Just Climate’s Climate-Led Investing Approach Attracts New, Big Investors

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Last Updated on: 26th March 2025, 09:03 am

For more than 40 years, former US Vice President Al Gore has been at the forefront of the movement to solve the global climate crisis. It’s amazing to think how different the US might be right now if 2000’s Bush v. Gore had been settled apart from everyday partisan politics. Instead, it became focused on Florida’s “hanging chads” to influence a national election. Today, as chair of The Climate Reality Project — the organization he founded in 2005 — Gore has trained thousands of committed activists to discuss the reality of the climate crisis and its solutions. And he’s in the news this month with the announcement that Just Climate, a venture started by Gore’s Generation Investment Management, has raised $175 million.

The new investment will be directed to businesses that enable the restoration of land degraded by agriculture and deforestation.

The natural climate solutions (NCS) strategy of Generation’s Just Climate is anchored by investors including Microsoft Corp.’s Climate Innovation Fund and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System. Just Climate’s NCS strategy aims to bring the many climate-related benefits of nature together, from physical commodity production to carbon storage, while also contributing to biodiversity, pollination, nutrient cycling, and the quality and quantity of water provision.

The Generation investment manager now oversees $1.8 billion of assets, a total that also includes a fund targeting decarbonization of heavy industry.

“The concept of the energy transition is a mainstream concept,” Clara Barby, senior partner at Just Climate, told Bloomberg. “When you do the work on the science and the data and where the emissions are coming from, it becomes very clear that the land transition is going to be the next wave.”

Land is a source and a sink of CO2 due to both anthropogenic and natural drivers. Land transitions, either from land use or climate change, affect global and regional climate. At the regional scale, changing land conditions can reduce or accentuate warming and affect the intensity, frequency, and duration of extreme events. The IPCC has concluded that climate change creates additional stresses on land, which exacerbates existing risks to livelihoods, biodiversity, human and ecosystem health, infrastructure, and food systems.

The need to reduce emissions from farmed and deforested land is essential but complex. Livestock grazing, which is a major methane production problem, covers hundreds of millions of acres. Today, about 70% of freshwater is used for agriculture. Synthetic fertilizers have increased reactive nitrogen levels by as much as 600%. As the population grows, these problems seem likely to worsen.

Restoring damaged ecosystems and rethinking the production of food is, therefore, a key part of tackling the climate crisis. “The way we are practicing land management today has to change in the same way as the way that we’re burning fossil fuels today has to change,” said Barby, as both “are unsustainable.”

Investment Options for Just Climate: Natural Climate Solutions

Eduardo Mufarej is co-chief investment officer and head of NCS for Generation’s Just Climate. He explained that Just Climate is now exploring many investment options that range from biological fertilizers to technologies for regenerative agriculture and waste-to-energy projects — with more than 20 potential opportunities under discussion. With the goal to make “catalytic” investments by avoiding well-trodden assets like renewables in Europe, he continued, four sectors are being targeted. The Just Climate emphases will be a counterpoint to the Trump administration’s decision to stop disbursing infrastructure investments.

Food value chains: These are arrangements that transform the traditional competitive seller/buyer relationships into a collaborative approach. Transparency, working together, and providing fair returns to all partners under shared environmental or social values are elements of food value chains. The food system already is responsible for an estimated one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, and fossil fuels are used throughout the food system. The industry benefits from $7 trillion in subsidies annually, making inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides artificially low cost and accessible to farms across geographies and social classes.

Forest and ecosystem restoration: Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding had been used to advance habitat restoration, conduct invasive species control, and conserve at-risk species. These activities benefited several significant ecosystems and recreational sites. In recognition that healthy ecosystems are part of the nation’s infrastructure, the law provided nearly $1 billion through the Ecosystem Restoration Section (40804) for locally led, collaborative projects that build resilience to climate change, restore healthy lands and waters, and enhance communities’ quality of life.

Waste and water: Challenges to utilities include aging infrastructure, emerging contaminants, and the increasingly severe effects of extreme weather. Many drinking water utilities are actively improving infrastructure through innovations such as asset failure prediction technologies, which improve the ability to identify issues before they become failures. In 2024, the wastewater and stormwater annual capital needs were $99 billion, whereas the funding gap was $69 billion, meaning only about 30% of the sectors’ infrastructure capital needs were being met. Assuming the combined wastewater and stormwater sector continues along the same path, the gap will grow to more than $690 billion by 2044.

Enabling technologies: With biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse ranked by the World Economic Forum as the third most significant global risk over the next decade, nature intelligence platforms are necessary to deliver actionable biodiversity health insights to businesses and conservation organizations. Just Climate funding will enable the company to continue pushing the boundaries of biodiversity measurement using eDNA technology, geospatial and AI; empowering businesses and organizations worldwide to embed robust, site-level biodiversity data into their strategies, helping them drive sustainable and resilient practices.

Generation Investment Management Planning

The Generation Investment Management Climate and Nature Report & Transition Plan uses environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors as tools to evaluate the quality of business and management. Consideration of climate change, and closely linked issues of deforestation and nature loss, have been central to Generation’s investment philosophy since its founding and continue to be instrumental into their strategy to integrate sustainability factors into their investment process.

“We need a financial system in which all financial institutions and capital allocators integrate climate and nature into their decisions across all asset classes. While we need governments to step in where markets can’t succeed on their own, we believe finance must act with or without government policy, because in our view managing climate and nature risks and opportunities is our fiduciary duty.”

Generation’s transition plan consists of two major components. The first is the transition of its investment portfolios to net-zero GHG emissions consistent with a 1.5°C pathway by 2040. The second is its operational transition plan, which also sets a net-zero target of 2040.