Prizes and Pitfalls: Navigating the voluntary carbon market in 2024

James Murray is Editor-in-Chief of BusinessGreen, having launched the site in October 2007. He is responsible for BusinessGreen's leading news, opinion and analysis, and also contributes to the brand's expanding events' programme. James is one of the UK's leading commentators on the low carbon economy. He writes occasionally for The Guardian newspaper and has also reported for BBC Radio on a number of green technology stories. James reports daily on a wide range of green business issues, with a particular focus on low carbon policy, economics and technology. In March 2011, James was voted number eight in the Press Gazette's list of the top 50 environmental journalists in the UK. Prior to launching BusinessGreen, James spent five years as a technology journalist working on a variety of IT titles.

Georgia is UK and European Policy Lead for Patch Technologies, a digital platform scaling unified climate action. She has worked for nearly twenty years in the energy and environment sector across non-profits, industry and Government. She was Head of Corporate Responsibility for Centrica; Energy and Environment Advisor to Theresa May; Director of Policy and Public Affairs at OVO Energy, and Co-Director of Future Countryside. She has a strong understanding of the political and commercial contexts of energy, nature and climate policy, and has seen policy through from inception to legislation. Georgia chaired the ZeroC Commission and was a commissioner on the Nature Positive Innovation Commission, and is a Board Member of PRASEG, The All Party Parliamentary Group on Renewable and Sustainable Energy

With a background in ecology, combined with extensive experience in scaling businesses, Jim was drawn to the fight against climate change and the ecological disaster it’s bringing with it. In 2019 Jim co-founded The Future Forest Company - a reforestation effort with a mission to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and restore biodiversity across the UK. Realising that tree planting could only go so far in helping solve the climate crisis, UNDO was born to deliver large-scale carbon removal projects with a permanence of 100,000+ years. Using enhanced rock weathering technology, UNDO spreads crushed basalt rock on agricultural land, permanently removing CO₂ from the atmosphere while improving soil fertility, food security and the health of our oceans. UNDO aims to be the first company to remove one million tonnes of CO₂ by 2025, a first step towards billion-tonne scale global operations. When Jim is not busy creating a liveable planet for future generations, he runs competitively at ultra-distance, his favourite events being 100-mile or more mountain races.

Jeremiah is a Director within Barclays Sustainable & Impact Investment Banking (SIB) group, which provides investment banking advisory to the climate technology sector coverage. Jeremiah leads carbon management and sustainable fuels infrastructure coverage for Europe, which is a holistic full-value chain industry team advising developers of carbon capture (point of source or direct air capture) to transportation and either storage or utilisation in electrolytic fuels in combination with hydrogen. Jeremiah is also senior banker for SIB’s structured finance advisory practice and his responsibilities include the origination and structuring of bespoke project development advisory, mergers & acquisitions and structured financing transactions.

Previously, Jeremiah was head of Barclays’ Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Structuring team, which developed and structured bespoke ESG investor solutions such as customised and managed ESG indices and structured products, where he led the launch of Barclays Green and Social Structured Notes programme.

Earlier in his career, Jeremiah held roles in securitisation and structured credit, where he was a core member of the team which established the Barclays Corporate and Investment Banking’s Colonnade and Churchill synthetic securitisation programmes, which together are now the largest synthetic credit risk sharing platform in the Europe.  He has also worked on loan repackages of infrastructure and project debt, master risk participation agreements and other structured credit and asset-backed transactions.

Jeremiah read BSc (hons) in Economics, Politics and International Studies from the University of Warwick and had MSt in Sustainability Leadership from the University of Cambridge.