News
PRESS - Cybermarket opens to link emission-offset projects, investors
Michael Burnham, Greenwire senior reporter
Washington, March 20th - A European brokerage firm today launched Climate Capital Network, an online marketplace that aims to connect investors with developers of projects that reduce or offset greenhouse gas emissions.
The site, www.climatecapital.net, is the creation of London-based entrepreneur Michael Mathres and his Paris-based managing partner Alan Ocana. The pair founded Climate Capital Ltd. in London last fall to broker deals between risk-taking investors -- among them, venture capitalists, banks and hedge funds -- and entrepreneurs and companies that offer solutions to mitigating climate change.
Such solutions, Mathres explained in a telephone interview, will include renewable energy, energy efficiency, recycling, reforestation and carbon capture-and-sequestration projects around the globe. The projects could come in the form of unregulated carbon offsets, as well as clean development mechanism (CDM) and joint implementation (JI) carbon credits that are regulated under the Kyoto Protocol.
About 150 investors registered with the company while it was in stealth mode, Mathres noted. He said he hopes to broker the new company's first deals by May and have at least 3,500 investors registered with the Web site by the end of the year.
In the meantime, Mathres plans to open the company's third office, in San Francisco, a short trek from Silicon Valley's venture capital heavyweights. Notable Silicon Valley investors such as Vinod Khosla and John Doerr have helped steer billions of dollars into cellulosic ethanol, solar photovoltaic power and other emerging technologies in recent years.
Yet, Mathres said, there is a "void" in the market for helping independent investors find and vet low- or no-carbon projects. That is where middlemen such as the Climate Capital Network can come in and provide due diligence and sector expertise, he said.
"The Kyoto Protocol is simply not enough," Mathres contented.
"We have to massively reduce our global emissions and have only 10 to 20 years to fix things," Mathres added. "We need to start a third industrial revolution predicated on, and driven by, low-carbon energies and technologies."
Veteran corporate consultant and author John Elkington will launch a similar initiative, called Volans Ventures, next month, with offices in London and Singapore.
In a recent interview with Greenwire, Elkington described Volans as a "social venture capital fund" that would marshal financial and human-capital support from corporations, nongovernmental organizations and governments for early-stage entrepreneurs who are engaged in anything from mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss to improving access to clean water and energy