What does it take to transform the way we build, grow food, and relate to the planet? In this conversation, Jelle de Bijl (Certification Manager at Construction Stored Carbon) and Gijs Tolmeijer (Business Developer for both Climate Cleanup and Oncra), both working at Climate Cleanup, sit down to talk about their work, what drives them, and hopes for the future.
What emerges is a candid exchange between two people driven by a shared belief: that a regenerative economy is not only possible, but already underway.
How they got here
Both of them ended up here through the same person, Sacha Brons: Construction Stored Carbon Specialist at Climate Cleanup and Food Forest Farmer at De Jonge Voedselbosboeren.
Jelle’s route was through the forest, more or less literally. He studied forest and nature management, specialized in natural materials and environmental calculations, and kept crossing paths with Sacha Brons at conferences on sustainable construction. When Sacha started a food forest, Jelle signed up as a volunteer. One thing led to another. He still spends his weekends there as a volunteer coordinator.
Gijs arrived through a different door. His master’s thesis asked whether professional food forests could actually be commercially viable; whether regenerative agriculture could pay. That research brought him into contact with natural carbon sequestration for the first time, and something clicked. “It’s genuinely a win-win-win,” he says. “You restore ecosystems, store carbon, and create economic value at the same time. That combination is rare.” He met Sacha on a field excursion, had a long conversation, and was working at Climate Cleanup not long after graduating.
More than a job
Most sustainability work, Gijs points out, is still essentially about doing less harm. Less CO₂, less waste, less damage. That matters, but it’s not what excites him. “Regenerative work actually restores something,” he says. “And the counterintuitive thing is: the bigger it gets, the better it is. Scale up a regenerative farm and everything improves: healthier soil, more biodiversity, better water retention. There’s no ceiling on the upside.”
There’s something else too. Working almost exclusively with people who are building solutions, rather than just worrying about problems, gives him a particular kind of energy. “Everyone in sustainability worries about climate change; that’s why you end up here,” he says. “But the people we work with are just going for it, even when it’s still hard and uncertain. That’s a really positive force to be around.”
For Jelle, the motivation is quieter and more personal. “I feel a strong connection to nature,” he says. “I love being in it, and everything it can provide when we treat it well. I want everyone who is here now, and everyone who comes after us, to be able to feel that same thing.”
The pioneers
Carbon sequestration and regenerative practice are, as both of them readily admit, still niche. Still finding their feet. Which means the people currently doing it tend to be a specific type: the ones who don’t wait for something to become normal before they commit to it.
“They decided the status quo wasn’t good enough and just started doing something different,” Gijs says. “That makes them, in a way, the most interesting, and arguably the coolest, people to work with.” Jelle sees the same thing from his side in construction: a sector not always associated with sustainability ambition. “You’d be surprised how many people in the industry genuinely care,” he says. “There’s real movement.”
What both of them are focused on, beyond supporting those pioneers directly, is helping create the conditions for the next wave. “You always have that second group, the early adopters, who follow once someone else has taken the risk first,” Gijs explains. “If you can support the pioneers well, the rest starts to move much faster.” The goal isn’t just to help the people already convinced. It’s to make the whole thing more contagious.
Making carbon storage pay
The central challenge, the one that underlies almost everything they talk about, is economic. How do you make regeneration financially viable, not just morally compelling?
This is where Oncra comes in, a carbon certification and valorization platform initiated by Climate Cleanup. Through independent certification, the carbon stored by regenerative businesses (in soil, timber buildings and biobased materials, but also in rock through mineral weathering and ocean storage) can be quantified and turned into something with financial value: certificates that can be sold, used for subsidies, or placed on a balance sheet. “Sequestering carbon costs time, money and energy,” Gijs explains. “You farm differently, build differently, absorb costs your competitors don’t. For a long time, you just had to take that hit. We’re trying to change that.”
The underlying numbers are striking. Research from German universities calculated that one tonne of CO₂ in the atmosphere causes around €875 in societal damage: floods, failed harvests, extreme heat events, all factored in. Oncra certificates currently trade at around €80 per tonne. “That’s a factor of ten,” Gijs says. “So the question isn’t really whether we can afford to do this.”
The friction of change
Neither of them pretends this is simple. The economic system they’re working within was built deliberately, over a long time, to make things as cheap and frictionless as possible. Changing the logic of that system creates resistance at every level.
Jelle feels it in his day-to-day work: getting companies to genuinely engage with new processes, rather than just comply with them, takes sustained effort. “It’s not just about having the right technology or the right protocol; it’s about getting people to actually want it,” he says. “In construction, people are used to doing things a certain way. Changing materials or processes can feel risky, even if the long-term benefits are clear. So part of the work is just showing that it’s possible. And that others are already doing it.”
Gijs sees it playing out at a larger scale: governments, businesses and individuals each waiting for the other to move first, responsibility shifting around without ever quite landing anywhere. He went to a theatre performance recently, De Zaak Shell, that staged exactly this dynamic: five monologues, five different actors (business, government, consumer, citizen, future generation), each pointing the finger at someone else. “And that’s exactly what you see in real life,” he says.
But he’s also oddly encouraged by the resistance he sees growing around climate action. I think that just before a system actually changes, you tend to see the biggest pushback. And that’s what we’re seeing now. The resistance, in other words, might be a sign that something is actually shifting.
What success looks like
So what does that changed system actually look like, in their minds?
Jelle pictures it: cycling through a city where timber buildings are going up, knowing they were certified through work he was part of. “If we can help make that the new normal,” he says simply, “that would be great.”
Gijs wants Oncra to become a functioning transaction mechanism: carbon certificates flowing between regenerative entrepreneurs who produce them and companies with residual emissions who need them, at a scale where it actually moves the needle. “But what I really want,” he says, “is for carbon sequestration to become so embedded in the system that nobody has to think about it anymore. Not a conscious ethical choice to buy the regenerative potatoes, just: all the potatoes are regenerative. Because that’s how the system is set up.”
So what do we do?
Inevitably, the conversation turns to the same question: the question of what any individual is actually supposed to do when the problem is so large and the system so entrenched.
Gijs has been reading the economist Irene van Staveren, who is speaking at the Climate Cleanup Summit 2026, and her distinction between happiness and meaning. “Happiness you can buy,” he says. “But meaning comes from what you do. The sustainable choices I make don’t feel like sacrifice. They feel like contribution. And doing that alongside other people who feel the same way: that’s where the real satisfaction is.”
He’s not dismissing individual action, but he’s also not putting it all there. “Don’t carry the whole world on your shoulders,” he says. “Just take responsibility for your own piece of it; as a consumer, as an entrepreneur, as a policymaker. And then actually do it.”
Jelle: “It helps to look for what actually connects you,” he says. “To nature, to people, to something beyond just consuming. And to get a bit creative about it. It’s less about sacrifice, and more about curiosity. There’s more out there than we often think. More ways of living, more ways of building. You just have to be willing to look for them.”
The system is shifting. A food forest tended on weekends. A timber building certified. A certificate sold. Change, here, is not a single moment. It’s a direction, and they’re already moving in it. The people doing it aren’t waiting for incentives. They’re acting anyway, and that’s what makes them the coolest people in the room.