Second Nature

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...

Richard Kelly and Robert Guest were employees 63 and 64 at Foresight. They built a £150 million portfolio in 12 months, took it public on the London Stock Exchange during COP26, watched interest rates destroy their share price through no fault of their own, delisted — and then rebuilt. Within months of going private, their three biggest shareholders rolled straight back in. That's not a recov...

Everyone talks about capital flows into nature. Nobody talks about what has to be true before that capital will move. Insurance isn't a nice-to-have in natural capital markets — it's the load-bearing wall. Without it, the deals don't close, the banks don't lend, the corporates don't buy. With it, you get carbon credits on a balance sheet as assets instead of liabilities. Y...

Greg Robson and Ed Thorne founded Sand River three years ago with a simple but radical premise: the companies solving the ecological crisis are the best businesses on earth — they just haven't been funded that way. Both came from operational backgrounds. Neither had the next great idea to save nature. What they had was the judgment to find the people who did. This conversation goes deep into...

Tim Christophersen had a UN contract running to 2038. Diplomatic passport. Lifetime security. A ringside seat to every major environmental agreement on the planet. He left. That decision tells you something important about where this man thinks the real leverage is — and where it isn't. He's spent 30 years building the architecture the world runs on: the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoratio...

David Gerard has spent 30 years learning how to make people forget to be cool. From FAO Schwartz at six years old to the highest-rated show in Las Vegas, from Google's marketing floors to coaching Fortune 500 CEOs on stage presence, David has built a career at the intersection of wonder, attention, and human connection — and in an AI world that's automating everything else, that intersec...

Carbon markets are broken. Not because the projects don't work — but because nobody has decided they should. Troy Carter, founder of Earthshot Labs, has spent five years building the end-to-end infrastructure to get serious money into reforestation and conservation projects worldwide. He's watched the market go hot, go cold, and watched good operators go bankrupt for reasons that have no...

Dimitri Theocharis grew up watching an economy collapse. So he left. New York, San Francisco, Harvard Business School. Then something unexpected: a climate startup in the UK that needed someone who understood both money and markets. Dimitri is now CEO of Ecologi, a platform at the intersection of carbon accounting, nature-based funding, and the voluntary carbon market — working with over 16,000 bu...

Tommy Ricketts is the co-founder and CEO of BeZero Carbon — the company that built the world's first carbon ratings agency, walked into COP26, and got told they were the single biggest risk to the carbon market. That was 2021. By 2023, the projects their critics were defending were in freefall. Tommy spent years at Bank of America training under a number-one ranked analyst, pitching ideas to...

Britain's biodiversity market was two years old when someone tried to kill it. Not deliberately — just through the spectacular collision of political timing, an overloaded planning system, and a regulatory bottleneck that hit at the worst possible moment. In this episode, I sit down with three of the people who were there — Emma Toovey of Environment Bank, Fiona Milden of Oxygen Conservation,...

Paul Beavis ran a €90 million global champagne business. He was the face of one of the world's most prestigious drinks brands. And he walked away from all of it. What he built next took three years of searching every great wine region on earth, 178 attempts to name a single product, and a back vintage tasting at Claridge's that nobody in the industry thought was possible. Wild Idol is th...

A $1 billion bet on nature sounds like impact. It’s actually something far more uncomfortable. Martin Berg isn’t guessing where this goes—he’s building it. From inside global finance to running a $1BN natural capital platform, this is what happens when markets collide with ecosystems. Land becomes strategy. Carbon becomes currency. Biodiversity becomes… investable. But beneath the ambition sits te...

Dimple Patel didn't arrive at the CEO chair via the usual route. She grew up on a council estate in the north of England, the daughter of immigrants who had their house burnt down and opened the shop the next morning anyway. She got to Cambridge on scholarships, traded through the 2008 financial crisis at Goldman Sachs, scaled a coffee chain to 37 stores and sold it to private equity, pivoted...

Can investing help solve environmental challenges — while still delivering strong returns? In this episode of the Oxygen Conservation Podcast, Rich Stockdale speaks with Ian Simm, Founder and CEO of Impax Asset Management. For more than two decades, Ian has been investing in companies that enable the transition to a more sustainable economy — from renewable energy and water infrastructure to smart...

What happens when financial markets finally realise nature isn’t external to the economy — but fundamental to it? In this episode of the Oxygen Conservation Podcast, Rich Stockdale speaks with Vian Sharif, Founder of NatureAlpha — a company using AI and environmental data to help financial institutions understand how their investments impact the natural world. Today, NatureAlpha’s insights inform...

What if the fastest way to fund nature isn’t through donations… but through the global payments system? Will Foulkes left elite structured finance at a Magic Circle law firm to build something radical: a “green margin” embedded into everyday transactions that automatically funds nature restoration. From adding 1p to supermarket products, to integrating directly into Europe’s largest payment proces...

Everyone thinks Oxygen Conservation is a land company. It’s not. It’s a data platform from its absolute DNA. In this rare behind-the-scenes conversation, Rich sits down with the team building the engine that powers every acquisition, every restoration plan, and every carbon model. From screening every square metre of the UK using 50+ datasets, to deploying drones capturing 3cm resolution imagery,...

Rob Gardner isn’t trying to make nature sound good. He’s trying to make it investable. As CEO of Rebalance Earth, he’s building the UK’s first natural capital asset manager — structuring real revenue models around flood mitigation, water resilience, peatland restoration, and even oyster reefs. With a £25m cornerstone portfolio backed by West Yorkshire Pension Fund, this is institutional capital mo...

What does real leadership look like when the country’s rivers are polluted, the public is angry, and the system feels stuck? Giles Bristow, CEO of Surfers Against Sewage, has lived both sides of the fight — from environmental lawyer inside the corporate machine to leading one of the UK’s most recognisable grassroots movements. This is not a comfortable conversation. Rich and Giles go head-to-head...

Most banks talk about values. Very few are willing to let those values shape decisions. Mark Clayton, CEO of Triodos Bank UK, leads a bank that treats impact as a discipline, not a slogan. Having worked at the heart of big finance, he understands how neutrality, risk, and growth are used to avoid responsibility — and what it takes to do things differently. This conversation goes inside the real tr...