Carbon markets sit at the awkward junction of science, finance, and politics, where the appetite for simple stories collides with a system built on probabilities. Few reporters have spent more time in that junction than Steve Zwick. He came to climate through the trading pits of Chicago, where he watched how information asymmetries reward insiders and mislead the public. That early lesson became a through line in his journalism and in his current work dissecting forest carbon and REDD+, the mechanism meant to make standing forests more valuable than felled ones.
“The great tragedy of climate finance,” he has said, “is that those who understand it most have their noses to the grindstone, while those who understand it least have their mouths to the megaphone.”
Zwick’s route was circuitous but coherent. He covered European business for TIME and Fortune, produced and hosted Deutsche Welle’s “Money Talks,” and later helped build Ecosystem Marketplace into a reference point for environmental finance. He has advised NGOs, companies, and governments, and worked at Verra—an organization that develops and manages carbon credit standards—on special projects. Since 2016, he has hosted the Bionic Planet podcast to chip away at the very asymmetries that first bothered him on the trading floor. In 2025, he co-founded Carbon Paradox and co-authored The Carbon Paradox with Renat Heuberger and Marco Hirsbrunner. Both efforts argue that carbon credits can finance meaningful mitigation, especially in the Global South, but only if their tradeoffs are faced openly rather than spun away.
If that sounds like advocacy, Zwick bristles.
“First off, I’d question the premise that I’m a strong proponent of REDD+,” he told Mongabay in September. “What I am is a strong proponent of accurate narrative.”
Much of his frustration is aimed at how the media processes uncertainty. He recalls the period after the Bali climate talks, when conservation groups admitted early missteps and updated approaches. For him, that was science doing its job. In public discourse, however, iterative correction often reads as confession and collapse. The result is a debate that ricochets between exposés and rebuttals while the slower work of method improvement plods on.
Method, to Zwick, is the point.
“Baselines are structured reference points against which we measure change,” he says. “They’re not crystal balls.”
The literature he cites is filled with guardrails and revisions by design: Conservative accounting of benefits, periodic resetting as data improve, independent checks on auditors, and a bias toward under-crediting where evidence is thin. None of that removes uncertainty, and he does not pretend it does. His claim is more modest: Across time and at scale, the system converges, and its climate impact exceeds the sum of its documented credits more often than not. He also argues that avoidance is undervalued.
“It’s up to 50 times more impactful to avoid emissions from deforestation than to try and suck them out of the atmosphere once they’ve escaped.”
Leakage—pushing deforestation from one place to another—illustrates his pragmatism. REDD+, he says, can account for it credibly; preventing it requires demand-side reform in commodity markets. In other words, carbon finance is a necessary piece of a larger policy mosaic, not a silver bullet. He is similarly sharp about scale. The voluntary carbon market is tiny relative to oil and agribusiness, yet it attracts forensic scrutiny that extractive sectors often evade. For Zwick, that asymmetry skews public perception of risk and reward.
Justice is another consistent point for Zwick. He frames forest carbon as payment for a measurable service that protects a global commons, not as charity. He points to community-led work in East Africa and to Indigenous leaders he has learned from, arguing that “best practice” starts with open knowledge and ends with communities making informed choices. Outsiders who parachute in to speak on their behalf, he warns, often flatten real diversity of views on the ground.
Zwick is hard on journalists, including himself. Carbon markets, he says, operate on probabilities, and reporters should treat findings as ranges, not verdicts.
“Results should be understood as probabilities, not certainties,” he argues, and responsible coverage should explain assumptions and situate outliers. The biggest risks he sees are political and narrative: a polarized fight that sidelines a tool which, though imperfect, mobilizes money quickly for forests and rural livelihoods. Success by 2035, in his view, would mean a world where most emissions are cut at the source and carbon markets have shrunk to residual use. Between now and then, the work is less about declaring heroes and villains than about refining methods, correcting course in public, and keeping faith with communities whose forests stabilize the climate the rest of us have unsettled.
