Environmental sector isn’t “investable or professional yet”

Editorial

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“I wanted to change the environment for the better. I wanted to take weirs out of rivers. I wanted to plant trees and reintroduce species and build new nature reserves, “ explained Stockdale on his motivation for starting Oxygen Capital in 2021, which invests in land to restore natural capital and sells carbon credits.

Stockdale stated that by the end of this year, the company will have 45,000 acres and a £150 million valuation. He said: “When I told some colleagues in the Wildlife Trust they laughed, because the speed of change in the environmental sector just wasn’t there before.”

When discussing the investment landscape in nature, Stockdale illustrated his point with a cricket metaphor: “The environment sector is Test cricket. It’s slow and laboured and traditional and protected. Investors don’t want Test cricket. They want T20. They want speed and urgency, and IRRs. Nature doesn’t care about IRR and that’s the problem, we don’t have a language to coalesce between the two.”

Regarding the environmental sector as a whole, Stockdale said it “is warm and lovely and kind and generous, and the standard is really low, so it’s not investable as a thing. People don’t work hard, they don’t understand what performance culture is.” He added, “It isn’t a sector that’s investable or professional yet.”

Looking to the dimension of criticism in the space, Stockdale stated they everything they do will be criticised. He argued: “Some people believe that the concept of natural capital and profiting from nature is inherently inappropriate and wrong, and you’re not going to change their mind, but that’s part of the logic that’s got us into the situation. My personal view on the cause of climate change, it’s the absence of a price on carbon and pollution.”

On the scale of opportunity in the natural capital market in the UK, Stockdale stated he believes there is “£20 million worth of high quality, premium natural capital acquisition opportunities.”

Looking to the importance of work with in this space, Stockdale concluded: “It can’t be any more urgent. We need to go, and we need to go fast. We need to do this; people want to. We’re making strides every day, improving things and making it an easier space to get into and do some incredible things. The flip side of that, and one that’s a weird dichotomy for people to carry quite a lot, is the worse the climate gets, the better that is for this business. That’s a really unfortunate thing to feel and to be aware of sometimes.”