Ask most people what climate finance means, and they'll say carbon credits. Ask about how climate interfaces with financial markets, and an informed respondent will add ESG investing (environmental, social, and governance investing) or screening fossil fuel companies out of institutional portfolios. Both are real. Both have absorbed most of the field's attention for the past decade.

If you would have asked Paul Moinester this question before January 27, 2020, his response would have been the exact same.

You see, Paul never thought he would ever work in finance. The thought had never crossed his mind. The field held zero appeal to him.

His background is in politics. In 2017, he launched TOPO, then The Outdoor Policy Outfit. The organization was predicated on a specific theory of change: that a renewed, more powerful environmental movement could be built that tapped into the shared identity and values of outdoor enthusiasts–hunters, hikers, skiers, anglers, and climbers. For three years, he worked to get the buy-in of the outdoor industry’s institutional powers but was not able to muster the support needed.

In January 2020, he was at the Outdoor Retailer Show in Denver, still trying to build the movement, when a colleague passed off a meeting she couldn't attend. It was with Bank of the West, which he later learned had come to the tradeshow to pitch outdoor companies on moving their banking to an institution that wasn't lending to fossil fuel extraction. Moinester went.

“I remember calling her on the way to the meeting and asking, why am I meeting with some bank at the Outdoor Retailer show? Why are they here? Little did I know that it would prove to be the most transformative 30 minutes of my life.”

In the meeting, Paul learned the fundamentals of how money moves through banks and into the world. He was shocked to learn that hundreds of billions of dollars every year flowed from our collective bank accounts into the fossil fuel industry and other carbon intensive industries.

Until then, he had never known it, but everything he had spent his career fighting for was being shaped by the invisible hand of the financial system. He had two degrees in environmental studies. He had spent fifteen years working in the climate space. The question that came out of that room that would not leave him alone was:

“How has nobody ever told me this before?!?”

That question became his fixation. He started calling countless friends across his climate network, leaders in corporate sustainability, in Congress, and in conservation. None of them had encountered this idea before.

Critically, Paul realized the power of banking as a climate solution is not just about trying to restrict the flow of finance into fossil fuel expansion. It's also about rewiring the financial system to direct trillions of dollars into climate solutions every year.

The scale of that opportunity becomes clear when you look at the numbers. Bloomberg estimates that meeting our climate goals requires $215 trillion in investment by 2050. Yet based on our annual climate investment rate, we are slated to fall $150 trillion short. So where is the money going to come from?

Having spent years working across the political world, Paul knew governments were not the answer. The answer, he realized, may have been hiding in plain sight: the tens of trillions of dollars already sitting in the bank accounts of climate-conscious corporations, institutions, and individuals.

If the capital already existed, then the next challenge wasn't actually generating more money. It was making the invisible visible.

So the question became how do you create a mechanism to transform the financial system from being the invisible hand of climate change into the visible hand of climate progress?

Paul spent 2020 holed up at home during the pandemic turning this question over in his head, examining it from all angles.

He kept seeing stories pop up in the news about how major companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft were doubling down on their climate commitments and emission reduction goals. He would read their strategies and reports and see nothing about their banking, save for the occasional mention of a green bond or a small reference to ESG. However, they were all tightening their emissions reduction goals and expanding the scope of what they were already measuring.

That’s when it hit him: what if companies could measure the emissions associated with those banking relationships, just as they measured emissions from their operations and supply chains? If they could, banking decisions would become climate decisions. And they could leverage these decisions to ensure their capital is flowing through banks and the financial system into climate solutions, which will advance their own climate ambitions.

Paul recruited a small team of key contributors to tackle the problem with him, developing a first-of-its-kind methodology to quantify these hidden emissions.

What they found stunned them. The climate impact associated with corporate cash and investments was far larger than anyone had anticipated. Even more surprising, virtually every company they spoke with had never considered it.

Notably, this wasn't an entirely new concept to the team behind the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol, the global framework that guides how companies measure and report emissions. They had long recognized that corporate cash and investments were relevant, but without a credible methodology and sufficient data, they had never required companies to account for them.

When the Topo team met with them in November 2021, they learned that the team behind the Protocol had long viewed corporate cash and investments as in scope, but they had never asked companies to report them due to data and methodology limitations.

That was the key that could unlock everything. The Topo team knew it was not an immediate flip switch. These rules take years to change. And while they had solved the methodology limitation, there were major data shortages that would take years more to address. However, this was a major legitimizer. And it created a viable pathway for widescale adoption.

Notably, in March of 2026, the GHG Protocol publicly signaled, for the first time, that in their projected 2028 update, reporting the emissions stemming from corporate cash and investments would be included as a recommended practice.

It took five years, but the idea of managing the emissions stemming from financial management, a practice no company was thinking about or knew existed in 2021, is on track to become a recommended corporate practice in the most consequential global framework.

After six years of tireless work, all of this remains a bit of a head scratcher for Moinester, who often refers to himself as a “reluctant finance bro.”

None of this was expected. Working in finance alone would have been a shock. Creating a new field in finance was beyond any realm of possibility. And the depths and layers of challenges that have to be overcome to make climate-resilient financial management standard practice for all companies, institutions, and individuals continue to reveal themselves every day.

But Paul and the Topo team are more bullish than ever that this is the future of financial management. And that more so than ever, it remains our greatest opportunity to unlock unprecedented capital for climate solutions.

Topo now operates, in effect, as a pro bono management consultancy alongside its advocacy work. The team develops tools and guidance designed to help companies act on what they learn. They work with sustainability leaders, treasury teams, and industry associations to turn an emerging idea into a professional practice.

They published their groundbreaking research in 2022. It took two years of solution building and recruiting to get the first major global company to start implementing this practice. However, over the last two years, Topo has gone from $0 to more than $60 billion dollars in assets under advisement, representing entities valued at over $1.5 trillion.

“You can’t just bring the horse to water,” Moinester says. “You also have to make the horse thirsty.”

The ten-year vision is an ecosystem, not a proprietary product. Big Four accounting firms with entire divisions doing this accounting. Treasury software companies with the methodology built in. Banks with dedicated teams. An entire universe of professionals dedicated to execution and driving impact.

This is the 2016 EV problem. The Nissan Leaf was a real car. But the charging infrastructure didn't exist. The range was insufficient for everyday use. The service and repair shops had not yet been upskilled. You could have mandated electric vehicle adoption in 2016, and it would have failed because the product and surrounding infrastructure were not yet ready for widespread adoption.

This situation, enormous and unexamined, isn’t unique to corporate cash. Most large systems problems look like this from the inside: not purposely concealed by anyone, simply outside the frame of what’s been measured, named, and assigned to someone. The climate funding shortfall is partly a capital problem. Partly it’s a problem of what hasn’t been seen.

What Topo had to build, first, was a framework for seeing: the vocabulary, the methodology, the conversation with standard-setting bodies. Visibility requires its own infrastructure.

The evidence Moinester points to isn’t measured in emissions avoided, at least not yet. It’s measured in something more foundational: accounting standards beginning to shift, treasury leaders joining the conversation, a profession slowly developing the language to describe a problem it once couldn’t see.

“It’s working,” Moinester says. “Our strategy is working in a macro environment that’s worse than we expected to be in, but the movement is taking hold.” A pause. “It’s just a future that’s proving to be a little bit farther out than I was hoping.”

Five years ago, most companies had no language for thinking about the climate impact of their cash. Today, the question is moving toward accounting standards, treasury teams, and boardrooms. The money has not changed. What is changing is our ability to notice what it has been doing all along. ■