Second Nature

What if six months of work could be completed in a single afternoon? And what if that's only the beginning? Artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the economics of business. The teams we need, the systems we build, the decisions we make and the speed at which we can turn ideas into reality. Tom George, Head of Technology at Oxygen Intelligence, joins Rich Stockdale to explore what...

Five years ago, Dr Rich Stockdale set out to build something most people thought was impossible. Today, Oxygen Conservation has grown into an extraordinary team of 50, managing more than 50,000 acres of land, transforming landscapes across Britain and building a business with ambitions that extend far beyond conservation as we know it. For the 200th episode of Second Nature, Rich returns to the gu...

How do you turn ambitious ideas for nature into investment opportunities at scale? From helping establish Oxygen Conservation over five years ago to becoming Managing Director of Oxygen Capital, George Pawley has been part of the journey from day one. In this special episode of Second Nature, George joins Dr Rich Stockdale to share the stories behind some of Oxygen's biggest deals, the extrao...

Can AI transform how we understand, value and restore nature? Dr Rich Stockdale is joined by Chris Winter, newly appointed Managing Director of Oxygen Intelligence, to explore the intersection of artificial intelligence, technology and natural capital. From world-record carbon credit prices and AI-powered landscape analysis to drones, LiDAR and digital twins of individual trees, they reveal the te...

Buying land is one thing. Transforming it is something entirely different. As Oxygen Conservation enters its next chapter, Fiona Milden steps into the role of Managing Director, responsible for turning some of the UK's most ambitious natural capital projects into reality. From woodland creation and peatland restoration to estate management, leadership and navigating extreme weather, the chall...

Dr Manuel Piñuela is CEO and co-founder of Cultivo, the natural capital company approaching 2 million acres across North America. His argument is deceptively simple: take degraded landscapes, understand where the economic and ecological upside lies, regenerate them — and build something institutional capital can actually invest in.  Rich and Manuel get into the reality behind that idea: natural ca...

We ask an extraordinary amount of Britain's countryside. Produce our food. Restore nature. Store carbon. Hold floodwater. Build houses. Generate energy. Create jobs. Give people access. And, somehow, remain completely unchanged. Gavin Lane, President of the Country Land and Business Association, and Eliza Ecclestone, Vice President, were two of the most engaging people we've had around t...

AI could be one of the most powerful tools we've ever had for nature. It could also make the problem considerably worse. Live from New York Climate Week, Rich Stockdale is joined by Anna Lerner, CEO of Climate Collective; Sheila Oviedo, Head of Climate and Nature Products at S&P Global; and Danan Margason, CEO of Aarden AI , to ask a deceptively simple question: will AI ultimately be posi...

Rich Stockdale has given away more copies of Crickonomics than any other book. Not because he is obsessed with cricket, although that helps, but because he thinks it might secretly be one of the best business books ever written. Tim Wigmore has spent his career using statistics, economics, history and brilliant writing to understand why cricket actually works. What followed became a conversation a...

What if the most valuable person in a rugby team isn’t on the pitch? Sam Larner has spent years pulling apart professional rugby through data. And the numbers expose some uncomfortable truths: teams overpay for experience, coaches repeatedly recruit the same profiles, unconventional players are systematically undervalued, and sometimes the difference between winning and losing is buried among 50,0...

Impact investing has spent years fighting for a tiny slice of institutional portfolios. Nadia Nikolova thinks that is the wrong fight. As CEO of ResponsAbility, managing almost $6 billion across emerging markets, Nadia sits at the intersection of institutional capital, climate, sustainable food and financial inclusion. She explains why impact investments should compete for the same 95% of portfoli...

For years, the nature sector built projects first and asked where the money would come from later. Cain Blythe thinks that has to change. From the first major investment into Broughton Sanctuary to Credit Nature's expansion across Europe, Africa and New Zealand, the conversation is finally moving beyond good intentions. Where is the demand? Who is going to buy? What return can nature generate...

Nature is moving from environmental obligation to financial opportunity. But what does it actually take to turn biodiversity, habitat and ecosystem services into something institutional capital can invest in? Nath Curtis and Ben Stansfield have spent two decades watching renewable energy evolve from a new, uncertain industry into an investable infrastructure market. Now they are seeing many of the...

For years, the environmental movement told us to be afraid of the future. Tom Crowther thinks that story has run its course. From discovering 3 trillion trees on Earth to watching his trillion-tree research explode into a global movement, and then become one of the most criticised ideas in environmental science, Tom has seen what happens when a scientific idea escapes the lab. He talks about the b...

Nature doesn't have a science problem. It has a communication problem. From Formula 1 paddocks to boardrooms, from global brands to Climate Week, Katie Neck and Elena Doms explore why the future of conservation depends less on convincing people they're wrong and more on showing them what's possible. Commercial thinking, personal brands, storytelling and optimism aren't distract...

Everyone agrees nature matters. Almost nobody understands where the real opportunity is. Nature tech is quietly becoming one of the most important investment themes of the next decade. AI is changing conservation faster than most people realise. Data centres are forcing a rethink of environmental infrastructure. And the companies that solve biodiversity, agriculture and ecosystem restoration won&a...

Everyone agrees AI will change the world. Almost nobody is asking what happens when governments built for the industrial age try to govern the intelligence age. Benedict Macon-Cooney has spent over a decade inside the Tony Blair Institute, advising political leaders around the world on AI, state capacity and government reform. This isn't a conversation about chatbots. It's about whether...

Everyone talks about product-market fit. Hardly anyone talks about founder-market fit. Soma Pirityi believes we've been measuring startups the wrong way. After building businesses, losing money, working in venture capital and studying AI, risk and entrepreneurship across Cambridge, UCL and St Andrews, he reached a simple conclusion: companies rarely fail because of the spreadsheet. They fail...

James Cameron has spent four decades operating where politics, business and the environment collide. He helped shape modern international climate law, advised governments across the world, founded one of the first climate investment businesses to manage over $1.7 billion, and still believes the biggest opportunities are ahead of us. But this conversation isn't really about climate. It's...

Luke Baldwin started a carbon credit business in 2023 — by his own admission, the worst possible year to do it. The market was in freefall, trust was gone, and nobody was buying. Two years later, his business closed the first deal in the world to capitalise future carbon removals as an intangible asset on a corporate balance sheet. This conversation goes into why the environmental sector still has...

Five years ago a carbon credit was $1 and largely a joke. Today it's hundreds of pounds a tonne, rated, insured, and traded on an exchange. The people who did that are in this room. Live at Clifford Chance during London Climate Action Week 2026, Rich convened a panel that doesn't usually end up on record together: a Magic Circle funds lawyer, the CEO of Climate Asset Management, a conser...

The economy has always been a subsidiary of nature. We just didn't have the instruments to prove it. Now we do — and the conversation is getting uncomfortable in the best possible way. Recorded live at London Climate Week, this is the conversation the sector has been having in private, finally happening in public. Tripp Wall of Pantheon Regeneration, Siddarth Shrikanth of Just Climate, and Di...

Allister Furey trained as a biologist, fell into AI before anyone called it AI, built kite-powered wind energy systems, sold a company to a competitor, ran operations in Singapore, and ended up building a carbon ratings agency. Not because it was the plan. Because the market was lying and someone had to say so. Allister is CEO and co-founder of Sylvera — the data business that rates carbon and com...

Five years ago there was no portfolio. No team. No podcast. No estates. The highest carbon credit price was under £20. Biodiversity net gain didn't exist. Rich had a business plan and a conviction that you couldn't scale conservation without capital — and almost everyone told him it was too complicated, too risky, or too ambitious. This episode is the five-year reckoning. Gathered with t...

Asger Strange Olesen has spent 15 years building context most people in this space only claim to have. Carbon developer, EU Climate Directorate, FSC Global Chief Climate Officer, now heading climate and biodiversity at IWC — a $6bn forestry asset manager backed by BNP Paribas. He has been inside the policy rooms, the certification bodies, the investor meetings, and the forest itself. This conversa...