About Us

Akre was created to help organisations help the planet. For decades now it has been clear that the economic system is harming the global ecological system. This is largely because the economy has been regarded as separate from the global ecological system.

Economics is evolving to frame the economy as part of the global ecological system, from which we take raw materials and return waste in a complex interchange of stocks and flows. A shift towards treating the economy embedded within the global ecological system as part of a complex system allows us to more accurately account for the impacts, both positive and negative, of our behaviour.

Goodbye externalities,

hello systems thinking.

How it works

We are moving away from the traditional view where Jane buys a pair of jeans for £40, and those jeans might have polluted a river with dye (an external cost) but Jane buys them anyway and the ecological cost of polluting the river is not paid for.

In systems thinking, we consider all of the implications of a transaction and price them in so Jane knows that when she buys the jeans, the carbon emitted producing energy used to make them is green and partially offset, the employees who made them are paid a living wage, the dye is mostly captured and partly offset with habitat units and water purification units and the transport emissions are reduced and offset where necessary. This makes the jeans £44 but transforms the impact the economy has from extractive to neutral.

From neutral to

enhance

If the manufacturer of Jane’s jeans wants to go beyond just compensating for the impact of the jeans, they could offer to offset them and add 20% more offset per transaction. This makes the jeans £45 and shifts the economy from extractive to regenerative.

This is where Akre comes in. Offsets need to be the last link in the chain, they need to be high integrity and well communicated. The interface between business and nature is where the problem lies but it is where we see the solution.

Who we are

Akre was formed in 2020 to improve the way business interacts with the rural sector. Renwick Drysdale having grown up on an arable farm in Fife, planting trees from the age of 7 completed his masters in Ecological Economics in 2018. Through the lense of Ecological Economics, he wanted to tie his father’s 40 years of experience at Kingdom Farming together with Kieran Kelly’s 30 years of experience at KF Forestry in woodland management to address some of this biggest issues of the day.

Starting as a woodland creation consultancy called Kilrie Trees, Akre evolved into the worlds first carbon negative tree nursery, with a natural capital consultancy and exchange. We have worked closely with Rodney Shearer, our lead consultant with over 40 years of experience in cell grown tree production to design our cutting edge glasshouse tree nursery in Fife.