Interview Summary

When did you first decide to align your career more closely with your sense of purpose?

It started while travelling through Asia and living in Australia on exchange. Diving on the Great Barrier Reef, I swam through an inner reef that looked like a ghost yard and then out to the living reef just beyond it, an explosion of fauna I had never seen before in my life. In Sumatra, I drove 45 minutes through palm oil plantations before reaching the jungle I had come to see. I came back to Denmark knowing something was missing in where I was and what I was doing.

What did you do next?

I found the Climate Change, Management and Finance MSc at Imperial and applied while still working full-time at PWC. I then applied to over 60 scholarships, mostly in Denmark, and was awarded 15, which covered both tuition and living costs for the year.

What are you doing now?

I am an Investment Associate at Foresight Group, working within the natural capital team on afforestation and forestry investments across the UK. The fund sits at over £200 million and operates mainly in Wales and Scotland. Every investment must clear a firm sustainability threshold at investment committee level. If it does not hit those targets, we do not invest.

What advice would you give looking back?

When impact stops being abstract and starts being something you can feel, that is the sign you have found something that sparks your purpose. Hold onto it, even without a plan. Stay connected to it, because when the opportunities arrive you will only be able to see them if you are already pointed in the right direction.

"When you decide to go into something that has an impact on the world, there is a lot of help to be had. You are not going to stand alone in this."

Career Summary

Christian Philip Tingsgaard Lassen studied business administration and commercial law in Denmark before working in transfer pricing at PWC. He completed the Climate Change, Management and Finance MSc at Imperial College Business School, funded entirely through scholarships, and joined Foresight Group as an intern. He is now an Investment Associate in the natural capital team, focused on afforestation and forestry across the UK.

Carried Across Continents

Christian is clear that his path did not begin with a plan. It began with a feeling he could not quite shake.

Diving on the Great Barrier Reef, he saw the bleached inner reef looking, as he puts it, like a ghost yard, and then the explosion of life just beyond it. In Sumatra, the drive through palm oil plantations before the jungle made the same point differently. He came home to Denmark and went back to his degree. But something had shifted.

An exchange at UC Berkeley during his master's began to give that feeling a shape. The university was already running courses that blended climate, energy and development with finance and law. For the first time, Christian could see that a career at the intersection of those things might genuinely be possible.

The feeling crystallised later on a balcony in Brazil. A song by the American band Nahko and Medicine for the People caught him completely off guard. "I felt captured by this frustration and this love for humankind," he says. "And a frustration that we cannot recognise that the way we're doing things is not correct." He spent the end of that trip in the jungle in Costa Rica, turning over the same question: what do I actually do now?

Finding the Funding

He went back to Denmark, finished his degree, started full-time at PWC and kept looking. Swimming in Copenhagen harbour one afternoon, a friend mentioned almost in passing that he had been fully funded through a specialist master's and had ended up turning scholarships down. That conversation changed things.

Christian found the Imperial MSc and applied. He then applied to over 60 Danish foundations and scholarship programmes, writing late into many evenings. He was awarded 15, covering tuition and living costs for the full year. Several of the scholarships he received were specifically tied to climate and sustainability. His view is that this kind of support is more widely available than most people realise. Start locally, look at pan-European options, check what universities themselves offer. "There is a lot of help to be had," he says. "You are not going to stand alone in this."

The Work Now and What Comes Next

At Foresight, Christian assesses land for afforestation across the UK, working across commercial forestry, native woodland and mixed approaches. Every project must meet a sustainability threshold. None of it is incidental to the investment case.

He watches the wider field with genuine excitement. The conversation is broadening beyond carbon into the full range of planetary boundaries: biodiversity, ocean health, the biosphere as a whole. Biodiversity Net Gain legislation in the UK, which now requires developers to offset biodiversity loss and increase it by a further 10%, points to where things are heading.

His advice to anyone who is where he was in Costa Rica, knowing something needs to change but not yet knowing how, is simple. Stay connected to what moves you. The ideas and opportunities come when you do.