When Alisha Logue inherited her grandmother’s rural farmland in Georgia, she thought she was carrying on stewardship of her family’s legacy. But rising costs quickly made holding onto the land nearly impossible, saddling her with mounting debt. That is, until a forest-restoration program gave her a lifeline, paying her to restore the forests on her property. Now, as she puts it, “we’re just watching the trees grow.”
Logue’s story is just one of several featured in From the Ground Up: Voices of the Carbon Market, a short mini-documentary from the group the Beyond Alliance. The film premiered earlier this year during Climate Week NYC and follows families across the US who have repurposed their land for a range of climate-focused projects — from planting pine trees to plugging methane wells and restoring native forests. The film highlights projects intended to reduce or remove carbon while also supporting livelihoods and local resilience.
These individual stories unfold amidst a stark broader context as the world faces a staggering financing gap between what’s needed to address climate change, and what’s available. About $6 trillion is needed annually to stay on track with the Paris Agreement’s goals. Voluntary carbon markets are one way to help fill a part of that gap — but only when they’re used with integrity and as a complement, not a loophole or substitute, alongside substantial emissions cuts.
If you need a refresher on what exactly carbon markets are, we’ve got you covered with our explainer here. But in short, it comes down to this: When done right, they direct private finance toward climate solutions that can strengthen ecosystems and communities, all while helping accelerate climate action. ‘From the Ground Up’ shows the human impact they can have through families who are finding ways to sustain themselves by protecting what matters most. It’s a powerful reminder that every ton of carbon removed or avoided can reshape individual and collective futures all at once.
There’s much to debate about when it comes to carbon markets, but the film brings the conversation back to the people at its center. We sat down with the filmmakers to talk about why these stories matter now, what they learned from the communities they met along the way, and what they hope to see shift in the future.
For many people, the voluntary carbon market can feel abstract, and for policymakers, it can be a difficult concept to explain. How did From the Ground Up aim to help make the concept more tangible and human?
We wanted to talk to people directly about their experience engaging in the carbon market as that seems innately interesting. Technical explainers are readily available while understanding exactly how and why people are engaging in this work, and what they are getting out of it, has not been obvious.
The film highlights a range of voices from places such as Georgia, Illinois, and Louisiana. What was the guiding idea behind choosing these particular stories and regions to represent the voluntary carbon market?
We looked for stories with an element of the unexpected. I know that I was personally surprised when I learned, for instance, that livestock farmers in Georgia were planting trees in their former pasture fields and that this effort to reach out to and engage small farmers in the carbon market was being overseen by a nonprofit organization (American Forest Foundation).
It was also surprising to me that people who drill and maintain oil and gas wells were being engaged (by the Chicago-based company Tradewater) in work to plug and cap leaky wells. This is because the expertise needed to drill is some of the same expertise that’s needed to safely do the plugging and capping, and with hundreds of thousands of leaky wells out there, it shows the potential for job opportunities. In Arkansas and Louisiana, I was surprised that the native trees being planted by Chestnut Carbon came with a commitment of keeping those forests growing for 100 years or more — that’s a significant commitment.
The stories in the film primarily focus on rural communities and landowners in the US. What do you think their experiences reveal about the role of everyday Americans in advancing climate action?
Most Americans are busy going to work, raising kids, getting the bills paid. The specter of climate change might worry them, or they might someday be affected by a fire or flood, but in terms of what to do about climate change individually, that’s often hard to figure out and maybe not the top priority. So, having some kind of financial benefit that comes along with getting involved — as is the case with the American Forest Foundation program in Georgia, which can help alleviate financial pressure by paying people to grow trees on their land — that really helps.
Putting a monetary value on the things that nature does for us — some people find it offensive to think of nature that way, but if we accept that we live in a highly capitalistic society, it’s an effective way of getting busy people to pay attention to something like the role of trees in pulling carbon out of the air and storing it. It’s something that was previously taken for granted and invisible. This program is also a way of creating consensual changes to how privately-owned land is managed. All of that to say, the way the carbon market has shifted the idea of what is valuable could be a model for how to engage more everyday people into solving some of America’s biggest environmental problems.
From your perspective, what’s the biggest misconception about voluntary carbon markets — and what would you like audiences to understand better after viewing the film?
A combination of factors like regulations that were ad-hoc, and a poor understanding of this market led to early, bad press before the market could get to a point of maturity. The take-away should be — let’s work to make carbon market projects more accountable and more verifiable, because we need every tool in the toolbox for combatting climate change, and carbon markets fund a lot of important regenerative work that otherwise would not be happening.
As a filmmaker, why did you feel it was important to highlight these climate issues through individual stories rather than data or policy explainers?
Climate experts and politicians have all had plenty of chances to say what they want to say. Farmers and others who work out in the field, we don’t have a chance to hear directly from them very often, and my hope was that their stories and point-of-view would be refreshing.
Carbon markets have faced scrutiny about their effectiveness. How does Beyond ensure that the projects it supports, like those in the film, maintain credibility and real-world benefits?
Beyond members are using their collective influence to drive higher integrity and greater impact across the carbon market. They apply rigorous internal and external due diligence to ensure their investments deliver tangible benefits for people, planet, and climate. Projects are evaluated against key integrity criteria — including additionality, permanence, durability, leakage, double counting, community impact, and robust monitoring and verification — to ensure real and lasting outcomes.
Beyond also works to strengthen market integrity more broadly by supporting initiatives such as the IC-VCM’s Core Carbon Principles, which set a global benchmark for high-quality credits, and the Coalition to Grow Carbon Markets, which advocates for stronger government oversight and alignment with the Paris Agreement. Through these efforts, Beyond helps ensure that carbon finance delivers measurable, credible, and durable climate solutions.
What do you see as the next step for Beyond’s storytelling and educational efforts around the voluntary carbon market and its role to play in scaling-up climate finance?
We’re still taking stock of the lessons-learned from this foray into climate storytelling, yet it’s clear that there is plenty of opportunity and need for more hopeful stories that showcase the creative ideas being tried out in carbon market projects. We also need more stories that spotlight all of our shared humanity, that no matter where we live, we all have our feet on the same shared ground, we are all breathing the same air, and we all want to pass on to the next generations a lively, healthy, thriving, vibrant planet.
Looking ahead, what gives you optimism about the future impact of voluntary carbon markets in the US or abroad?
Carbon markets are a pragmatic way of approaching a problem, because rather than telling people what they should be doing or should not be doing, carbon markets create incentives for doing things that are good for planetary health. It’s the carbon market that’s paying people to go out and find leaky gas wells and stop them from leaking, and it’s the carbon market that’s paying people — both individuals and companies — to plant trees on their land.
This is not the only tool we should be using to solve climate issues, but it has the potential to be a very powerful way of funding and building allies for the work that needs to be done to clean up our human messes and to regenerate the natural systems that regulate all of our homes.