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