Natural capital: the £ trillion opportunity hiding in plain sight

Dr Rich Stockdale at Oxygen Conservation explains the role of natural capital in sustainability, business and investment

 

Not long ago, natural capital sat outside serious financial conversation - a cause for philanthropists, charities, and hobbyists. It was slow, small-scale, and disconnected from capital markets. That era is over.

 

Natural capital, the world’s stock of productive natural assets - soil, water, woodland, wetlands, peatlands, and biodiversity - is now on track to become one of the largest alternative asset classes of the 21st century. It’s no longer about “donating” to the planet; it’s about recognising, pricing, and trading the underlying economic value of our natural infrastructure.

 

The market is moving from the fringes to the financial mainstream at speed, creating the investment opportunity of this generation.

 

 

From passion project to portfolio play

For decades, conservation funding relied on donations, grants, and very occasional government support, chronically undercapitalised and structurally unable to scale. The result? Good intentions, limited returns, little to no meaningful progress.

 

Natural capital investment changes the model entirely. By valuing ecosystem services - carbon sequestration, biodiversity uplift, flood prevention, and water purification - we can create tradable products: high-quality carbon credits, biodiversity units, and other ecosystem services. These generate premium, long-term cash flows, providing asset managers and investors with a new, diversifying source of returns.

 

The potential opportunity is enormous. The UN calls natural capital the world’s largest untapped market, a multi-trillion-dollar asset class in the making. In the UK alone, Green Finance projections require over £10 billion of private capital annually over the next 10 years to hit statutory environmental targets.

 

For those able to deliver verified, high-quality credits and ecosystem services, the combination of tightening regulation and rising corporate demand is setting the stage for significant and sustained price appreciation.

 

 

A strategic imperative for business

Natural capital is not a soft ESG gesture; it’s a real asset strategy. Physical risks from climate change (floods, droughts, supply chain disruption) and increasing requirements to disclose climate and nature-related risks under TCFD and TNFD frameworks mean corporate portfolios are increasingly tackling their exposure to growing environmental risks.

 

Forward-thinking companies have already moved: sovereign wealth funds incorporating natural capital risk into portfolio models; listed corporates funding peatland restoration or woodland creation to generate credits; infrastructure investors integrating natural capital into multi-asset strategies.

 

In short, natural capital is becoming a hedge, a growth lever, and a competitive differentiator.

 

 

Quality as the market driver

As with any new market, quality is the differentiator. The voluntary carbon market’s early controversies damaged confidence in poor-quality credits but created outsized demand for premium, verified, and transparently recorded products.

 

Premium products now command a price multiple. Our “Beyond Carbon” deal with Burges Salmon sold UK nature-based credits at £125 per tonne, a world record at the time. Our own market-leading Oxygen Carbon Curve — project prices for premium credits exceeding £500 per tonne by 2050. This scarcity premium is already visible and will deepen as supply lags demand.

 

 

Scaling the model

At Oxygen Conservation, we are a leading natural capital asset manager, deploying capital to acquire large-scale landscapes with both appreciation potential and immediate value opportunities. From Cornwall’s temperate rainforests to the Cairngorms, our approach blends data-led ecological restoration with a value creation stack designed for resilience and growth: 

• Natural capital products (carbon, biodiversity, nature credits)
• Renewable energy development
• Built property & strategic land promotion
• Ecotourism and place-based economic activity
• Strategic land value uplift 

By packaging these returns in portfolios structured for institutional ownership and secondary liquidity, we make nature-based assets investable at scale.

 

 

Professionalising the sector

The natural capital economy requires a hybrid skillset: finance fluency, ecological expertise, data analytics, and market storytelling. This isn’t charity work; it’s asset management with an ecological engine. Teams in this sector must run like high-performance investment outfits, disciplined, data-driven, and geared for growth.

 

 

Three trends in natural capital markets

The natural capital economy continues to evolve quickly, with several themes emerging that are shaping how capital, capability, and products come together: 

1. Capital with clarity. Dedicated allocations to natural capital are enabling managers to secure large-scale, high-quality projects and build institutional-grade product pipelines. This focus on defined capital pools is helping the sector move beyond opportunistic deals toward strategic, landscape-level programmes.
2. Counterparties matter. A cluster of UK operators (Rebalance Earth, Nattergal, Restore, Environment Bank) and specialist advisors/delivery partners (Treestory, Caledonian Climate Partners, Credit Nature) are setting benchmarks for quality. The credibility, governance, and delivery capability of counterparties are proving to be key determinants of asset integrity and long-term performance.
3. Premium products in demand. High-integrity carbon credits, biodiversity net gain units, and emerging nature credits are attracting strong interest, with pricing influenced by scarcity and tightening standards. These products are increasingly seen as combining environmental outcomes with potential resilience against market volatility. 

 

The macro shift

We are entering a new economic era where nature moves from being an unpriced externality to a priced, traded, and yield-generating asset. This is not “impact investing” as a sideline. It’s the creation of a new pillar of the global financial system.

 

The capital flows will be measured in trillions. The winners will be those who treat natural capital with the same rigour, structuring, and speed as any other high-growth asset class. 

 

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Dr. Rich Stockdale is the author of Scaling Conservation and the founder of Oxygen Conservation, where he has built one of the world’s most impactful natural capital portfolios, valued at hundreds of millions of pounds and actively transforming thousands of acres into thriving ecosystems for people and wildlife. Oxygen Conservation is building the market, the product set, and the portfolio that institutional capital will scale into. If you want to join this journey or need guidance finding your own route into the natural capital economy, reach out

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and ipopba