SRI360 | Sustainable & Responsible Investing, Impact Investing, ESG, Socially Responsible Investing

In climate investing, credibility is often associated with breakthrough technologies or large-scale energy infrastructure. This episode challenges that assumption by asking a different question: what if some of the most compelling climate investment opportunities lie within the everyday realities of farming?

My guest this week is Sarah Nolet, Co-Founder and General Partner at Tenacious Ventures. With a background that spans systems engineering, hands-on farming experience, and venture capital, Sarah now leads an investment firm focused on building climate resilience across global agri-food systems.

In our conversation on Sustainable & Responsible Investing 360, Sarah explains why traditional venture...

Climate finance conversations often focus on mitigation. However, the question Tamer El-Raghy raises is more structural: what if one of the most compelling climate investment opportunities lies in helping smallholder farmers adapt?

In this episode of Sustainable & Responsible Investing 360, I’m joined by Tamer El-Raghy, Managing Director of the Acumen Resilient Agriculture Fund (ARAF).

Tamer leads one of the first investment vehicles dedicated to climate adaptation in agriculture across Africa, backing early-stage companies that help farmers improve productivity, stability, and resilience in the face of changing climate conditions.

We discuss why agriculture remains ch...

In venture capital, credibility is often framed around access, networks, and pattern recognition. This episode challenges that foundation by asking a harder question: what if the industry’s biggest blind spot is also its most persistent source of mispriced opportunity?

My guest this week is Sharon Vosmek, CEO and Managing Partner of Astia. With more than two decades of early-stage investing experience, Sharon has built one of the most structured bias-mitigation processes in venture through Astia’s Expert SIFT methodology. A documented and disciplined system designed to eliminate individual, network, and process bias from investment decisions.

Sh...

In fixed income, credibility is tested differently, and real world metrics like liquidity, scale, and benchmark scrutiny leave little room for storytelling. This episode examines how impact strategies can operate inside mainstream credit markets without weakening financial discipline or diluting measurable outcomes.

My guest this week is, Matt Lawton, Matt is the Head of Impact Fixed Income at T. Rowe Price, where he leads global credit and emerging market blue bond strategies. With more than 15 years across credit research and portfolio management, Matt has helped build one of the industry’s most structured approaches to impact in...

Most climate investment still flows toward mitigation, technologies designed to reduce future emissions. Far less capital is directed toward climate adaptation, despite the fact that many regions are already living with the physical, economic, and social consequences of climate change.

This imbalance is especially visible in emerging markets, where climate risk, rapid economic growth, and limited institutional infrastructure collide.

In this episode of SRI360, I’m joined by Alina Truhina, Founder and Managing Partner of Radical Fund and Utopia Capital Management. 

Alina has spent her career building and backing early-stage companies across Southeast Asi...

What happens when sustainability strategies fail to address real climate risk and long-term investment outcomes?

In this episode of SRI360, I am speaking with Laura Ortiz Montemayor about impact investing, climate risk, and regenerative finance, and why sustainability alone may no longer be enough for investors focused on long-term value creation.

Drawing from Laura’s experience in traditional finance and her work building regenerative investment strategies in Latin America, the conversation explores how capital allocation shapes systems, and why rethinking how capital is deployed matters as much as where it flows.

The conversation is...

What happens when sustainability strategies fail to address real climate risk and long-term investment outcomes?

In this episode of SRI360, I am speaking with Laura Ortiz Montemayor about impact investing, climate risk, and regenerative finance, and why sustainability alone may no longer be enough for investors focused on long-term value creation.

Drawing from Laura’s experience in traditional finance and her work building regenerative investment strategies in Latin America, the conversation explores how capital allocation shapes systems, and why rethinking how capital is deployed matters as much as where it flows.

The conversation is...

The biggest risk investors face right now isn’t just climate change, geopolitics, or emerging-market volatility. The real threat in impact investing is inertia. Capital stays in familiar places because big asset owners can get satisfactory returns elsewhere. So, unless incentives and information change, inertia wins.

This episode is about why social investment keeps getting stuck, even when good people across government, finance, and communities are trying to do the right thing – and what actually has to change for money to start moving.

It focuses on where incentives misfire and how to scale impact investing and...

Agrifood and AgTech investing in Latin America is still widely misunderstood. That gap between perception and reality is creating real opportunity for patient, specialized investors who understand agriculture as a long-term operating business, not a short-cycle investment theme.

Volatility here is often mistaken for weakness. But as this conversation makes clear, agribusiness has kept growing through recessions, pandemics, and political transitions. In many cases, it’s been one of the most resilient parts of the economy.

I’m joined by Francisco Jardim, General Partner at SP Ventures. He’s spent nearly two decades building one of the...

Catalytic capital is often described as concessional capital, sometimes accepting lower returns. But this framing overlooks what matters most. In practice, catalytic capital steps in first, absorbs the risk others can’t, and makes institutional capital comfortable enough to follow.

If you’re involved in capital allocation, this matters because catalytic capital isn’t about charity. It’s about structuring risk so institutions can invest in assets they normally couldn’t because of regulatory and rating rules.

This episode focuses on how catalytic capital functions inside impact investing portfolios under real regulatory and balance-sheet constraints. 

It rev...

Forestry is often treated as just timber production. But in this 2-in-1 compilation about sustainable forestry, you’ll hear a different way of thinking. One that looks beyond timber to carbon, biodiversity, water, and resilience.

I revisit key moments from two earlier episodes that look at sustainable forestry as a serious investment strategy and a practical example of nature-based investing. They show how forests can deliver competitive returns, hedge inflation, and reduce portfolio risk while addressing climate and biodiversity pressures.

In one conversation, Bettina von Hagen talks about how better forest management can make forests mo...

The apparel industry is a $3 trillion market. But a massive share of what it produces goes straight to waste.

That combination points to mispriced inputs and broken systems. And to real opportunities for circular economy solutions that work on both the business side and the environmental side.

In this end-of-year gift to listeners, I'm revisiting a conversation that shows where to look for investment opportunity: at overproduction, reverse logistics that don’t work, and at a system where brands often find it cheaper to write off returned product than resell it.

These are hi...

Green bonds sound simple until you try to separate the real ones from the 50 shades of green flooding today’s market.

This episode offers an insider framework to distinguish credible green bonds from greenwashing, understand what real additionality looks like in fixed income, and make more confident capital-allocation decisions in a label-driven market.

It revisits early conversations with Marilyn Ceci and Romina Reversi, leaders who helped build the green bond market before sustainable finance went mainstream. Both worked inside JP Morgan as issuers, investors, and regulators were still defining standards, reporting, and impact measurement.

...

Blended finance is making hard deals in emerging markets investable. It drives real infrastructure development where capital markets are thin.

And when the work involves emergency aid and building businesses, you need someone who’s seen how money really works in emerging markets.

Few people know how to make those pieces fit together better than my guest today. Talmage Payne has spent three decades proving that mission-first investing can deliver both measurable social impact and competitive returns.

Talmage is the founder of multiple social ventures across Southeast Asia and West Africa. He now se...

My guest is Mark Kahn, Managing Partner at Omnivore, a $295 million venture capital firm investing in startups across agriculture, food, and the rural economy in India, focused on climate risk resilience.

In this episode, we talk about how venture capital can be redesigned to fund climate adaptation in the real economy, and still deliver real returns.

Mark shares what he’s learned from over a decade investing in agritech and climate adaptation in India, and why institutional investors continue to underestimate the opportunity in emerging markets.

We also discuss:

Richard Brandweiner, Chair of Impact Investing Australia and a longtime institutional investor, joins the show to discuss the realities of impact investing at scale. He reflects on universal ownership, system-level risks, blended finance, and what it truly takes to align capital with real-world outcomes and fiduciary expectations.

Richard shares lessons from leadership roles at Perpetual, Aware Super, LeapFrog, Pendal, and Regnan, and why hope isn’t a strategy when designing investment frameworks meant to deliver measurable impact.

A candid conversation for investors, asset owners, and practitioners who want an honest look at where sustainable finance is...

In this episode, I talk with Ron Homer – Chief Strategist for Impact Investing at RBC Global Asset Management, and one of the earliest architects of community development investing in the United States.

Ron’s perspective was shaped in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where he watched a thriving neighborhood decline not because of its people but because mortgage support and investment disappeared. That experience set him on a five-decade mission to help redirect capital back into places that had been overlooked.

He went from banking in Boston to co-founding Access Capital Strategies, where he flipped mortgage-backed securities into something that...

My guest today is Eva Yazhari – General Partner at Beyond Capital Ventures and one of the most original thinkers in the world of impact investing.

Trained on Wall Street, Eva left finance to found Beyond Capital, turning her expertise toward building impact-driven markets. 

Beyond Capital Fund was structured as a nonprofit, a 501(c)3 – not to do charity, but to meet the moment. She describes it as “almost like a Trojan horse” – a structure that made her approach more acceptable to early supporters, even as she operated with full VC rigor.

She knew in 2009 that most i...