Tackling climate change presents several complex problems, such as balancing conservation with economic needs, and protecting and replenishing forests to capture carbon and offset emissions.
Through the firm’s year-long fellowship program, a paid leave of absence where consultants are embedded in nonprofits instead of working for the firm, four McKinsey fellows worked with conservation organizations to find solutions to these challenges and more.
Financing ecosystems, not just projects
Balancing the protection of precious natural resources with economic development, especially in developing countries, is a perennial challenge. Jennifer Liu, a fellow at Blue Nature Alliance, a global partnership to advance marine conservation, spent her fellowship working on innovative conservation financing strategies. One solution promoted collaboration by proposing a regional conservation trust fund to benefit each of the East African countries that border the Western Indian Ocean.

Jennifer discussed the fund at The Eleventh Conference of Parties to the Nairobi Convention in Madagascar, where Western Indian Ocean countries met to align on a regional conservation strategy, and helped inform the resulting agreement between nations.
“I brought financial expertise to get stakeholders to meet in the middle and figure out how to adapt financial solutions to meet their needs,” Jennifer says, “because financing conservation on an individual basis is costly, resource intensive, and not nearly as effective as coordinating across regions to protect whole ecosystems.”
Rethinking subsidies to help nature
Across the world from Madagascar in Mexico City, Andrew Gorovoy worked to shape public policy to enhance environmental outcomes—starting with one of the trickiest levers: farming subsidies.
As a fellow with The Nature Conservancy, he attended the Mexico City meeting to discuss farming subsidies with the United Nations Development Programme and research foundation CIMMYT.
He explains that subsidies meant to help farmers can have unintended impacts, like discouraging agricultural diversity by subsidizing a specific subset of crops or inadvertently causing deforestation by incentivizing expansion of farmlands to collect more subsidies.
“It’s common for subsidies to have unintended consequences, and tackling them is critical to meeting conservation goals,” says Andrew. “The meeting in Mexico was an opportunity to begin applying the research and analysis we conducted toward finding local solutions.”
Building carbon credit markets that protect forests
While Jennifer and Andrew worked within established institutions, two other fellows helped scale newer organizations working at the frontier of carbon markets: Freddy Cushnir at Symbiosis (established in 2024) and Craig Stock with the LEAF Coalition (established in 2021). Both organizations bring together corporations that aim to preserve and restore forests by growing the demand and supply of high-integrity carbon credits, which are used to offset carbon emissions by adding or protecting natural carbon-trapping sources, like trees. Symbiosis’s members so far are Google, McKinsey, Microsoft, Meta, and Salesforce, and LEAF currently has nearly 30 members, mostly large corporations.
I kept thinking that these projects are literally changing the surface of the planet.
Freddy’s love of nature goes back to his childhood birthdays. When his parents asked him to pick a charity to donate to in lieu of gifts, he always chose rainforest conservation. Working for Symbiosis—whose goal is to facilitate the removal of up to 20 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere by 2030 through reforestation—has given him a chance to deepen his expertise by helping to evaluate project ideas for carbon credit reforestation.
Together with Symbiosis’s technical lead, he looked at factors including what to plant, community engagement plans, and strategies to ensure lasting, positive impact.
“I could feel my knowledge growing and developing. Symbiosis is working to help establish a strong pipeline of high-integrity carbon credits, and the organization received so many great applications from project developers,” says Freddy. “I kept thinking that these projects are literally changing the surface of the planet.”

Craig, working specifically with Emergent, the coordinating arm of LEAF, helped develop ways that Emergent could support tropical forest governments as they create and strengthen their forest protection projects to bring to LEAF members.
“I got to understand how governments can develop policies to save their nature and create nature-positive economic systems,” says Craig, whose consulting work at McKinsey focused on helping companies reduce their impact on nature. “This is critical because national-level frameworks can be the most effective way of protecting large swaths of our most important tropical forests.”
How McKinsey skills advanced nature-positive work
While solutions to protect nature exist, scaling them can be difficult. A big challenge all the fellows faced was accelerating the pace of change. Craig cited McKinsey’s 80/20 philosophy—80 percent of progress happens in 20 percent of the work—as a guide. He emphasized upskilling and prioritization in his work but stressed that tropical forest governments need increased technical support.

“Many countries are making progress on their transition to nature-positive, but the right technical assistance will unlock investment in tropical forest protection even faster,” he says.
Freddy was one of the first staff members at Symbiosis. He helped set up the organization, figure out its quality standards and procedures, and develop its operating model, both with members and internally. “It felt at times like drinking from a fire hose, but I’d learned at McKinsey how to get up to speed quickly,” he says.
Providing structure and “ruthless” prioritization were key for Andrew as well. Most of his colleagues were scientists and subject matter experts working with governments and NGOs. Coming in with consulting experience allowed him to create “velocity in a what can be a vast and nebulous space,” he says. “I’d ask every day, ‘What needs to happen today to get us to results?’”
For Jennifer, a big part of the work was not just the pace of change but expanding the length of it. Historically, donors invested in marine projects for about a two-year term, which didn’t leave flexible funding for governments to develop their operational capacities or enact bold ideas. She describes a “paradigm shift” underway where funding is delivered in partnership over a longer period so governments will have what they need to see big changes through.
While change is stubborn, each of the fellows was motivated by what’s possible—and by the knowledge that the cost of staying the same is too high.
“There’s a global responsibility for everyone to play their part in preserving the remaining pristine natural ecosystems on Earth,” says Jennifer. “Throughout my work I’d always ask stakeholders, ‘What are the long-term risks if we don’t value our natural resources?’”