How we operate

What separates Tellus from other project developers is that everything we do is done with a boots-on-the-ground, pragmatic, action-oriented approach. We value immediacy, data driven decision making, ground truth and tangible results. We’re relentless executors who’ll use every tool available to get the job done.

We’re also driven by the desire to build a legacy - impactful projects that will outlast us all. We’re trying to restore and protect natural ecosystems so they last for millenia, and this has an important influence on how we operate.

Guiding principles

Since Tellus builds for the long term in complex and dynamic environments, we place a lot of value in our guiding principles - they help maintain strategic alignment over the long term, mitigating mission creep and strategic drift.

Healthy nature

Our mission at Tellus is to rapidly protect and restore nature at scale. That means amplifying and supporting the functions of natural ecosystems to produce effective solutions to the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.

We operate on the principle that a ‘healthy’ ecosystem is one that can sustain itself and the communities living in and around it. Understanding and optimising the locally unique mechanisms which make this possible requires a deep understanding of environmental science, ecosystem services, social science and conservation strategies.

Healthy ROI

The long-term sustainability of our projects depends on an alignment of incentives whereby we only win when our partners win. We want to move the protection and restoration of nature away from being purely a philanthropic endeavour to one where there is a sustainable business plan for each and every project. That is why we work to create a healthy ROI for our projects to attract investment and sustainable finance.

For private-sector clients our projects represent a high-value asset, but for natural-asset owners it’s often their entire livelihood, so we manage performance with the same level of rigour you’d expect in any other high pressure and high performance environment.

Healthy local communities

No human endeavour is sustainable unless it sustains the livelihoods of the people who bring it to life.

Environmental projects that prioritise social and economic co-benefits command a premium on any sellable assets (such as carbon credits). Healthy local communities are the single most important criteria for the long-term sustainability of any environmental project because they’re the strongest practical bulwark against many of the greatest threats to success, including:

  • Lack of stakeholder buy-in

  • Land-tenure conflict

  • Lack of local ecological knowledge

  • Unemployment

  • Regulatory shift

  • Corruption

Our principle is to prioritise the health of local communities, which we achieve by building strong, personal relationships with all local community representatives, governments, NGOs, investors and operational partners. Beyond this we know we need to provide education, training, new jobs and health services, and to invest in local culture.