Gina Hall

“You don’t have to be in Greenpeace to understand that climate change is a challenge that touches everything—across all sectors and all countries.”

In 1992, Gina V Hall (MBA 1986) was working in São Paulo, Brazil, when the United Nation’s Earth Summit took place in Rio. That event jumpstarted an international discussion around climate change, sustainability, and biodiversity that interested Hall, who had been involved in financing a geothermal project when at JP Morgan in New York. But the field of clean energy was still nascent; after moving on to Monsanto and to London, Hall, with her husband, devoted the next 10 years to launching and building a gourmet ice cream brand for distribution throughout the UK.

Once they had secured a listing for their company on the London Stock Exchange, acquired two competitors, and had a new team in place for the next phase, Hall and her husband began to look for new challenges. It was 2007, and the documentary An Inconvenient Truth had been released the year before. “Climate change and what we’re doing about it really started to hit home for me,” she says. “I realized it was an issue where I could commit 100 percent.” In 2008, Hall joined the Carbon Trust, a company that partners with organizations around the world to accelerate the transition to a cleaner, more sustainable energy future. Initially assigned to the firm’s joint venture arm, she worked with the company’s portfolio of clean tech startups, leveraging extensive financial expertise with on-the-ground experience as an entrepreneur. “Being immersed so suddenly was like drinking from a firehose,” she says. “It was a fantastic way to learn about the field—we had everything, from a green building fund to an onshore wind developer.”

While she continues her role as investment director, Hall also works alongside development entities such as the World Bank and IFC, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development—as well as commercial banks—to provide the technical expertise and help source grant monies that make it easier for green projects to happen.

A current project, for example, focuses on improving the sustainability of Brazilian beef in the state of Mato Grosso, which has extensive wetlands as well as Amazon rainforest. “Brazil is a big country with a big carbon footprint—and the biggest contributor is beef, once you include emissions due to land use change,” says Hall. Small pilots have demonstrated more efficient, environmentally sustainable methods to raise cattle, but that transition requires a few years of upfront investment on the part of ranchers. “Carbon Trust creates a package of funding and knowledge that essentially ‘de-risks’ the process” Hall says. “Without that intermediary support, the transition would be much more difficult to execute at scale. And we need to be doing much more at scale if we are to make meaningful headway towards a 2-degrees Celsius world.”

Hall admits that she is sometimes frustrated by a seeming lack of progress in mitigating climate change—but she is also energized by the potential for change and the dynamic nature of the field. “I’ve been at Carbon Trust for 10 years because each year is very different in terms of which players are coming to the fore,” she says. “Green bonds, for example, have exploded as a financial instrument in the last two years.”

“You don’t have to be in Greenpeace to understand that climate change is a challenge that touches everything—across all sectors and all countries,” Hall continues. “Taking on that challenge is doable, but it requires a combination of finance and innovation. That’s what’s interesting to me.”