Reflections from a recent focus group discussion convened by Singapore Sustainable Finance Association (SSFA) and Co-Axis, part of Temasek Trust, on scaling biochar in Southeast Asia with blended finance.

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Southeast Asia sits at the intersection of global agricultural scale and climate vulnerability, yet remains virtually absent from durable carbon removal. Last month, we had the privilege of sharing Arukah's model at an SSFA and Co-Axis discussion convened specifically to unpack this gap: what would it actually take for biochar projects in the region to become bankable, and where should catalytic and philanthropic capital sit in that stack?

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The room spanned philanthropic, catalytic and commercial capital, carbon buyers and insurers: an unusually complete cross-section of the people who will ultimately have to agree on how these deals get structured.

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Durable Climate Markets Have to Work as Markets

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Our starting point at Arukah is that farmers and agribusinesses are not peripheral beneficiaries of a carbon project. They are core economic participants in the value chain, and the technology, pricing and financial structure all have to work for them if the model is going to survive beyond the life of any project support.

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Two design principles have shaped how we build around that.

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Build the Market, Rather Than Subsidise Around It

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Our biochar is sold, not given away, because willingness to pay is an important signal of whether the product is genuinely useful. Free biochar can scale distribution fast, but it also removes the only real test of product-market fit, and it tends to crowd out the legitimate businesses that would otherwise have to compete on price and quality.

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We also commit 50% of gross carbon revenue directly to farmers, digitally paid, building them into the economics of the value chain rather than treating farmer participation as a project cost to be minimised.

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The objective isn't to maximise short-term deployment. It's to establish validated feedstock pricing, product pricing, and farmer participation economics that can continue to operate on their own once catalytic support ends.

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Build Trust Infrastructure Before Asking Capital to Price Unfamiliar Risk

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Southeast Asia is a new market for durable carbon removal buyers, and unfamiliar markets carry a pricing risk that sits on top of ordinary delivery risk. We've invested early in digital MRV and end-to-end traceability to address this directly: Arukah was in the first global cohort accepted by Puro for biochar dMRV, and among the first to bring biochar dMRV to blockchain.

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For buyers, financiers and insurers entering a market they haven't priced before, continuous and independently verifiable operating data can materially change what they're willing to underwrite, and at what price.

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This is also why we invited insurers, including Artio, into the discussion. We think there's an important distinction between the risks catalytic capital should absorb now and the risks insurance or traditional finance can eventually price on their own.

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Where Blended Finance Fits, and Where It Should Hand Off

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At this stage, we think blended finance is most useful where the market is still being built: validating local product demand and pricing, developing farmer-inclusive supply chains, and creating the information infrastructure required to establish a repeatable operating model.

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As those risks become observable and priceable, insurance and traditional capital should increasingly be able to take over the work of financing scale. That handoff, from catalytic capital proving the model to commercial capital scaling it, is the design principle we're building toward, not an afterthought.

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Where We Are

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We have developed a unit economic stack with our first-of-its-kind facility in Cambodia, with a soon-to-be-announced set of results around national-scale testing of biochar efficacy across three key crop categories. We are actively developing new unit economics stacks for our upcoming plants across the Philippines, Thailand, and more. When geopolitical pressures grew this year around energy and fertiliser resilience, we also noticed that our partnerships had come to us inbound, largely in the order of each country's fertiliser import dependency, suggesting long-term structural demand for the physical outputs of our projects, and the right conditions for long-term market-based scalability.

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Grateful to SSFA, Co-Axis and everyone around the table for an open and collaborative discussion, at this critical time for food and energy resilience for Southeast Asian farmers and agrifood supply chains.

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If you're working on any part of this stack, whether carbon buying, insurance, catalytic or blended capital, or farmer-facing agribusiness, we'd welcome the conversation.

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