E179 Allister Furey: Manufacturing Trust

E179 Allister Furey: Manufacturing Trust

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 commodity credits, prices geospatial data, and tries to inject statistical rigour into a market that has spent years rewarding a good story over a real outcome. He's one of the most technically formidable people to appear on this podcast, and this conversation covers more ground than most. We get into what it actually takes to build consistent, manufactured opinion at scale — the moment they had to call clients and tell them millions of dollars of credits had been wrongly rated, the analogy that changed how they think about quality, and the single thing that needs to happen before voluntary carbon markets can grow. The answer involves the Treasury, the emissions trading scheme, and a direct challenge to how we think about the licence to pollute. It's closer than most people think — and more political than most people want to admit.

E178 OC Round Table: Building A Dynasty

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 three of the people who built it with Rich Stockdale: Fiona Milden, Managing Director; Andrew Dewar, Head of People and Culture; and Chris White, Head of Natural Capital and Oxygen Intelligence, Rich looks back at what it actually took. The recruitment stories that made him cry. The culture decisions that kept them honest at 8pm on a Thursday night. The world-record carbon credit prices. And the AI and data system, Claudia, that a US competitor raised $100 million to build while OC built it in the day job. But this isn't a victory lap. It's a live question. How do you protect culture as you scale? How do you keep hiring people smarter than you? What does it cost personally to work at this level? And what does the next five years look like when you're building a business you think will be acquired by Nvidia or DeepMind? This is a conversation about what it actually takes. Not the idea. The execution.

E177 Asger Strange-Olesen: The Additionality Problem

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 conversation goes to places the sector tends to avoid. Why additionality — the foundational rule of the carbon market — is philosophically broken, and why no equivalent market mechanism on earth works the same way. Why forests already in existence are technically worth nothing under current rules. Why every government programme designed to fix the land use crisis has collapsed under its own bureaucracy before reaching the people it was designed to change. The data conversation is equally forensic — backpack lidar, open-source carbon modelling, and why the real breakthrough in forest measurement isn't above the canopy. It's what's happening beneath it. Plus Asger's policy blueprint for 2030: a mandatory nature and carbon footprint on every product sold in European markets, simple enough that land managers don't need to believe in climate change to participate. Complexity doesn't scale. This episode makes the case.

E176 Richard Kelly & Robert Guest: Britain Is Running Out of Trees

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 recovery story. That's a vote of confidence in people. This is one of the most complete journeys Second Nature has hosted: from internal innovation lab to IPO, from listed markets to take-private, from 50 forests to nearly 100 assets across 31,000 hectares — and 12.5 million trees in the ground. The UK imports 80% of its timber. It's the second largest net importer in the world, behind only China. Richard and Robert are quietly building the answer to that — and they haven't even started talking about carbon yet. We get into the reality of raising capital in a market that was moving against you. The emotional cost of doing everything right and still getting punished by macro forces beyond your control.  And how AI is reshaping the due diligence process.

E175 Insurance Round Table: The Market Nobody Talks About

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. You get BNG units trading like real infrastructure. You get developers who can actually monetise their projects without locking 20% of their value in a buffer forever. This round table brings together three people building that infrastructure from the inside: Natalia Dorfman, CEO of Kita — the world's first specialist carbon and natural capital insurer; Will Butler, CEO of Gaia Sicura — the world's first insurance broker exclusively for nature regeneration; and George Pawley, General Counsel at Oxygen Conservation, who has been placing and stress-testing these policies in the real world since the beginning. Between them, they cover the full chain from project risk to policy placement to legal execution. Rich goes deep on how insurance unlocks capital that nothing else can reach, why buffer pools are a relic from a world before specialist insurers existed, what happens to this market if political risk starts getting priced into BNG, and why AI is simultaneously liberating and terrifying for a sector that runs on expert judgment. The future of natural capital isn't just about planting trees. It's about making those trees insurable.