About Us

The origins of Oxygen Conservation trace back to a pivotal meeting between Rich Stockdale, then leading the Environment Agency in Devon and Cornwall, and one of the directors of Oxygen House Group. That connection, built on a shared commitment to the environment, led first to collaborative projects on water quality in the River Dart and land management for people and wildlife, then to something far more ambitious. Inspired by the Tompkins Conservation Foundation’s large-scale land conservation work in South America, the Oxygen House Group board commissioned a concept paper for acquiring conservation land in the South West of England. Rich was invited to build on it, producing the Green Print – a 30,000-word founding document that laid out how to establish a commercial enterprise delivering positive environmental and social impact first, with profit as a result, not the purpose. OC officially started work on 2 June 2021. The founding thesis was bold: the stock market was overpriced and land, especially in the South West of England and other desirable areas of the UK, was undervalued. Those landholdings held great potential to demonstrate how conservation projects could deliver impact. The first acquisitions came quickly: Leighon in Devon, Wood Advent in Somerset, Swineley in Yorkshire, Esgair Arth in Ceredigion, and Firth of Tay in Perthshire. Five estates across four nations, funded by the Dixon Foundation, the Dixon Family, and Oxygen House Group. The foundation was laid.

The second year transformed OC from a collection of smaller estates into a serious landscape-scale operation. The investment philosophy shifted: secure assets that could achieve increasing land value over time, and that had the potential to create significant numbers of carbon credits and support the development of large renewable energy generation infrastructure. The portfolio grew to seven, with two landmark Scottish acquisitions that changed the scale of everything. Invergeldie brought 11,701 acres into the portfolio, and Blackburn and Hartsgarth added a further 11,407 acres. These were not modest land parcels; they were estates the size of small cities, each with enormous potential for carbon sequestration, biodiversity uplift, and wind energy. The financial architecture evolved to match the ambition. Co-investments from Oxygen House Group and Blue and White Capital, combined with an innovative and subsequently award-winning debt funding package from Triodos Bank, provided the capital to scale. That Triodos partnership was the first public demonstration of OC’s commitment to making the market for natural capital – showing that investments of this type were bankable. The team grew, the data infrastructure began to take shape, and OC established itself as a major UK landowner with a distinctive model: conservation and commercial rigour as the same force, not opposing ones.

With the large Scottish estates secured, 2023 was about building a more balanced, diverse portfolio and beginning to commercialise the business model. Two new acquisitions – Mornacott in Devon and Shropham in Norfolk – were chosen specifically for what they could add beyond carbon and renewables: property development potential through strategic land and property conversion, integrated ecotourism businesses, and the conditions to produce high-quality biodiversity net gain credits. BNG would become a mandatory requirement for new development in England from February 2024, and OC positioned itself ahead of that regulatory shift. The ecotourism brand Oxygen Escapes began to take shape. The team deepened its expertise across environmental science, property, and land management. The data being collected across the estates – every tree GPS-mapped, every transaction documented – was building an evidentiary standard that would later command record-breaking prices. Scaling Conservation, Rich’s first book, began to articulate the intellectual framework behind what OC was building, and the launch of The Shoot Room Sessions podcast (later rebranded to Second Nature) which became the UK’s leading Natural Capital podcast. The estates were no longer just land. They were becoming what would later be described as the equivalent of data centres – producing density, precision, and complexity of data that no one else in the market could match.

The portfolio continued to scale, but with greater intentionality. Siblyback in Cornwall added 968 acres, while Dorback in the Cairngorms brought a further 15,035 acres of iconic Scottish Highlands to the portfolio, pushing the total landholding towards 45,000 acres. It was an entirely new challenge; OC had never acquired an estate of this size before, and it changed the scale of everything once again.

On the ground, the strategy translated into measurable ecological delivery. Across the estates, 220 acres of new native woodland were established, projected to sequester over 35,000 tonnes of carbon over the next century. Restoration work deepened: wetlands were created and expanded, degraded peat systems began recovery, and river systems were reconnected. At Leighon, tree planting and wetland scrapes enhanced both biodiversity and natural flood management. At Swineley Farm, historic drainage grips were blocked to initiate large-scale blanket bog restoration. In Wales, the Upstream Thinking project at Esgair Arth began restoring the Afon Arth catchment, removing invasive species and reconnecting fragmented habitats. Internally, the complexity of the operation increased. The systems, data, and delivery capability required to manage assets at this scale were tested in real time. What had been designed in earlier years was now being executed across tens of thousands of acres.

2024 demonstrated that OC could not only acquire and assemble land at scale, but actively restore, measure, and manage it—under the attention of a market that was beginning to understand the significance of what was being built.

By 2025, OC had built the portfolio. Now it needed to tell the story. Rich’s first book, Scaling Conservation, was published, and the Second Nature podcast grew past 80 episodes, bringing the world’s most compelling thinkers in conservation, capital, and technology into conversation. The commercial proof points arrived with force. A transaction with Burges Salmon achieved a world-record price of £125 per tonne for Woodland Carbon Credits – because OC could prove every single step in the chain. The portfolio’s working valuation approached £400 million. The team reached almost fifty people, with expertise spanning environmental science, finance, data, property, and content. We laid the foundations for Oxygen Capital, establishing the structure required to manage institutional investment, alongside Oxygen Intelligence—developing the data and technology needed to measure, model, and manage natural capital with rigour and confidence. The team expanded, and so did the outcome.

2025 made one thing clear: We are not building projects, we are building the infrastructure for natural capital at scale.