I have always been fascinated by the most influential coaches in sport, deliberately taking their ideas into unfamiliar territory. Not to prove they are right, but to discover where their thinking breaks.
Carlo Ancelotti winning leagues in Italy, England, France, Germany, and Spain was not about tactics alone. It was due to principles that travelled. Pep Guardiola taking a possession-heavy philosophy from Barcelona to Bayern Munich and then to Manchester City was not an exercise in replication. It was a live experiment. Same ideas. Different players. Different culture. Different constraints. The philosophy survived because it adapted.
That distinction matters.
Ideas that only work in one league, one culture, or one system are not repeatable or scalable. They might be elegant. They might be profitable. They might even be purpose-driven. But if they collapse without home-field advantage, they are not a winning formula.
At Oxygen Conservation, we spend a lot of time thinking about scale. Scale of land. Scale of capital. Scale of impact. But real scale is not achieved by doing more of the same in familiar conditions. It is achieved by understanding what translates and what breaks when you move across borders, cultures, ecosystems, and regulatory frameworks.
Testing this belief sat firmly behind our recent trip to Sweden, where I had the privilege of delivering a keynote lecture to the MBA cohort at the University of Gothenburg, invited by the brilliant Viktor Elliott (Director, Business IT Lab), Peter Neubauer (Founder), and the wider NaturaTua team. We were joined by around fifty MBA students, senior academics from the University, and some of the most influential figures shaping the future of investment in Sweden. We were especially grateful to be joined by representatives from AP2, one of Sweden’s leading pension funds, an allocator that already operates with a clearly defined mandate to deploy capital in ways that benefit biodiversity.
Formally, it was a speaking engagement. Functionally, it was an experiment.
Testing the Model
This trip was a chance to take our thinking out of the UK context and expose it to very different factors, a differing environmental baseline, cultural relationship with nature, and investment ecosystem. A chance to be challenged, questioned, and sharpened by people who see risk, regulation, and return through many different lenses.
Post Game Analysis: Here’s What We Learned
The first thing that becomes obvious when you spend time in Sweden is that the environmental context is materially different. Climate patterns are different. Seasonal rhythms are different. Ecological baselines are different. Even the way land is used, accessed, and understood feels distinct.
The most striking figure we heard what that around 70% of Sweden remains forested compared with around 13% in the UK.
Perhaps even more striking than the physical environment is the relationship people have with it. In Sweden, nature is not something you visit at the weekend. It is something you live alongside. Wolves are not abstract symbols in rewilding debates. They are present. Moose are not romanticised from afar. They are part of daily reality. There is a cultural literacy around wildlife that feels embedded rather than performative.
That matters: natural capital models do not exist in isolation. They sit with social contracts. They sit on public trust. They sit on centuries of cultural narratives about ownership, stewardship, and coexistence.
You cannot simply lift a model from one geography and expect it to land intact in another. And that’s where everything gets interesting.
Pace, and the Shape of Risk
One of the most important lessons from Sweden was about pace.
In the UK, we often frame bureaucracy as the enemy of progress. Sometimes that is justified. Slow decision-making, fragmented governance, and outdated regulatory processes can absolutely stall innovation and delay action that is urgently needed.
But Sweden complicates that narrative.
We learned that decision-making there is often slower and more deliberative. Consensus matters. Legitimacy matters. At first glance, that can feel like friction. But we can appreciate that it reflects a deep cultural commitment to long-term thinking and institutional trust.
For investors, this presents a genuine trade-off.
Slower pace can reduce execution risk and build stronger mandates. It can embed projects more deeply within communities and institutions. But it can also delay response to rapidly accelerating crises like climate change and biodiversity loss.
The question is not whether one approach is right and the other wrong. The question is how these differences shape risk, opportunity, and timelines.
Regulation: Protection or Preservation of the Present
Some of the most provocative conversations during the trip centred on regulation.
Regulation is intended to protect nature – but it can also protect outdated assumptions and practices. The risk is not over-regulation, but regulation that prioritises compliance over improvement.
In Sweden, as elsewhere, we were shown examples where regulation appears more focused on preserving the present than improving the future. That distinction matters.
Protecting nature should not mean freezing systems in time, especially when advances in ecological science, monitoring technology, and land management allow us to understand ecosystems in far more sophisticated ways than even a decade ago.
The reminder for us was clear.
We need to remain open-minded with our own understanding and beliefs. The frameworks we inherit and currently implement are not immutable truths. They are products of their time (and place), and we must be willing to question them, time and time again.
Immediate Feedback from the Next Generation of Capital
One of the most energising aspects of the trip was engaging directly with the MBA students.
There is something uniquely clarifying about being questioned by people who are smart, curious, and unburdened by legacy thinking. They ask different questions. They challenge assumptions you did not realise you were making. They force you to articulate not just what you do, but why you do it.
The feedback was immediate, direct, and thoughtful.
It was also a powerful reminder that the next generation of talent does not need convincing that climate change and biodiversity collapse matter. They already know. I love audience participation, so when I asked the room how many people thought the price of carbon would go up dramatically over time, virtually every hand was raised.
And the fundamental question they’re asking is whether we have financial systems, investment structures, and institutional courage capable of responding at the speed and scale required to solve the climate and biodiversity crises.
Climate Change Is Not Abstract, It’s Physical
We went to Sweden hoping to experience a wonderfully festive, snowy Christmas season. Instead, much like the UK, that familiar rhythm has quietly disappeared. The cold, crisp winters that shape culture, memory, and identity are being replaced by warmth and rain.
It sounds small, but it is not. It represents an emotional and cultural loss as much as an environmental one. Climate change was not a statistic on a slide or a scenario in a report. It was present in the air, in the rain, and in the shared sense that something familiar is slipping away.
That lived experience changes the tone of the debate. It shifts what feels acceptable, what feels urgent, and what now feels overdue.
What Translates, What Breaks
So, returning to our experiment, how would I synthesise what Sweden taught us about the transferability of our approach to Scaling Conservation to different geographies?
Some things translate remarkably well. The idea that nature can be treated as investable infrastructure resonates strongly. The belief that environmental impact and financial performance can reinforce rather than undermine each other is
grounded in sophistication, not scepticism. The ambition to operate at scale feels appropriate, not excessive.
Other elements require adaptation. Language matters. Cultural framing matters. Assumptions about land ownership, access, and the role of private capital vary significantly. The way in which trust is built is different. The way risk is perceived is different.
Sweden has left me more confident in the applicability of the Oxygen Conservation model beyond the UK. Not because the contexts are the same, but because the underlying principles hold when they are tested, challenged, and adapted. The core idea that the environment can be treated as long-term, investable infrastructure proves resilient precisely because it’s… natural.
Ending with Questions
I will close this reflection the same way I closed my keynote in Gothenburg.
What type of world do we want?
Do we have the financial systems and processes capable of making that world a reality?
And how are we going to invest in the future, not just our money, but our time and talent?