ImpactAlpha Open

Temasek sees opportunity in climate adaptation + retooling impact investing

Dennis Price · May 20, 2025

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In this week’s Open:

  • Private equity opportunities in climate adaptation and resilience
  • Retooling impact investing with Calvert Impact and Innovative Finance Network
  • Agent of Impact Sara Ziff fights for labor rights in fashion
  • New podcasts fromImpactAlpha, Impact(ed) and Activest

Let’s jump in. – Dennis Price

Must-reads on ImpactAlpha

  • Temasek on hot sectors for PE investment in climate adaptation and resilience. It’s been called the “unavoidable opportunity,” as emissions already baked into the atmosphere will profoundly alter weather patterns for decades to come. Climate adaptation and resilience, once considered uninvestable, has quickly become what the $288 billion Singapore state-owned global investment company Temasek is calling “one of the defining markets of the future.” Learn more.
  • Retooling impact investing. Some of impact investing’s most seasoned practitioners are getting impatient. “Our work is not delivering results at the speed our local, national and global conditions require,” writes Jenn Pryce of Calvert Impact in a guest post. Innovative Finance Network’s Aunnie Patton Power and Doughnut Economics Action Lab’s Erinch Sahan put it more bluntly: “The tools we have developed as a field have largely failed to scale or radically change traditional financial market architecture.”
    • Read Pryce’s post, as well as Patton Power and Sahan’s dispatch.
  • Mati Carbon leverages its $50 million XPRIZE to remove carbon and support farmers in tropical zones. Last month, Mati Carbon won the XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition, taking home the $50 million grand prize backed by Elon Musk’s foundation for its “enhanced rock weathering” process that sequesters carbon in soil and improves soil health using pulverized rock additives. Their next step? Raise more money. See why.

Agents of Impact

💃 Sara Ziff, Model Alliance: Fighting for labor standards for fashion workers

On a recent spring evening, a crowd of fashionistas gathered at a townhouse on New York’s Park Avenue to celebrate the passage of the Fashion Workers Act, a landmark law protecting models that goes into effect in New York next month. The guest of honor was Sara Ziff, founder and executive director of Model Alliance, a labor advocacy group that was instrumental in passing the law. Before you pull out your tiny violin, hear her out. “This work for me is personal,” she says. “Many of the issues that we work to address are issues that I experienced firsthand, whether it’s sexual abuse or financial exploitation, or things as simple as wanting to see your own contracts and agreements and have insight into your own finances.” 

🏃 On the move

  • MacArthur Foundation named Bola Olusanya, former chief investment officer of The Nature Conservancy, as vice president and CIO to manage its $9 billion endowment.
  • Invest Appalachia tapped Victoria Hewlett, previously with Appalachian Opportunity Fund, as an investment associate, and Justin Tien, previously with Deutsche Bank, as an investment manager.
  • Renovus Capital Partners welcomed Phil Garbarini, an MBA student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, as an Impact Capital Managers mosaic fellow.

The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact: Impact investing’s original sins. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank. Up this week: Two views on the future of impact investing from Calvert Impact and Innovative Finance Initiative. Plus, Temasek makes the case for the private equity opportunity in climate adaptation and resilience. And, how Mati Carbon is adding debt capital to its $50 million XPRIZE to finance carbon removal and soil restoration in tropical zones.

  • Listen to the new episode of This Week in Impact. Get the podcast in your feed by subscribing on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.

🧑🏽‍🎓 Impact(ed): Financing worker ownership transitions. Apis & Heritage’s Todd Leverette joins Lucas and Eric to talk about employee ownership transitions and the role that buyout funds play in promoting worker ownership. Listen in.

🗺️ The Activest Podcast: The coming epic epoch. Micah, Ellen, Homero and John dig into bond market trends this year. Such as: the increased presence of higher education institutions, particularly HBCUs, in the muni markets; nonprofit tax changes and tax-optimized municipal bonds; and the need for racial equity analysis in public budgets. Check it out.

Get in the Game

💼 Step up

  • The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is recruiting an intern in London. 
  • Align Impact seeks an advisor in New York or Denver. 
  • Hamilton Community Foundation has an opening for a director of social finance investments in Ontario.

Dozens of job opportunities are available to subscribers each week on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.

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