The man quietly spending $1 billion on climate action
June 11, 2025
Tucked away on a side street in a bustling area of central London lies the headquarters of the largest climate organisation you have never heard of.
Every year, the Quadrature Climate Foundation (QCF) funnels hundreds of millions of dollars to some of the world’s most influential campaign groups and scientific institutions, steering the direction of both research and lobbying on the green transition. It has backed studies into anti-methane vaccines for cows, green aviation fuels, geothermal energy and carbon-removal technologies, to name a few.
With universities across the UK and US facing cuts to research budgets, organisations such as QCF are stepping in, helping to prepare for a shift to net-zero emissions.
QCF was launched in 2019 as the philanthropic arm of Quadrature Capital, a UK-based hedge fund whose founders, Greg Skinner and Suneil Setiya, say their support for climate issues is driven by their “passion” for tackling poverty, inequality and human suffering. The duo topped The Sunday Times Rich List for charitable donations this year, together giving away more than $6.7 million per week in the last year to climate causes via their foundation. Since its inception, QCF has handed out more than $1 billion to fund climate action, making it one of the largest and most powerful climate philanthropy organisations in the world.
Who decides what research it will support, the causes it will accelerate, which direction the transition should take? Enter Greg de Temmerman, a former nuclear physicist who is now chief science officer at QCF. It is his job to sort through the ideas landing on his desk and decide which ones hold the most promise.
Madeleine Cuff: Tell me how you went from working on nuclear fusion to working in climate strategy?
Greg de Temmerman: I had the chance to work on the ITER project [an international fusion experiment based in France] for seven years. It’s the biggest scientific project on Earth. I did a lot of outreach, trying to explain to people what fusion was. But the project was getting more and more delayed.
Because I was doing a lot of outreach, I was going to talk to a lot of decision-makers, and I saw the gap between science and researchers, and the world of decision-makers. So, I made the decision in 2020 to leave fusion completely, and I co-founded a small think tank with an entrepreneur in Paris. We were trying to make sure decision-makers and policy-makers understood what was going on in early-stage tech. I was recruited by the Quadrature Climate Foundation in 2023, to do more or less the same job, but now with the means to actually support projects.
Tell me about your role there?
What QCF does is support projects and partners that can help induce change in the world. It’s a wide range of things, from supporting early-stage technologies to advocacy, to campaigning, to plenty of technical work, capacity building, and so on. It’s a huge portfolio that we have. But you have to be able to understand what the problem is you are trying to solve.
You can say, “I want to accelerate renewables”. But what is preventing you from doing it? Is it a finance flow? Is it because we don’t have a [suitable power] grid? So, I was brought in to try to ask those questions and make sure we were actually going after the right things.
How is philanthropic funding different from traditional investment or government support?
Philanthropic capital doesn’t expect any financial return. It means you can take more risks than an investor would. You can also be quicker than governments. In my view, we are greasing the wheels so we can accelerate the [net-zero] movement and unlock other sources of money.
You have backed projects from solar-powered operating theatres to research into new strategies for storing carbon in the ocean. Your annual budget is huge, at about $325 million for 2025. Do you think you have a lot of impact and influence?
We are both a big fish in a small pond and a small fish in a big pond. In terms of climate foundations, we are one of the biggest in the world in terms of budget. So it’s great, you can feel very important. But our budget is nothing compared to the trillions we need per year for the climate transition.
Other ideas you have backed include research into climate tipping points, climate education schemes for government officials and support for clean technology entrepreneur programmes. Is there anything you look back on and think, “That was a really great success story for us”?
I think we were one of the first and biggest funders of permanent carbon removal. We did a lot of work on trying to create compliance markets, trying to make sure people were thinking about measurement, reporting and verification, because you want to avoid any kind of scams. You want to support research to understand all of that. The permanent carbon removal field started after the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, where people understood the importance of negative emissions, and then we managed to help catalyse a few things and get discussions at a really high level going. Now, people are taking that topic seriously.
You put together a new strategy last year, which broadens QCF’s focus from rapid decarbonisation to include adaptation and resilience to climate change. Why the shift?
The climate is changing quickly. The planet is going to be hotter. You will have more extreme events. Everything you do, even on decarbonisation, has to be resilient to that. [The new strategy] is a way to frame everything we do with a single thread and make sure we are going after what our founders are most interested in, which is the fact that we care about climate because people will suffer.
Part of the new strategy involves funding climate intervention work, otherwise known as geoengineering, a controversial area of research that involves developing potential strategies to artificially manipulate the climate, such as by injecting particles into the atmosphere to reflect more of the sun’s heat back into space. Why are you funding this?
Of course, this is science that should be mainly funded through public money. That was not happening for many reasons. So we decided to fund research to make sure [it] was being funded, and that people were asking the right questions.
It is an incredibly ethically contentious area. You offer philanthropic capital and are therefore not answerable to government. Can you really justify supporting this field?
We don’t have a position on whether geoengineering should be done or not. We don’t advocate for any deployment of geoengineering because we think it’s not possible at this stage and we don’t know enough.
Our thinking was that people were talking about geoengineering. Some start-ups were starting to be active in the field, but research was lagging behind.
Are you purely funding basic research or are you supporting field trials?
A lot of what we support is actually basic climate science. One of the biggest issues in geoengineering is understanding how clouds are formed, but that’s also a big issue in climate science. There’s a very strong overlap. We funded a very small field experiment in the US, which was about injecting sea salt particles into the air [the trial was halted after just a few weeks following public opposition]. We don’t want to go bigger than that, because, first of all, the climate models [that can predict the impact of such things] are not there. If you want to do outdoor experiments, you need to have very strong observational capacities so that you can actually understand what you are doing, and the models need to capture that. We think on the basic climate science side, there’s still a lot to be done.
It is clear the current political mood is challenging. For example, in the US, President Donald Trump is dismantling federal climate policies and research programmes, and we are seeing corporate retreat from climate targets. How would you describe this headwind?
Transition means two things. When a system has to disappear and a new system has to appear, it’s not going to happen very smoothly, right? The incumbent system will react and will try to fight back, and that’s where we are. We need to think about how we communicate that. How do we make people understand that it is going to be hard and there will be ups and downs?
The next few years will be really hard. Climate is definitely not popular – the terms climate change and climate action are going to be really hard to sell for different reasons. We know in the UK, for example, a big issue is the gap between price [to consumers] and cost [of producing electricity]. You keep saying to people that we are installing cheap renewables, but nobody sees the effect on electricity bills. It’s not a technical problem, it’s a market-design problem. How do you build a market that is actually dealing with the reality of those renewables?
But even if you don’t care about climate, you should have an interest in getting away from fossil fuels. These are extremely volatile products. We know that. We know gas and oil prices can go through the roof more or less overnight. If you want a resilient system, you have to get away from that. What is going to be interesting now is to make sure people understand that energy transition is in their interest anyway, whether they like climate [action] or not.
There is also the problem of climate disinformation and disingenuous actors. Is there anything we can do to combat this?
People are still attacking climate science, but it’s hard, because the evidence is against them. You can still believe Earth is flat, but we know [that’s not true]. What is happening more and more is that people are fighting against the solutions rather than the science. That’s more difficult. Type in “electric cars” on YouTube and you will see a number of videos with people saying that electric cars are not the solution.
These are interesting arguments, but they reach a level of complexity that is tricky, because if you want to start talking about the environmental impacts of electric cars, you need a lot of data and a lot of knowledge. It does raise some interesting questions: have we thought about the full environmental footprint of the transition, and can we demonstrate that it is good to do it? We can push that question to researchers.
What are the big opportunities for QCF over the coming year?
If you want to transform industry, you need to decrease electricity prices. I think there’s a lot of potential there.
The other area where we are doing some work is industrial emissions. They used to be called hard-to-abate sectors, but solutions are getting ready now, so it’s a question of launching them, making sure there is a market, making sure people are willing to pay the extra cost at the beginning. It’s exciting. People said we would never be able to decarbonise sectors like steel. And now we can.
You described yourself earlier as a big fish in a small pond. How do you deal with the responsibility of being an influential force in shaping the direction of the climate transition?
At the end of the day, it’s trying to understand that you are part of a system and that we don’t know everything. You try things because you think this is the right thing to do at the right moment, and you think it’s going to unlock other things, but you also accept that you might be wrong.
How do you stay positive? It feels like progress on climate is disintegrating.
I usually say I’m optimistic on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and pessimistic on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and then I take a break on Sunday.
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