whistleblower Desiree Fixler, former head of sustainability at DWS, who revealed that the bank had vastly overstated the sustainability credentials of its investment products. This case illustrates a broader issue: many financial institutions leverage the appeal of "green" investments without sufficiently backing up their claims, risking legal consequences and eroding public trust. With the ESG market projected to exceed $50 trillion by 2025, the Deutsche Bank incident serves as a critical reminder for institutions to ensure transparency, accountability, and genuine commitment to sustainability — beyond just branding.

   

4. Shell’s emissions in 2024 held steady at 1.2 billion tons of CO₂ equivalent, according to Reuters — nearly three times the annual emissions of the entire United Kingdom. What does this mean really though? Voluntary net-zero pledges from fossil fuel giants aren’t enough. As legacy emissions continue to accumulate, the world must rapidly scale durable carbon removal solutions. We can’t rely on reductions alone — we need to start drawing carbon down.

   

🔖 Good reads from India

1. Is India Ready for a Warming World? - A independent research organisation (Sustainable Futures Collaborative) published a report assessing India’s preparedness around extreme heat due to climate change. It focuses on 9 major cities, including Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai. These 9 cities represent 11% of India’s urban population. What stood out: India is bound to experience extreme heat events that will increase in severity and duration, having far-reaching consequences. Unless we pay heed & act, we’re going to be overwhelmed with rising temperatures & high mortality levels. Link (Special mention: One of the authors, Escandita Tewari, was the first intern at Alt Carbon. We’re super pumped and proud of her!)

   

2. The impact of climate risks on agriculture could amount to a 2.8% GDP loss by 2030; lost labour productivity due to extreme heat could cost the economy $220 billion by 2030. But, there’s hope for a greener, faster-growing India, argue the authors. We’re already initiating a tonne of projects, but we should go the extra mile. This opinion piece in the Indian Express makes a case for how a healthier and greener India is within reach.

📖 what we are reading:

1. Julia Webster Ayuso explores how climate change is accelerating the loss of Indigenous languages, using the Sámi people of northern Sweden as a powerful example. As Arctic warming disrupts traditional reindeer herding practices, intricate Sámi words that capture subtle environmental cues and cultural knowledge — like ealát, describing ideal grazing conditions — are disappearing. This compelling piece reveals a profound link between biodiversity and linguistic diversity. When ecosystems suffer, languages and the invaluable ecological wisdom they contain are also at risk. It’s a sobering read.

   

2. Leveraging ecosystem responses to Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW)A new study published in Nature Communications explores how Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) can significantly boost carbon dioxide removal (CDR), making ambitious climate targets more attainable and affordable. By applying basalt dust to forests and croplands, researchers found that carbon sequestration could nearly triple due to phosphorus released from basalt, enhancing ecosystem growth. Crucially, ERW can reduce reliance on more resource-intensive methods like Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), thus lowering mitigation costs and environmental impacts. This is a truly fascinating study and underscores the potential of ERW as a scalable and sustainable carbon removal solution.

3. 🍵 And finally... a matcha mystery from Japan

   Despite record-breaking production levels, Japan is facing a matcha shortage as global demand for the green tea powder surges & climate change affects production in Japan. Shops are selling out as soon as it hits the shelves. On the latest Big Take Asia podcast, K. Oanh Ha chats with Bloomberg’s Mia Glass about the world’s growing obsession with matcha — and why even the most dedicated producers can’t keep up. Listen here →

🌱 hope in the time of climate change

1. In his 2025 Annual Letter, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink underscores the pivotal role financial markets play in tackling the climate crisis, advocating for a pragmatic energy transition. He highlights the urgency of directing capital towards infrastructure and sustainable energy projects, especially in emerging economies, to drive meaningful climate action. In the context of Trump-mania, Larry Fink’s statements indicate how Net Zero is going to be the industrial opportunity of the 21st century. But that means ambitious investments in building infrastructure and investing in R&D.

   

2. UK Pension Giant Drops State Street Over ESG Pullback: In a major rebuke to declining ESG commitments among US asset managers, The People's Pension — one of the UK's largest pension funds — has withdrawn £28bn from State Street, reallocating £20bn in equities to Amundi and £8bn in fixed-income assets to Invesco. The pension fund made it very clear— sustainability and long-term value creation remains crucial for them. It’s refreshing to see how capital can send strong signals and force impactful climate promises even if policy kowtows to the prevailing government. Sanity prevails.

That’s a wrap from me. ✌️
Want to talk climate change, hit me up at sparsh@alt-carbon.com