Pioneering Carbon Removal: An Interview with Treeconomy’s CEO on Our Latest Sale
An Interview with Harry Grocott: His Perspective on Our First-of-its-Kind Sale of Carbon Removal from a Unique Rewilding Project
Project Development
Science & Tech
Jul 18, 2024
Carolina Amu Trujillo

We were excited to announce our groundbreaking sale to Naturalis last week, purchasing carbon removal from Nattergal’s Boothby Rewilding Project. This collaboration marks a significant milestone for our company and the broader carbon markets, as it represents the first-ever sale of carbon credits from a rewilding project.
To delve deeper into the significance of this collaboration and its implications for nature-based carbon solutions, we sat down with our CEO, Harry Grocott. In this interview, Harry discusses the impact of this pioneering project, the crucial role of Treeconomy's technology in validating carbon sequestration, and the broader importance of supporting rewilding initiatives.
Can you tell us about the Boothby Rewilding Project and its significance for Treeconomy and the carbon markets?
HG: The Boothby Wildland project is a biodiversity-driven nature restoration project in England near Grantham. It's an example of an incredible high-impact project; it's not just another tree-planting project; it's a process-led nature restoration programme with a multi-habitat approach. This is complex, far more complex than most projects we’ve seen at Treeconomy.
At the moment, this sort of project doesn’t fit under the UK’s voluntary carbon market standard, The Woodland Carbon Code, and we haven’t seen a project like this internationally under other standards either. It doesn’t fit under the UK’s WCC because it isn’t a plantation forestry project, which is what the current system is designed for. We like the Woodland Carbon Code, but it's just not yet flexible enough to accept projects like Boothby.
Treeconomy is a mission-driven business; we enable nature restoration projects, using advanced technology monitoring to quantify and evidence the carbon impact of projects like Boothby. With more robust data, we can get buyers and investors comfortable with new types of projects like Boothby and work at carbon prices, which will allow this type of project to succeed. The significance of this project for us at Treeconomy is that it's the first time we’ve been able to put two years of R&D work into action. This is breaking the top of the iceberg for a rewilding project. We now need to scale this across tens of thousands of hectares and have proper impact at scale.
How does Treeconomy’s technology contribute to the success of unique nature-based projects like rewilding initiatives?
HG: Boothby and other rewilding projects remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere from above-ground woody biomass and within the soil itself. Of course, they have a biodiversity and ecosystem restoration impact that is arguably more, or at least as, important as the carbon impact, but we focus on the carbon benefits at Treeconomy.
The woody biomass is generally in the form of scrub, a messy bush-like growth. The important part of this is that until now, it has not been possible to accurately quantify and model the carbon impact of this scrubby biomass. This is the main source of carbon removal in the first 20 years or so of a rewilding project - so not being able to evidence the carbon volume of this biomass is a major barrier for these projects.
Treeconomy has spent the last two years building a scrubby biomass carbon calculation programme. To make this happen, we’ve had support from the Rewilding Britain Innovation Fund and the Natural England Investment Readiness programme.
We're now in a position to scale this R&D programme substantially, building a data set that can be used across the UK to model rewilding carbon impacts more accurately and for longer periods of time.
What are the key challenges in measuring and quantifying carbon sequestration in rewilding projects, and how does Treeconomy address these challenges?
HG: Rewilding projects are not like plantation forestry or afforestation projects. For conventional afforestation projects there is a fixed planting schedule with known inputs (i.e., the species and the number of trees planted are known in advance, and growth rates can be modelled). In addition, there is an existing dataset and relationships, borrowed from commercial timber forestry, used to convert tree size into carbon volumes. While this process can be limited when tree spacing increases and we see more variety in species mixes, there is at least an existing process and general market acceptance.
None of this scaffolding for carbon calculation nor projections exists for rewilding and scrubby biomass. To date, this has limited rewilding projects from accessing carbon finance. This isn’t just a problem for voluntary markets but also means these projects aren’t considered as land use change options for policymakers such as the UK’s Committee on Climate Change who set the recommended 30,000ha of new afforestation for the UK Government to help them achieve the UK’s legally binding Net Zero carbon emissions target.
If policymakers can model rewilding projects, would they be recommended as part of this mix? Maybe.
Being able to evidence impact right now, as we’ve done for the Knepp Estate, is vital to help us model the future impacts for projects like Boothby. And now we're seeing buyers comfortable enough with this data not just to fund carbon removal on these projects but to pay a high price for this to be done.
How do you see this collaboration with Naturalis influencing the future of carbon markets and nature-based solutions?
HG: One key thing for us all to remember is that we are attempting to mitigate both a climate and biodiversity crisis. This principle has informed Treeconomy’s focus on nature-based solutions to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. We can see buyers are active and putting billions of dollars into funding carbon removal, so if we can use that to restore damaged ecosystems at the same time, all the better.
A buyer like The Naturalis Biodiversity Center understands this prerogative better than most. Working with Remove, a European Carbon Dioxide Removal accelerator, they pulled together a request for proposals that hit both of these criteria—proven carbon dioxide removal that also supports ecosystem restoration. Importantly, they recognise this is hard to achieve and are therefore willing to pay the necessary price.
In the future, we expect to see this model repeated by other buyers or groups of buyers, like the Symbiosis Coalition. Buyers in the voluntary carbon market have finally been called out for underpaying for quality, with their reputations now damaged. The active buyers recognise that poor-quality projects damage their reputations far more in dollar terms than the money they ‘save’ by buying cheap offsets. Designing smart buying mechanisms that present the required terms to suppliers is a trend we’ll see repeat. We’re grateful to have worked with the Naturalis Biodiversity Center as they set this trend and put their money to work impactfully. They’re leading the way.
What message would you like to convey to potential buyers and stakeholders about investing in rewilding projects and supporting accurate carbon removal validation?
HG: The message from this collaboration is that we’re open for business and ready to scale. We’ve been dancing around this chicken-and-egg problem for too long; good projects cost more, and the carbon price needs to be higher, but buyers can’t see quality and are scared, so they have pushed prices down to try and mitigate this uncertainty. Good projects are hard to find and harder to create.
Treeconomy’s technology can now prove the exact impact of carbon removal, and by partnering with really great project developers like Nattergal, we can match this with projects that have both carbon and ecosystem restoration impacts.
I can tell you we are now working on more and larger projects, just like Boothby, and we’re seeking buyers. Treeconomy’s role is to find great projects, quantify their impact, and connect them to buyers. We currently have millions of tonnes of carbon removal potential and are keen to partner with good buyers to bring these projects to life.