Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

Trees can cool the planet. They can also buy us some time. Or can they? 

Last week, some banner news neatly aligned on an arc that was quite revealing. 

India’s largest impact investor, Aavishkaar, raised its latest fund. Sized at Rs 1,000 crore ($130 million), Aavishkaar says the fund will “also focus” on climate. But when I spoke with Aavishkaar founder Vineet Rai, I learned that it will only “opportunistically” invest in climate-related ventures. 

However, there’s a bigger, and I must add, more interesting fund that he is raising. If all goes well, by December this year, he will launch the US$300-US$500 million Carbon First Fund. Which, you guessed it, will deal with carbon units even while returning capital to its investors. Meaning, investors will get their returns in carbon units unless they specifically ask for cash.

Meanwhile, in the rich world, the punt on capturing carbon grew bigger. Climeworks, a Switzerland-based D2C (direct-to-capture) startup, raised US$650 million from a bunch of professional and corporate investors. One of the few companies in the world to capture CO2 from air and inject it deep underground for permanent storage, Climeworks’ scale is very modest today—4,000 tonnes of carbon captured per year, which is equivalent to the Co2 emissions from 600 EU residents.