Rethinking CO2 Compensation: A Conversation with Ruth von Heusinger

What if the most powerful climate tool in Europe isn't a breakthrough technology or a viral protest movement - but a regulated market that most people have never heard of? That's the case Ruth von Heusinger makes in our latest Impact Runde, and she makes it with the clarity of a physicist and the conviction of someone who turned down a PhD to work on the problem directly.

Ruth is the founder of ForTomorrow, a nonprofit that uses the EU Emissions Trading System to do something deceptively simple: buy up CO2 emission allowances so that polluters can't use them. Fewer allowances in the system means less CO2 gets emitted. Period.

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From Physics to Climate Action

Ruth's path started early. She founded a Greenpeace group as a student, studied physics in Berlin and Paris, and then made a deliberate choice: no ivory tower research, despite the opportunity. Instead, she joined Statkraft, Europe's largest renewable energy producer, where she worked across power market analysis, renewable energy, and — crucially — emissions trading. Later, at atmosfair, she gained deep experience in voluntary carbon markets. But something kept nagging at her: traditional offsetting projects in the Global South, while valuable, don't reduce CO2 emissions where Europeans actually produce them. ForTomorrow was her answer.

The Trash Can Analogy

Ruth explains the emissions trading system the way only someone who truly understands it can - simply. Think of it like a trash system: every company that emits CO2 needs to buy a "trash can" (an emission allowance) from the EU. The number of trash cans gets smaller every year. If you can't afford one, you can't produce waste. ForTomorrow enters the picture by buying those trash cans and making sure nobody uses them. Every allowance they purchase is one less ton of CO2 that European industry can emit. With nearly 27,000 tonnes already removed from the market - roughly equivalent to shutting down a small coal power plant for a month - the impact is real and measurable from day one.

Trees and Trading

But ForTomorrow doesn't stop at removing allowances. Responding to what their community actually wanted, Ruth added a second pillar: planting new forests in Germany. Not symbolic tree planting, but actual increases to Germany's total forest area — designed to pull CO2 back out of the atmosphere over the long term. And soon, they'll expand into biochar production, turning thinned-out trees into a durable carbon sink instead of letting that CO2 return to the air.

What struck us most was Ruth's rigour. She works closely with Professor Perino at the University of Hamburg to ensure ForTomorrow doesn't accidentally create loopholes or contribute to greenwashing. In a sector plagued by credibility issues, that discipline matters.

Why It Matters Now

Ruth doesn't shy away from the uncomfortable reality: Europe is in a sustainability backlash. Regulations are being rolled back, business models are collapsing because of policy reversals, and the waves of climate ambition she's seen over the past 15 years are dipping again. But the emissions trading system itself remains robust - and that's exactly why she built ForTomorrow on top of it.

As she told us: the system works. It just needs more people using it. And that's an invitation - not just to policymakers, but to all of us.

Listen to the full episode here! 👉 Spotify | Apple

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