Meet Alexander Pettefer — CEO of iRise Carbon

iRise Carbon deploys verified clean cookstoves and manages certified reforestation projects across Malawi, generating carbon credits that are independently verified, household-monitored, and satellite-tracked. We exist because carbon credits are only valuable if they are real — and we built the systems to prove ours are.

I came to this space through the land. Working in Malawi, I saw what deforestation actually looks like at the community level — families burning wood because they have no alternative, forests retreating year by year, and a carbon market that was supposed to help but wasn't reaching the places that needed it most. The voluntary carbon market had the right idea but the wrong infrastructure. Too many credits were being sold on the back of assumptions rather than data. I didn't set out to build a carbon company — I along with our team set out to fix that gap, and building the company was the only way to do it properly.

Integrity means that when I sign off on a credit, I could stand in front of the household that generated it, show them the data, and have it match what we sold. It's not a brand value — it's an operational standard that either holds or doesn't, and ours has to hold because communities in Malawi are depending on the revenue it generates.

The most common misconception is that we're a small developing-world project with limited credibility in international markets. The reality is that iRise Carbon holds a Gold Standard Programme of Activities, a VCS-registered ARR project under VM0047, an Article 6 Letter of Approval from the Government of Malawi, and CORSIA-eligible credits sold to verified buyers in Switzerland, Japan, and Singapore. We are a rigorous operator in a serious market — we just happen to be based where the climate action is actually happening.

The Article 6 Letter of Approval from the Government of Malawi is the milestone I'm most proud of — not because of what it means for the balance sheet, but because of what it represents. It means the Malawian government has formally recognised that what we're doing contributes to national climate targets, and that the communities participating in our programmes are part of Malawi's sovereign climate strategy. Behind that letter are thousands of households cooking on cleaner stoves and forest areas that are being actively restored. The number matters. But the national recognition of community-level climate action is what I remember.

The hardest part is the pace mismatch. The communities we work with are dealing with the effects of climate change now — not in a policy cycle, not in a reporting period, now. And the carbon market moves slowly: verification timelines, methodology approvals, registry backlogs. Holding those two speeds together without cutting corners is genuinely difficult. What keeps me going is straightforward: I've sat in households in Malawi where a clean cookstove has changed the daily experience of a mother and her children — less smoke, less time collecting firewood, less money spent on charcoal. That's not a metric. That's a reason.

Ask for the data behind the credit before you ask for the price. Any credible developer should be able to show you the methodology, the verification audit, and the household or site-level records that underpin every tonne you're buying. If they can't — or won't — that's the answer you need.