Selwyn Duijvestijn from DGB - From finance to carbon

Featuring Selwyn Duijvestijn, CEO of DGB Group

Episode 4 of Ground Truth by CarbonHQ. Listen now on Spotify & Apple Podcast.

In the world of carbon markets, there’s a lot of noise — but very few people who are actually building projects at scale. Selwyn Duijvestijn is one of them.

In this episode of Ground Truth, Selwyn joins Allen to talk about what it really takes to get nature-based carbon projects off the ground. As CEO of DGB Group, a publicly listed project developer, Selwyn is focused on one thing: executing. Not PowerPoint decks, not consulting reports — just planting trees, issuing credits, and restoring land at scale.

Selwyn’s background isn’t the usual conservation story. He started in finance — managing hedge funds, structuring deals, and thinking in terms of ROI. But when he shifted into nature restoration, he brought that same discipline to a space that badly needed it. He saw an industry full of passion but lacking execution. So he built a company to fix that.

Today, DGB has over 250,000 hectares under management, with projects live in Cameroon, Uganda, and Kenya. They’re planting native species, distributing clean cookstoves, and structuring large-scale reforestation and avoided deforestation projects — all with verified carbon credits flowing through the pipeline.

Selwyn is candid about the realities: carbon development is messy. Community engagement takes years. Land rights are complicated. Buyers want certainty, but projects take time. He’s had deals fall through at the last minute and had to learn the hard way how to get monitoring right.

But he’s also optimistic. DGB has issued credits, secured multi-million-dollar offtake agreements, and built a reputation for actually delivering. And with Article 6 agreements now starting to take shape, he sees a pathway for even greater scale and integrity.

His advice to other developers? Focus on the hard stuff. Build local trust. Invest upfront. Be transparent. And most of all — get something done.

“Everyone’s talking about carbon,” he says. “But there’s only a very small group of people actually doing something.”

To learn more about DGB Group and their work, visit green.earth