Presented at CivicAction, and CivicTechTO, SPICE is my climate project as a City of Toronto Climate Action Champion. Scarborough's diverse ecosystem of more than 1100 plant species, and more than 200 bird species are extraordinary in all of Canada.

Making invisible ecological value visible
SPICE is an initiative of Invisible Carbon focused on small-batch ecological restoration. We work from a simple premise: some of the most valuable climate, ecological, and social work is happening at a scale that conventional systems do not see, do not count, and do not reward.

SPICE exists to identify, document, value, and support the ecological services created through informal local stewardship. We focus on bluffs, creeks, water-linked systems, and fragmented urban ecologies where maintenance and restoration may happen in small pieces, but where the ecological significance is real.

The natural ecosystems of Scarborough aren't just scenic, but economically vital. By absorbing carbon emissions, Scarborough's ecosystems directly reduce the social cost of carbon, a measurable dollar value tied to the damage caused by each ton of CO₂ released into the atmosphere; this natural carbon offset helps balance the environmental burden of the densely developed Toronto region, effectively saving the city and public health millions in long-term climate-related costs and enabling economic growth without the effects of debilitating pollution. These green spaces regulate temperature, purify air, enable pollinators, generate oxygen, and manage stormwater - functioning as living infrastructure that makes urban growth in Toronto not only possible, but economically and ecologically sustainable.

Invisible Value for community carbon insetting
Industrial climate narratives often privilege scale, while the real work of ecological care happens locally. SPICE was created to make small-batch ecological restoration legible to communities, supporters, and future partners by showing that fragmented and place-based stewardship still generates meaningful ecological, climate, and social value. Small-scale and peri-urban restoration efforts can improve biodiversity, ecological continuity, and resilience.

We are interested in the places that are most easily overlooked: edge conditions, water corridors, bluffs, and urban-natural interfaces. These are often the spaces where informal care already exists, but where there is no shared system for measuring the value of that care or turning that value into long-term support. The climate connection for SPICE connects local restoration to climate adaptation and mitigation. When bluffs, creek systems, and other ecological corridors are maintained and restored, they can contribute to carbon storage, habitat integrity, urban heat resilience, and local flood response. Urban nature-based restoration is increasingly recognized as part of climate resilience planning.

Ecosystem valuation
SPICE moves beyond narrow extraction-based valuation. We are interested in ecological value, social value, stewardship value, and climate value together, sometimes referred to as One Health. The goal is not only to estimate what an ecosystem is “worth” in the abstract, but to build a framework for recognizing the living services that land and water provide, and the labor required to sustain them. Our valuation approach combines local ecological observation, stewardship records, project-based reporting logic, and stakeholder narrative.

Small-batch ecological restoration matters!
Small-batch ecological restoration matters because ecosystems are rarely restored all at once. They are restored in pieces, through repeated acts of maintenance, care, monitoring, and repair. Conventional systems often overlook this because it is built to recognize scale, centralization, and formal project visibility. SPICE is built to recognize what those systems miss. This is the invisible carbon premise: a bluff edge, a creek corridor, or a fragmented urban habitat may not appear significant in a conventional model, yet the ecological services it maintains can be meaningful, measurable, and precious, perhaps to birds, fungi, pollinators, or plant diversity. SPICE exists to bring those local ecological services into view.

The personhood framework
SPICE uses a personhood model that treats the ecosystem as a stakeholder rather than an asset. This changes the central question from “what can we extract?” to “what does the land need to thrive?” Environmental personhood and rights-of-nature frameworks increasingly position ecosystems as entities with standing, care requirements, and governance relevance rather than passive objects of ownership. In SPICE, personhood is not a symbolic gesture. It is the basis of valuation. If the ecosystem is a stakeholder, then restoration is not merely a cost or a charitable act; it is part of maintaining the conditions necessary for a living system to continue functioning.

Stewards are stakeholders
SPICE also treats stewards as stakeholders. If ecological systems generate value, then the people maintaining those systems are not peripheral to the value structure; they are central to it. Stewardship is labor, and labor that sustains ecological services deserves recognition. This is where SPICE introduces a new proposition: volunteer hours should not disappear into invisibility. They should be documented, valued, and staked as retirement savings value. The invention here is not simply to count hours, but to connect stewardship labor to long-term ecological economic recognition.

Can stewardship form retirement savings? Women continue to face a major retirement security gap in Canada. The Ontario Pay Equity Office reports that the gender pension gap stands at about 17%, meaning women receive about 83 cents in retirement income for every dollar men receive. At the same time, youth unemployment in Canada remained at 14.3% in April 2026 for people aged 15 to 24. SPICE responds to this reality by proposing that stewardship labor should be visible as future value. If a person helps maintain ecological services worth thousands, millions, or tens of millions of dollars, that work is valuable and precious. SPICE therefore treats documented stewardship hours as stakeable retirement savings value: a way to recognize that ecosystem maintenance is not informal surplus labor, but a contribution to long-term social and ecological wealth.

Invisible Carbon

North America's Solar Punk Sustainability Studio 2025, 2026