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Climate Confident - Practical Climate Solutions That Cut Emissions

Climate Confident is for business leaders, climate professionals and policymakers who need to understand what is actually cutting emissions—and what it takes to make those solutions work at scale.

Each Wednesday, I speak with the executives, engineers, scientists, founders and policymakers turning climate ambition into measurable progress. Together, we examine the technologies, business models, policies and implementation strategies reshaping energy, transport, industry, supply chains, food and finance.

These are not conversations about distant targets, vague pledges or greenwash. They are candid discussions about what is working, what is failing, where the real bottlenecks lie, and how leaders can make better decisions about decarbonisation, resilience, investment and risk.

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Proven approaches to reducing emissions
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Analysis of the markets, technologies and policies driving the transition
Honest examination of costs, trade-offs, setbacks and unintended consequences
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Climate Confident - Practical Climate Solutions That Cut Emissions

Why Traditional VC Is Failing the Climate, and What Comes Next

October 22, 2025 • Tom Raftery • Season 1 • Episode 243

0:00 | 42:31

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In this week’s episode of Climate Confident, I sat down with Johanna Wolfson, co-founder and general partner at Azolla Ventures, to talk about how we can rethink climate-tech investing - not as a game of chasing returns, but as a mission to fund what truly matters.

Johanna’s firm takes a bold approach using catalytic capital, money that embraces higher risk to bring breakthrough technologies from lab to market. We explored why that matters right now, as parts of the venture community hesitate just when the planet has, as she put it, “negative time to spare.”

We dug into the uncomfortable truth: the pull of the “returns-first” mindset is still powerful, even in climate investing. But Johanna makes a compelling case for impact-first capital that can back ideas others won’t touch, from gigaton-scale carbon removal to early-stage innovations in shipping, geothermal, and bioplastics.

She also flagged two blind spots investors urgently need to address: methane and nitrous oxide, gases far more potent than CO₂ yet largely ignored - and the coming wave of adaptation and resilience tech as climate impacts intensify.

This conversation will make you think differently about where climate capital flows, who it serves, and what true impact investing looks like in a world that can’t afford to wait.

🎧 Listen now to hear how Azolla Ventures is rewriting the rules of climate finance, and why the next frontier may be investing in resilience itself.

Keywords: climate tech investing, catalytic capital, climate finance, venture capital, methane reduction, resilience technology, impact investing, Azolla Ventures, gigaton-scale emissions reduction, Climate Confident podcast

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