Johanna Jensen, Ph.D.
About me:
I'm a forest ecologist working at the intersection of science, land, and climate finance — helping build carbon projects that are as scientifically rigorous as they are grounded in the people and places they depend on.
My path started in the Arctic. I earned my PhD in Forest Ecology from Columbia University, where NASA-funded research took me deep into treeline ecology, remote sensing, and statistical modeling — trying to understand how forests respond to a changing climate at their most sensitive edges. That question — how do we measure and support forests through change — has shaped everything I've done since.
Over the past several years, I've taken that scientific foundation into the field. At Pachama, I led afforestation and reforestation (ARR) carbon projects end-to-end across the US, Mexico, and Brazil — which meant everything from building relationships with the landowners and communities whose land these projects lived on, to designing forest inventory protocols, to running the growth-and-yield and leakage models that underpin a project's carbon claims. I've walked plots with field teams, built dynamic baseline and canopy-height-derived growth models in R and Google Earth Engine, and set up biodiversity and water-quality monitoring to support habitat and hydrology claims that mattered to the communities I worked with.
Later, at Carbon Direct, I moved to the other side of the table — leading technical diligence on forest carbon projects across Africa and Latin America, evaluating them against Verra, ACR, and Isometric standards. That work gave me a rare vantage point: I understand what makes a project fundable and credible, because I've built projects and I've scrutinized them.
Today, I'm looking for my next role in forest carbon and nature-based solutions — whether that's project development, technical/MRV strategy, or geospatial analysis. What I care about most, across all of it, is the same thing that got me into this field: forests and the people who steward them, and building climate work that actually holds up — scientifically, financially, and on the ground.
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