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February 10th, 2026
In the latest episode of The Future of Trust, we invite Amy McCrae-Kessler, climate systems builder, environmental lawyer, and founder and CEO of Facet Power, to examine a central tension in climate finance today: why capital is eager for climate exposure, yet struggles to trust the projects designed to deliver it.
Rather than centering the conversation on a single technology or market mechanism, they explore trust as a structural problem. Trust between capital and communities. Trust between financial models and physical reality. And trust in whether climate infrastructure is being built to last, or merely to satisfy short-term expectations. The discussion makes clear that climate progress is not constrained by ambition, but by systems that fail to align incentives, risk, and long-term value.
Amy’s approach to climate work did not originate in policy briefs or investment memos. It began with direct exposure to ecosystems and the consequences of their disruption.
She grew up on a farm, spending much of her childhood immersed in nature and learning, intuitively, how systems behave when everything is connected. That curiosity carried into adulthood through extensive travel and fieldwork, from reef monitoring in Belize to wildlife surveys in Kenya. A formative experience came during a month in Borneo, where she worked with orphaned orangutans displaced by deforestation and extractive industries.
On the flight home, seated next to an executive from a major mining company, Amy watched active clear-cutting unfold beneath the plane. In that moment, she recalls realizing that “trusting people to do the right thing is not a way to operate in the world.” That insight marked a turning point. Climate, for her, became less about hoping for good behavior and more about designing systems that make integrity unavoidable.
Across her career, Amy has worked in big law, federal agencies, international development, and industry coalitions. She helped scale emerging sectors like biogas and biochar from fragmented niches into multi-billion-dollar industries. That vantage point gives her a clear view of why so many climate projects struggle to attract serious capital.
The issue, she argues, is not innovation but how risk is defined. Most financial frameworks treat environmental and social impacts as externalities, while compressing decision-making into short reporting cycles. Amy expands the lens, looking at risk systemically across communities, ecosystems, and time horizons. As she puts it, “quarterly reporting isn’t a real economic cycle. Nature doesn’t operate that way, and neither do resilient businesses.”
When these realities are ignored, projects may appear viable on paper while feeling fragile in practice. Investors sense that fragility. Communities experience it directly. Trust erodes long before capital ever commits.
Facet Power was built to address that disconnect.
Rather than developing single assets, Amy focuses on designing integrated ecosystems that link biomass waste conversion, carbon-negative energy, durable carbon removal, and natural capital restoration. Energy production anchors long-term revenue. Carbon and advanced materials add scale and flexibility. Natural capital investments protect the asset base itself.
Climate, Amy emphasizes, behaves as a system. Treating it as a collection of siloed projects only guarantees repeated failure. “If you try to solve the climate with one-off assets,” she explains, “you’ll always be chasing the next failure instead of building something that lasts.” By bundling distributed projects into coherent, financeable ecosystems, Facet makes hyper-local climate action legible to institutional capital while preserving integrity on the ground.
One of the most distinctive elements of Amy’s approach is how literally she treats nature as a stakeholder.
Facet gives nature a formal stake in the capital structure. Not as philanthropy. Not as a marketing commitment. As equity. A portion of project value flows into a trust dedicated to ecosystem stewardship and long-term resilience. Amy frames this as a necessary correction, noting that modern economies have been built by using natural resources without paying for their depreciation. “That debt doesn’t disappear just because it’s not on your spreadsheet,” she says. “It compounds.”
By embedding nature directly into the capital stack, long-term thinking becomes structural rather than optional. Trust is enforced by design.
Throughout the conversation, Amy is clear that climate finance does not suffer from a lack of narratives. It suffers from a lack of systems.
Too much capital follows novelty and visibility rather than durability. Technologies that photograph well attract outsized funding, while proven, multi-benefit solutions struggle for support. Salesmanship replaces engineering. Speed replaces rigor. Amy describes this imbalance as an ethical problem, especially when capital continues flowing toward solutions that cannot deliver at scale. “We’re funding what sounds good,” she observes, “instead of what actually works.”
Facet’s response isn't to wait for institutions to change. It's to build the infrastructure they need: bankable project structures, transparent risk frameworks, replicable development processes, and governance that holds up under scrutiny. In this model, trust is not a sentiment. It's an architecture.
When asked what a trustworthy climate system looks like decades from now, Amy points to integration. Local expertise working alongside global capital. Profit-driven projects grounded in physical reality. Communities building durable prosperity from their own resources. Nature treated as infrastructure rather than decoration. As she puts it, “we don’t have a capitalism problem. We have a capitalism-without-facts problem.”
Climate will not be solved by waiting or moralizing. It will be solved when integrity, resilience, and long-term value are designed directly into how projects are built, measured, and financed.
That alignment depends on trust becoming operational. Systems like the ones Amy describes require credible, traceable proof of performance, not just intent. This is where Demia’s role becomes essential, providing the trust layer that secures data at the source, enables end-to-end verification, and turns real-world climate outcomes into decision-grade signals that capital, regulators, and markets can rely on. When verified performance becomes visible and comparable, capital can move with confidence and local climate action can scale without losing integrity.
The alignment of climate, capital, and nature isn't theoretical. It's a systems challenge, and it demands a foundation built on trust.
🎧 Listen to the full episode:
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