I’m fortunate to be invited to speak at a lot of events, and increasingly, I say no. Time is the most precious thing we have, so let me start by explaining why I chose to invest mine at Saffery’s Natural Capital Event yesterday.
In short, that room matters more to the future of natural capital than almost any other audience I could speak to.
The Adults in the Room
Finance Professionals are sometimes positioned as gatekeepers. I don’t think that’s quite right. In my experience, they’re the adults in the room. They’re the people who decide what’s real. What survives an audit. What survives tax. What goes to the Board. And in time, they’ll help decide whether the Natural Capital is an Asset Class, and perhaps all of us survive at all.
Plenty of sectors have had ideas, ambition and vision.
Very few have scaled without finance professionals stepping in and saying, “Right – how does this actually work? Oh, and who’s going to pay for it?
Short of Discipline
Natural capital today, for the first time in its history, is not short of ambition. What it’s still short of is discipline. And that’s why I wanted to open yesterday by recognising the incredibly important role, and asking for help.
Because the next phase of this sector won’t be won by better storytelling, although we’ve got that bit covered just in case it helps. It will be won by people who are prepared to deal with difficult questions and the consequences of those answers.
Nature as Critical Infrastructure
Nature is increasingly being recognised for what it really is: CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE. REAL, PHYSICAL, ECONOMIC INFRASTRUCTURE.
Ecosystems regulate temperature, water flows, and the very stability of land itself, all at scale. In doing so, they reduce flood, fire, and heat risk, underpin food and energy systems, and shape the risk profile of our entire economy.
These functions are not abstract environmental benefits; they are the physical foundations on which insurance markets, supply chains, and long-term economic activity depend.
One of the ideas that has been occupying my thinking of late is that the more digital our world becomes, the more reliant it is on nature!
The awkward truth is that we are now trying to formalise and capitalise this natural infrastructure decades after we began consuming it. That creates friction. Accounting complexity. Tax ambiguity. Timing mismatches between biology and balance sheets. Risk that doesn’t behave the way spreadsheets would like it to. None of that is theoretical. All of it lands, eventually, on someone’s desk in finance.
And it’s worth pausing on that, because this kind of mismatch isn’t actually new, and of course, everyone in the room yesterday knew that.
Accounting has always dealt with the gap between messy reality, and neat and, tidy reporting. You already live with the tension between the balance sheet and the P&L: one a snapshot, the other a story. They’re never perfectly aligned, and again like nature, perhaps they’re not supposed to be.
Accrual accounting is simply a way of smoothing time — not a claim that accounting reflects reality perfectly. Natural capital just makes that fact harder to ignore. It feels tangible, behaves economically, but sits awkwardly between the physical and the intangible. Exactly what I mean when I say nature is infrastructure. And when something doesn’t fit an existing accounting mould, our instinct is usually to reach for a guide or a map. These aren’t philosophical problems. They’re practical ones.
Maps, Tourists, and the Reality of the Terrain
I’ll be honest with you. As a sector, we love maps and strategy documents. Emerging standards. The only maps we have for this adventure are imperfect ones, borrowed from earlier waves of infrastructure development: renewable energy, project finance, long-dated assets that once felt unfamiliar and risky until finance learned how to hold them.
But maps are what you give tourists.
Where we’re going with natural capital is an adventure. The maps will lag reality. The pace of change today is faster than it has ever been, and it will never be this slow again. Markets don’t pause while frameworks catch up. What we need right now are experienced guides – people who understand judgement, sequencing, risk, and consequence. People who are comfortable making defensible decisions with imperfect information, and then improving them as the terrain becomes a little less uneven.
That’s what financial professionals have always done when new asset classes emerge.
And that’s exactly where natural capital now sits.
The Market Is Splitting
These markets are no longer about philanthropy or impact only investment – but they’re not yet fully formed infrastructure investments either. They’re emerging in the space between the two. And in that space, credibility decides what survives.
We’re already seeing a divide open up. Between premium, high-integrity Natural Capital products that can stand up to scrutiny, and commoditised volume that can’t. Between projects that are interesting and platforms that are genuinely investable. Between things that work at pilot scale, and structures that can absorb institutional capital without breaking.
Institutional investors aren’t asking whether nature matters. That debate is over. They’re asking whether this market is investable at scale. They want consistency. Governance. Accounting treatment they can defend. Tax structures that don’t unravel under pressure.
What We’ve Built at Oxygen Conservation
Over the past five years, we have built one of the UK’s largest Natural Capital portfolios, totalling more than 50,000 acres across England, Scotland and Wales, with an estimated value of around £400 million. Portfolio One (as we call it) is therefore the first natural capital portfolio to be assembled at true institutional scale and quality, not a concept, not a pilot, but operating in the real world with real assets, real revenues, real costs, and real scrutiny.
Building it has forced us to confront early the exact questions yesterday’s room existed to answer: how natural capital is valued, how it sits on the balance sheet, how risk is understood, and how we ensure it’s only the beginning.
We’re Going to See A Conservation Unicorn
We’re in the process of preparing to raise what we believe will be the sector’s first genuine £1 billion natural capital fund. I want to say this without understatement: that is not possible without finance professionals.
Not without their judgement. Not without their challenge and their feedback. Not without their ability to navigate complexity, and importantly, their willingness to bring confidence to chaos, appreciating sometimes that we may have caused the chaos.
And I’ll be candid, that’s uncomfortable.
Because it means slowing things down in places where enthusiasm wants to run ahead. It means accepting that some things we care deeply about won’t survive contact with financial reality unless we do the hard work now.
But that’s how durable markets are built.
The Machinery of Credibility
The sessions yesterday were technical by design. Accounting treatment. Tax considerations. Practical guidance. That is the machinery of credibility. That is how natural capital earns its place alongside traditional infrastructure, not as a special case, not as a moral exemption, but as the most important asset class of our time.
If we get this right, natural capital becomes auditable, investable, and resilient. If we get it wrong, it won’t be because nature was too complex.
It will be because the adults arrived too late.
A Direct Ask
So I closed by asking for help, genuinely.
Not for endorsement. Not for applause. For help in doing the hard work. In stress-testing assumptions. In shaping standards before they harden. In guiding this market while it’s still forming, rather than inheriting rules written by people who never had to implement them.
Every successful market has a moment where a small group of serious professionals quietly decide to make a difference. I believe yesterday was one of those moments.
So now, it’s over to the adults in the room.