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#InventedAtImperial: Treeconomy
#InventedAtImperial
Treeconomy
Harry Grocott, (Founder/CEO) (MSc Climate Change, Management & Finance (2020)
Treeconomy provides an income for landowners by planting trees, measuring the carbon captured with new drone technology and selling this as carbon offset packages to corporates looking to hit net zero targets.
The problem The Committee on Climate Change has a target of 30,000 trees to be planted annually as part of the UK’s legally binding Net Zero 2050 strategy, but last year only 13,000 were planted. Farmers manage 71 per cent of the UK’s land area and will clearly be involved in this planting but many are cash poor and struggle to justify the opportunity cost of tree planting. Farmers want to maintain the lifestyle of farming, but unless they can sustain themselves financially, they won’t be able to. On the other side of the coin, companies are increasingly setting net zero carbon targets, and are finding there simply aren’t many UK-domestic carbon capture projects from which to buy offsets. The solution At Treeconomy, we provide a service and marketplace to landowners who plant trees and woodlands. We use drone-based LiDAR to quantify the carbon captured which differentiates us from the rest of our potential competitors. Current project developers use tape measures to provide a best estimate, which limits
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Robert Godfrey, (Co-founder) (MSc Environmental Technology 2020)
accuracy and scalability. We package this as carbon offsets and sell these high-quality offsets to corporates – providing a strong financial incentive and reward to our ‘carbon farmers’. Our corporate offset purchasers get a higher quality carbon offset due to our technology advantage and are willing to pay a premium for these offsets, particularly as they are domestically sourced, but also because we can guarantee that the carbon we sell has actually been captured and stored. That means more money for our carbon farmers, and a virtuous circle. Where did the idea originate? Harry was working in wealth management but couldn’t find a credible investment that would provide both a financial return and a positive climate impact, which is what a lot of high-net-worth clients were interested in. Trees and forests could provide a great investment profile: plant trees, quantify carbon captured, sell the carbon yearly, receive income. It would provide a very credible income-investment, and one which should increase
over time as the price of carbon appreciates. The current carbon price varies from single digits up to £24 in the UK, but Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates suggest that future carbon pricing could be north of $100 per tonne. How did your team meet? We met through a sustainability masterclass held at Imperial in June 2019. Treeconomy had just joined the Climate-KIC LaunchPad and I had been invited to the soft launch of the White City Campus as part of that. During the networking I met David Wheeler (co-founder at Academy for Sustainable innovation, and Principal at Sustainable Transitions), who liked the sound of Treeconomy and invited me to present the idea at his masterclass that week, called the Academy for Sustainable Innovation. I presented, Rob was in the masterclass and we went from there. Do you have any advisers? Our main adviser is Dr Irina Fedorenko, previous co-founder of BioCarbon Engineering, a drone Issue 3 / 2020–21
