A viral video of a girl swept away by floodwaters shocks the world — and galvanizes three university students into action. Armed with idealism and a bold plan, they journey to the tropics of Demba to help implement carbon-funded climate solutions.

What begins as a hopeful venture leads them into a thicket of wicked problems — 25 paradoxes, hiding in plain sight, that reveal just how tangled climate solutions can become, where every fix sparks new dilemmas that challenge everything they thought they knew-about climate finance, global justice, and their own roles in the fight for a livable planet.

The Carbon Paradox is an ambitious and genre-defying novel — a fictional work based on facts — that explores one of the thorniest questions of our time: how do we fund real climate action in an imperfect world?