Second Nature

Oxygen Conservation

Life on Earth is changing faster than ever. Second Nature introduces you to the people driving that change.

Join host Rich Stockdale as he sits down with some of the most interesting people working at the intersection of nature, business, finance, adventure, leadership, and politics. Together, they uncover the stories, lessons, and truths that will shape the future of our planet.

Expect everything from extreme journeys in the wild to high-performance insights, from conservation breakthroughs to the realities of building purpose-driven organisations. These conversations challenge assumptions, spark new thinking, and shine a light on what it really takes to make an impact in the world at scale.

Started in 2023 and brought to you with support from Knight Frank, Second Nature is your chance to learn from the people pushing boundaries and creating change—one honest conversation at a time.

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29 episodes
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Avg 1 hr 26 min
English

Episodes 29

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S1 · E179
June 25 · 1 hr 23 min
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.
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S1 · E178
June 18 · 1 hr 47 min
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.
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S1 · E177
June 11 · 1 hr 38 min
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.
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S1 · E176
June 4 · 1 hr 33 min
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.
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S1 · E175
May 28 · 1 hr 39 min
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.
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S1 · E174
May 21 · 1 hr 45 min
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.
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S1 · E173
May 14 · 1 hr 31 min
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.
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S1 · E172
May 7 · 1 hr 49 min
E172 David Gerard: Wonder Is a Business Strategy
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 intersection has never been more valuable. Rich and David go deep on what magic actually teaches you about communication, perception, and leadership. Why the best performers — magicians, comedians, F1 drivers — all have one thing in common. Why authenticity is the only moat that AI can't erode. And why the conversation every leader needs to be having right now isn't about technology — it's about presence. This one covers everything from breathwork and breathwork to boardrooms, Darren Brown to data analytics, the Stanford marshmallow test to what it really means to build a career that's entirely, unapologetically you.
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S1 · E171
May 6 · 1 hr 9 min
E171 Troy Carter: AI Will Save the Forests
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 nothing to do with their work. Now he thinks the whole fragmented, mistrustful, acronym-ridden industry is about to consolidate — and whoever ends up at the centre of it stands to do something genuinely historic. Rich sat down with Troy in San Francisco during Climate Week to talk about why the demand problem is more real than the financing problem, why AI companies might be the unexpected saviours of conservation, and why he's been posting on LinkedIn asking if anyone wants to do a roll-up of distressed carbon projects. They also go somewhere most conversations in this space never reach — the sacred relationship between humans and the rest of this planet, and whether without that, none of this is actually worth fighting for.
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Showing 21–29 of 29 episodes