MEET THE EXPERT  ·  Alexis Drevetzki

“I will never be able to disentangle the social and the environmental dimensions. Because one will always rely on the other — and right now, both dimensions are relying upon a listening ear and thoughtful advocacy.” For Alexis Drevetzki, NbS Analyst at Xilva, this is not a philosophical position. It is the practical conclusion of a promising career spent watching projects succeed or fail at precisely the boundary where forest ecology meets human society. 

Alexis Drevetzki grew up in Las Vegas — a city she describes as one of the best places in the world to live if you love the outdoors. The red deserts, the snowy mountains, the access to extraordinary wild nature: this is the Las Vegas she knows, not the one most people imagine. But she decided to leave the desert for some time and explore Colorado, where she pursued her undergraduate studies. It was during this time that she travelled to the Amazon Rainforest and the Galápagos Islands and had an encounter there that she describes as the defining moment of her career, and came home with a purpose she has been sharpening ever since. 

She holds a Masters of Science in Climate Studies from Wageningen University, specialising in human-environment interactions. The university, widely regarded as one of the world’s leading institutions for life sciences and environmental studies, is where she developed the systems-thinking lens that now underpins her approach to evaluating nature-based solutions. 

Alexis joined Xilva as an NbS Analyst specifically to test a conviction she had long held — that private investment had no business in this space — and the Xilva GRADE due diligence framework and methodology is the tool through which she is now discovering, in exacting detail, what thoughtful private engagement with nature actually looks like.

This is the second conversation in Xilva’s Meet the Expert series, in which we profile the people doing the due diligence work that makes the difference between NbS investments that deliver and those that disappoint. 

From Las Vegas to the Amazon

The encounter that shaped Alexis’s career did not happen in a library or a lecture hall. It happened on a farm in the Amazon Rainforest, during a study-abroad programme she attended as an undergraduate student.

Her class had been taken on a tour of a nearby farm, where an older woman grew all of her own food and sustained four generations of her family on a single plot of land alongside a river. Near the end of the visit, the woman asked the students to gather into a circle.

“She proceeded to explain to all of us that a company wanted to take her land away in order to install an oil pipeline,” Alexis recalls. “She began to cry. She explained how she had no resources, no ability to fight against it.” The woman then turned to the students and made one request: go back to your home country, and use the education you are privileged to receive to help people like her.

“That moment has stayed with me,” Alexis says. “I have always found nature valuable and worth protecting for its own sake. But seeing how this woman lived — how much she cared for and relied upon her land and its nature to sustain her and her family — left a deep impression on me as to why the social dimension is so instrumental to environmental work.”

She returned from that trip with a principle she has not been able to put down since. “I know that in Xilva, and in all my future endeavours, I will never be able to disentangle the social and the environmental dimensions,” she says. “Because one will always rely on the other. And right now, both dimensions are relying upon a listening ear and thoughtful advocacy.”

It is, she adds, why she gravitates towards the work she does. Due diligence that stops at the carbon model — that assesses the planting plans, approves the carbon accounting, and moves on — misses precisely the thing that most often determines whether a project survives.

Stakeholder engagement is not a form to fill in

The gap Alexis finds most consequential — and most consistently underaddressed in the projects she assesses — is not in the carbon models or the allometric equations. It is in the quality of the engagement with the human communities on which every NbS project ultimately depends.

“This is becoming more important to buyers and investors,” she acknowledges. “But they often don’t understand the depth of what good stakeholder engagement actually looks like.”

The problem, she explains, is that project developers typically submit what she describes as a superficial engagement strategy: one that lacks tailoring to specific communities. The plan often names engagement activities without describing how those activities were designed to work and while it provides evidence of engagement having happened, there lacks evidence of what it produced or how it shaped the project.

“There is a lot of focus on evaluating the planting strategies, the carbon model, the allometric equations used and determining whether proper literature and benchmarks were used to develop these,” she says. “The same standard is often not applied to the social science aspect despite there being a wealth of literature and resources to guide community engagement strategies that should inform that strategy evaluation.”

The implication is specific and addressable: the same rigour applied to verifying the technical basis of a carbon model should be applied to verifying the methodological basis of a community engagement process. The literature exists. The benchmarks exist. The evaluation frameworks exist. They are simply not being systematically applied.

“This is a gap,” she says. “And it is not a gap that is difficult to close; it just requires asking more thorough questions. What methods did you use to engage with this specific community? On what basis were those methods selected? What did the engagement find, and how did that change the project design?” These are answerable questions. Most projects, in her experience, are not being asked them.

“The same rigour applied to verifying the technical basis of a carbon model should be applied to verifying the methodological basis of a community engagement process. The literature exists. The benchmarks exist. They are simply not being systematically applied.”
— Alexis Drevetzki, NbS Analyst, Xilva

The map and the territory

At Xilva, Alexis works primarily on the assessment of Afforestation, Reforestation, and Revegetation (ARR) projects, the most common project type in the voluntary carbon market. These projects are predominantly located in the Global South, across grasslands, savannas, woodlands, and forest ecosystems. In any given assessment, she is reviewing forestry design documentation, stakeholder engagement evidence (meeting minutes, Free Prior and Informed Consent records, benefit-sharing agreements), risk analyses and mitigation plans, team credentials, and governance structures and working in tandem with local expertise.

The question she is always trying to answer, beneath all of those documents, is a single one: does this project developer have substantial evidence that they have genuinely considered what they claim to have considered?

The part of the Xilva GRADE methodology she finds most revealing, she says, is the emphasis on the project’s Theory of Change. “The Theory of Change is the roadmap and the vision of the project,” she explains. “Close scrutiny of it is essential to understanding what the project hopes to be, how they plan to get there, and with whom.”

What a Theory of Change reveals, in her experience, is the degree to which a project developer has genuinely engaged — before anything else — with the communities and the ecological context in which they are operating. Did they involve communities in understanding the drivers of ecosystem degradation? Did they design activities that meaningfully address those problems? Is there internal logic between the activities and the intended outcomes? Does any of it make sense for the specific ecological conditions of the project? These claims in juxtaposition with the project’s evidence is telling about their stated ambitions versus actual capabilities.

“It reveals a lot about the developer’s intentions,” she says. “If the Theory of Change is superficial, if it reads like it was written to satisfy a requirement rather than to guide the project, that tells you something important before you have looked at a single piece of carbon modelling.”

Your project will not look the same in fifty years

The misconception Alexis returns to most often which she finds most consequential and most consistently underaddressed in the projects she assesses, is the assumption that the conditions in which an NbS project operates today are the conditions in which it will operate in fifty years.

“Coming from a background in climate change studies, I feel this aspect is often underplayed,” she says. “There is a kind of thinking that doing these interventions will mitigate climate change impacts in and of itself. And while NbS undoubtedly helps to mitigate climate change effects, unless a huge, dramatic shift happens in our current trajectory, there will still be significant impacts felt in the coming decades that alter the ecosystems and societies that make up these NbS projects.”

The practical consequence is a gap that she believes the field has not yet adequately addressed. There is an absence of adaptive pathways and scenario planning in the majority of project designs. A fifty-year nature-based project that does not account for the forest conditions, the hydrological patterns, or the community contexts that may exist by year twenty is not truly a fifty-year project. It is a project designed for a climate and a landscape that may no longer exist.

“It is important to begin integrating adaptive pathways and scenario planning into project design,” Alexis says. “To plan for alternative scenarios, not just the one in which conditions remain stable, because they likely won’t.”

This is not, she emphasises, an argument against NbS investment. It is an argument for more rigorous design — and, critically, for due diligence frameworks that ask whether that rigour is in place. An investor who approves a project on the basis of its carbon model and its current community relationships, without asking how the project is designed to respond to materially different conditions in decade two or three, is taking on a risk they may not have explicitly priced.

“Unless something dramatically changes in our current trajectory, the ecosystems and communities these NbS projects depend on will look different in thirty years. Adaptive pathways need to be built in from day one, not added as an afterthought.”
— Alexis Drevetzki, NbS Analyst, Xilva

Water is the next frontier

One of the more unexpected angles in Alexis’s perspective on the future of NbS markets is where it begins: with Lake Mead, the one and only source of water in Las Vegas, and with the negotiations between Nevada, the other western US states, and Mexico over water rights that have been ongoing for more than two decades.

“I come from Las Vegas, Nevada, which has been in a drought for over twenty years,” she says. “I grew up being acutely aware of water scarcity, but attributed it to being in a desert. Every year, I see our water reservoir (Lake Mead) keep dropping. But the negotiations for water use rights get harder and harder as the years go on, and the effects of water scarcity no longer impact only desert regions.”

The pattern she has observed at home is, in her view, an early signal of a global dynamic that is now accelerating. Water is becoming a strategic resource in ways that will materially affect NbS projects through changed precipitation patterns, altered river systems, and the intensifying demands of agriculture, industry, and a growing urban population.

“I believe water is quickly becoming the next critical topic,” she says. “I hear it constantly in environmental circles, and now it is starting to appear in the corporate and commercial worlds as companies develop not just nature strategies, but also water strategies.” The rise of AI is compounding this, she adds. Data centres require massive volumes of fresh water, and the tension between industrial demand and ecosystem need is going to worsen.

For NbS due diligence, the implication is practical. Projects that do not model their exposure to water risk, for example, that do not account for what happens to a reforestation project when the hydrological cycle in its region shifts materially, are carrying an unpriced liability. The same adaptive pathways question that applies to climate impacts applies here: is the project designed for the water reality that will exist in fifty years, or only for the one that exists today?

Private investment changed my mind 

Alexis’s presence at Xilva is itself the product of a deliberate intellectual challenge she set herself. Before joining Xilva, she held a position common among early-career environmental scientists: a deep scepticism about the role of private investment and corporate actors in nature-based solutions.

“I used to be a very strong believer that these two worlds could not reasonably overlap,” she says, “due to competing interests.”

Rather than simply holding that view, she chose to test it. She joined Xilva as an intern, specifically to challenge her own assumptions and see what the voluntary carbon market (VCM) actually looked like from the inside. “I genuinely wanted to challenge my mindset on this, and see what positives exist within the VCM,” she explains. “Now, since working at Xilva, I can see how important private investment is to NbS. There are people from the private sector who genuinely want to make a real, positive impact, who want to learn more about nature and what they can do to support it.”

The intellectual shift she describes is not simplistic. She retains a clear view of what tends to go wrong in communication between the environmental and corporate worlds. It is not, she argues, a question of values so much as of language.

“I don’t think a successful strategy typically comes from argumentation — from trying to convince someone of the value of nature,” she says. “It usually comes down to the language used about values. People are often not using the same language that their audience is using, and so are unable to find common ground and create resonance and shared meaning. If you can help someone feel heard and understood, then you can begin to build trust. And trust is where change actually happens.”

Change how you operate, not just what you offset

The message Alexis would most like to deliver to corporate sustainability directors who are investing in NbS is one she acknowledges may be uncomfortable to hear.

“I would expect corporates to ask themselves ‘Even though I am investing in this NbS project, am I also changing the way my corporation operates to reduce its emissions? Or am I just relying on this investment to offset, while not changing how I operate?’” She poses this not as a rhetorical point but as a genuine due diligence question — one that she believes corporate boards should be asking themselves as explicitly and rigorously as they ask about the quality of the projects they are funding.

The position reflects a longer-term view she holds about what is ultimately required for the NbS market to produce genuine, lasting impacts. “As long as we continue to apply extractive, monetary language and values towards ecosystems,” she says, “we will continue to run into the same problems but in new forms.” She sees private investment in NbS as a necessary and important bridge — one that can direct real resources towards real conservation at a scale that public funding alone cannot reach. But she holds that it is a bridge, not a destination.

“If my career in this field could leave one lasting contribution,” she says, “I would hope it is to the global realisation that our lives are so intimately connected with the natural world. It is fundamentally impossible for humanity to prosper without allowing nature to prosper. And I would hope that it has helped people and organisations to stop thinking in the near-term, and realise the long-lasting and far-reaching impacts that their decisions can have on the world, both for the good and the bad.”

Xilva provides independent due diligence, assessment, and operational monitoring services to Nature-based Solutions investors globally. Our proprietary Xilva GRADE methodology offers a comprehensive assessment of NbS project quality, financial robustness, risk, and impact potential. Contact us if you would like to meet our experts.