Second Nature

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.

E174 Ed Thorne & Greg Robson: Relationships Can't Be Automated

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 how you invest in a market that barely exists yet, what you actually look for in a founder, why valuation is mostly theatre, and what happens when AI — the thing everyone says is terrible for the planet — turns out to be nature's most powerful advocate. Greg draws a line that most people in this space are too cautious to say plainly: if we continue treating nature as infinite and free, and we build an intelligence more sophisticated than ours before we've fixed that, we will have earned what comes next. There's also a genuinely beautiful argument in here about partnership, about the moment you stop doing what you're told is valuable and start doing what you believe is valuable, and about why the best time to get on the playing field is exactly when the problem looks too big to solve.

E173 Tim Christophersen: The $7 Trillion Secret Destroying The Planet

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 Restoration, the global biodiversity framework, the early scaffolding of nature markets. He's written one of the formative books on nature of our time. And his conclusion, after all of it, is quietly devastating — the frameworks exist, the science exists, the money exists. What's missing is imagination. The ability to picture what abundance actually looked like before we forgot it was ever there. Now at Salesforce, deploying 65 million trees and making the case for a bio-economy that replaces extraction with restoration, Tim is one of the most quietly radical thinkers in the room. This conversation goes to uncomfortable places — the philosophy that stripped nature of its soul, the subsidies spraying gasoline on a burning house, the question of whether governments will ever actually show up, and why the answer might not matter if the right people move fast enough.