Brian von Herzen is the Executive Director of The Climate Foundation, addressing gigaton-scale carbon balance on land and in the sea. With a Ph.D. in computer science from CalTech he spent several years working for leading high-tech companies. Brian and his partner Becky Truman flew a twin Cessna 337 across the Atlantic several times and observed melt ponds across the Greenland ice cap for glaciologists. From small and difficult to find in 2001 they became 97% of the surface of the ice sheet (1.7 million square km) in 2012. These observations led to the founding of the Climate Foundation in order to find sustainable solutions to carbon balance through a deep understanding of natural processes and how to restore them.
Since then Brian’s work has included restoring global primary productivity, cooling coral reefs, turning human waste biomass into biochar to bring much-needed sanitation to third-world communities, and creating grid-scale energy storage systems. His interest and love of the oceans resulted in his leading the Discovery Channel Project Earth documentary titled “Hungry Oceans.” His work has led to many honors and achievements, including a startup, TinyHerds, to develop non-traditional sustainable protein sources through award-winning automated cricket ranching technology.