What if the biggest barrier to solving climate change isn’t technology — but the way we finance it?

In this conversation, Troy Carter sits down with Dr. Delton Chen, founder of the Global Carbon Reward, to explore a radically different approach to funding climate and ecological action at the scale the problem demands.

Delton’s idea starts with a simple observation: there is a massive global shortfall in climate finance. Projects struggle to get off the ground, and current market structures rely on fragmented standards, voluntary demand, and complex chains of intermediaries.

The Global Carbon Reward proposes something different — a system where:

• Climate-positive actions are directly rewarded through a new financial asset (XCR)
• Central banks act as guarantors of a long-term price floor
• Private capital is mobilised by treating climate action as an investable, low-risk asset
• Carbon is no longer traded for offsetting, but accounted for and retired at the point of impact

They go deep into:

• Why the world faces a multi-trillion dollar climate finance gap

• How current carbon markets compare to a reward-based system
• The role central banks could play in stabilising long-term climate investment
• Whether this kind of system can realistically emerge — and where it might begin
• The deeper challenge: how to price and manage systemic risk to the Earth’s carbon cycle

This is a wide-ranging conversation that steps back from day-to-day project work and asks a more fundamental question:
If we were designing the system from scratch, how would we fund the transition to a stable climate?

🔗 Dr. Delton Chen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deltonchen/🌐 Global Carbon Reward: https://globalcarbonreward.org/

🎙️ Listen on Spotify / Watch on YouTube: The Earthshot Podcast

Greg Adams - CFO of Chestnut carbon (Greg's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-adams-0ba79a5/)

https://chestnutcarbon.com/

What does it actually take to finance nature at scale — not in theory, but in practice?

In this episode, Troy Carter speaks with Greg Adams, about what it took to turn large-scale reforestation in the U.S. into something banks, buyers, and long-term capital could support.

Greg walks through Chestnut’s journey from early land acquisition to signing long-term offtake agreements with Microsoft, and ultimately closing one of the most significant project finance deals the nature-based carbon market has seen to date. The conversation goes deep into why contract structure matters, why land ownership changes the risk profile, and how lessons from energy and infrastructure finance can be applied to forests.

They explore:

• Why long-term offtake agreements are foundational for scaling nature projects

• What made Chestnut’s reforestation projects bankable to major lenders

• How quality, integrity, and cost discipline have to coexist

• The role of registries and standards in building buyer confidence

• Why carbon markets need fewer “snowflakes” and more common structure

• How conservation can be both high-integrity and financially durable

This is a candid, practical conversation for developers, financiers, buyers, and anyone trying to understand what it will take for restoration and reforestation to move from pilot projects to real infrastructure.

In this episode, Troy Carter sits down with Anthony Stevens, who leads innovation across digital assets and financial markets at Northern Trust, to talk about the less-visible work that determines whether carbon markets can really grow up: the systems that make credits trackable, transferable, and trustworthy at institutional scale.

Anthony brings a capital-markets perspective to a practical question: what has to be true for large financial institutions to participate with confidence?

They explore:

• What “trust” looks like in practice: custody, controls, auditability, and clean data

• Where today’s carbon markets still create friction and risk

• How registries, standards, and market participants can better align

• What digital rails and tokenization can help with (and what they can’t)

• What it would take for carbon markets to become stable enough for long-term capital

If you’re following the evolution of carbon markets, this one gets into the details that shape everything downstream.

🔗 Anthony Stevens: https://linkedin.com/in/anthony-stevens-933147/?skipRedirect=true
🌐 Northern Trust: https://www.northerntrust.com

🎙️ Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/_NxN6lxB9A8