Imagine using carbon finance to fund nature restoration. That’s the concept behind Treeconomy — a young, growing carbon-removal company. The idea is simple: find investment, plant trees, capture carbon and sell carbon credits to companies to offset their carbon emissions.
By encouraging landowners to become carbon farmers, the company also hopes to spread the message that the carbon- offset business can be lucrative. “You can transition your land use from, let’s say, sheep farming — where you’re extracting a product like meat or wool, which emits CO2 — to something that captures carbon, and you’re going to get paid for it as well,” says Harry Grocott, CEO and co-founder of Treeconomy. “Carbon farming is a fairly passive form of income — it just involves planting trees. We help landowners to create these projects and connect them with big companies, because there’s no stock exchange for carbon.”
Treeconomy was born when Grocott, a geography graduate who spent three years working in wealth management in London, realized that there was no way of investing in effective carbon-removal strategies. “No one knew how to calculate the carbon content of trees and forests, and therefore, nobody could make money out of it,” Grocott says.
Treeconomy uses two main types of technology to calculate the carbon content of forests. One is high-resolution satellite imagery, which uses private satellites to take pictures of forests. The other involves flying drones over forests and firing light beams at the trees, using lidar (light detection and ranging) or picture-based technology, to generate 3D images of the forest.
More and more companies are trying to reduce their net emissions. “There’s huge movement on the demand side,” Grocott says. “The question is where do these carbon credits come from?” With individual companies like energy giant Shell looking to increase its carbon offsets to 120 million tonnes by 2030, there is a big imbalance on the supply end. According to the Bank of America, the carbon offset market will need to grow fiftyfold to achieve 2050 net-zero emissions goals. Despite the need for carbon farming, starting Treeconomy was a challenge. After three attempts to get funding from the Sustainable Innovation Fund, Treeconomy received just over £100,000 (€120,000), which allowed Grocott and his co-founder, Robert Godfrey, to prove the concept, build a team, test the technology and start some pilot projects. “Our theory is we need to make carbon-removing land use really profitable, or at least competitive with other forms of land use,” Grocott says. “We operate at a 70:30 business model, so 70 per cent of everything we sell goes straight back to the landowner, and we take 30 per cent.”
Globally, more than 50 gigatonnes of greenhouse gases are emitted every year. With global net-zero targets, the aim is to get to zero, or at least equivalent to zero, by 2050. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), one third of the journey to net zero can be achieved with nature-based solutions alone.
Treeconomy projects range from R&D work on the carbon value of dynamic rewilding landscapes to working with big companies and a number of smaller B Corps. It is sure to grow over the coming years, as will its trees and the number of carbon offsets available on the market.
Takeaways...
What is net zero?
What is carbon negative?
The world emits CO2 into the atmosphere, but CO2 is also removed — by trees, for example. We reach net zero when we produce no more than the amount we take out. That’s only the first step, however.
Carbon negative is when we remove more CO2 than we produce. Two countries are already doing this: the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan and the South American country of Suriname. And Panama, in Central America, is expected to join the carbon-negative club this year. Forests, which absorb CO2, enjoy a high level of legal protection in these countries. There are also strict rules about reducing carbon emissions.