Partner: Great Yellow

Location: UK-wide nature recovery portfolio

Standard: Woodland Carbon Code (WCC)

Technology deployed: Treeconomy’s Due Diligence (DD) Tool

The mission: Help Great Yellow screen Woodland Carbon Code eligibility across its nature financing portfolio early enough to inform the natural capital strategy, building a clearer picture upfront of what a site can offer across stacked revenue streams (carbon, BNG, water) to demonstrate a high level business case to landowners and project developers.  

Great Yellow exists to drive regenerative land-use transformation at scale by connecting land management, investment, and outcome buyers into a single, integrated framework. The organisation has expanded rapidly (growing from eight to nearly fifty people in under two years) driven by three operational pillars: Nature Projects (natural capital strategy), Capital (investor financing), and Trade (selling verified ecosystem outcomes). 

To power the early scoping phase of this model across its UK portfolio, Great Yellow established a formal commercial partnership with Treeconomy to license our Due Diligence (DD) Tool. Since then, automated spatial screening has become a core fixture of how their Nature Projects team evaluates site potential. To understand what that integration looks like in practice, we sat down with Caitlin Ciceri, Natural Capital Programme Strategy Manager at Great Yellow and who is currently using the tool most closely to explore how geospatial due diligence is shaping her daily workflow and broader strategy. 

Caitlin sits directly at the intersection of where ecological ambition meets financial reality. Her role is to take holistic restoration plans designed by internal ecologists and identify what can be monetised to build a bankable, investor-ready natural capital strategy:

To bridge this gap between restoration design and investment modeling, Great Yellow integrated Treeconomy’s Due Diligence (DD) Tool into its core workflow to assess Woodland Carbon Code eligibility across whole landscapes.

Before adopting the DD Tool, Woodland Carbon Code eligibility was assessed late in a project lifecycle, only after the ecological strategy and planting plans were already fixed. Eligibility was a box to check against a plan that had already been decided, rather than a strategic input into designing that plan in the first place.

As Caitlin explains, this sequencing created significant blind spots:

This approach carried a tangible cost. Eligible hectares went unnoticed because whole landscapes were rarely screened upfront. Furthermore, confirming eligibility required contracting third-party specialists to manually run site assessments, introducing financial friction and operational delays. 

With the DD Tool, Great Yellow now screens Woodland Carbon Code eligibility across a landscape at the outset, before the planting plan is fixed, not after. On one 150,000-hectare project, the team had already identified around 1,800 hectares of planned tree planting. Caitlin used the DD Tool to confirm how much of that plan was actually WCC-eligible.

This early vantage point has transformed how Great Yellow supports its clients. Rather than rubber-stamping completed plans, Caitlin’s team can actively advise landowners and ecologists early in the process, pointing out where planting is both carbon-eligible and ecologically appropriate. 

Day to day, three features of the tool do most of the work for her: the eligibility map, the red-amber-green flagging, and a summary view of the percentage of eligible land.

By screening a landscape before its ecological strategy is finalised, Great Yellow can identify additional eligible hectares across its pipeline that may otherwise have gone unrecognised, expanding the revenue generating footprint of a project while remaining true to what’s ecologically right for the site. The DD Tool also works the other way: flagging land that appears plantable but isn’t eligible (recently forested land, or land near archaeological sites, for example) so that Great Yellow’s projects avoid wasting time and money developing parcels that cannot qualify under the Woodland Carbon Code.

For Caitlin, much of her role is translating what natural capital markets mean for a specific landscape to clients and landholders who are new to the concept. The DD Tool’s eligibility maps have become central to that conversation.

Replacing manual external consultancy with Treeconomy’s platform has reduced cost, cut friction, and sped up deal readiness. Just as importantly, Great Yellow benefits from dedicated technical support to help navigate complex spatial findings whenever needed.

Great Yellow’s pipeline spans carbon, biodiversity, and water markets. While the current DD Tool centers heavily on the Woodland Carbon Code, the UK market’s strong focus on peatland and soil restoration presents clear opportunities for broader scope. Treeconomy is working closely with Great Yellow to understand the needs, using that input to help guide how the DD Tool’s screening capabilities expand across additional land-based standards. 

For Caitlin, the combination of intuitive technology and collaborative support makes a clear case for natural capital managers:

Great Yellow’s experience shows how evaluating eligibility across whole landscapes early instead of  late and parcel by parcel, unlocks financeable opportunity while preserving ecological integrity. Whether you are managing land portfolios or developing projects, Treeconomy provides the geospatial technology, technical rigor, and technical support required to scale nature recovery with confidence.