Voices of Impact: Climate Finance Philanthropy with Adam Fraser, CEO at Terraset
- Foundation House
- Feb 24
- 23 min read
Voices of Impact is Foundation House's ongoing interview series featuring the leaders and organizations coming through our Activist Residency program. At Foundation House, we believe transformative change happens when there is space to connect, strategize, and take action. Our Greenwich, CT retreat hosts nonprofits and coalitions working across environmental, social impact, and mental health initiatives, giving teams the time and space to think bigger, align deeper, and return to their work with renewed clarity. These conversations are a window into that process.
February 28, 2026
We're excited to share this conversation between Adam Fraser, CEO of Terraset, and Richard Zimmerman, Executive Director of Foundation House on climate finance philanthropy.
From his roots as a sports journalist in northern England to leading one of the most innovative climate finance organizations in the world, Adam brings an unlikely and deeply compelling path to the climate sector. In this interview, he shares how Terraset is forging a new avenue for philanthropic capital to fund the greenhouse gas removal solutions the planet urgently needs, and how his team's residency at Foundation House helped clarify their mission and sharpen their focus.
Video highlights and full transcript below.
What does sports journalism have to do with carbon removal? More than you'd think. Adam traces his path from reporting on sport's social impact, to leading the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation under the legacy of Nelson Mandela, to arriving at Terraset with one galvanizing question: where is the biggest gap between funding and impact in the climate space? His answer and the Mandela-inspired ethos he carries into the work might just change how you think about what's possible.
Only 2% of the $900 billion philanthropic market goes to anything climate-related and a mere 0.1% to greenhouse gas removal. Adam breaks down why this disconnect exists, what it will take to close it, and why urgency isn't just a talking point at Terraset. He also introduces the organization's core insight: that every credible climate model requires massive carbon removal, even if we stopped all emissions tomorrow.
Adam walks through exactly how Terraset deploys philanthropic capital: pre-purchasing carbon removal credits, working with a portfolio of 25+ vetted projects across carbon removal, methane abatement, and refrigerant destruction, and structuring deals in ways that unlock additional investment from banks and institutions. It's a masterclass in catalytic giving and a roadmap for donors who want every dollar to go further and faster.
Adam reflects on Terraset's residency at Foundation House, the rare gift of bringing his team and board together to step back from the work and ask the harder questions: What should we stop doing? What doesn't make sense anymore? What are we not even thinking about yet? He shares what emerged from those days and offers a clear-eyed and hopeful vision for where Terraset is headed as it continues to innovate at the frontier of climate finance.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Chapter 1
Richard Zimmerman: Hello everybody, we're really excited to have Adam Frasier, CEO of Terraset. You and I have gotten to know each other over the last couple years, just as you joined Terraset. It's just been so great to get to know you and to learn about your organization. And at Foundation House, we also had the honor and the opportunity to host you and your team for a retreat and also join us at convenings as well, so we're going to use this opportunity to do this video to have a greater conversation. We love to learn about you, about the organization and the retreat, and your view of the world going forward. So with that, could you tell us a little bit about yourself? I've heard your story and it's so inspiring. Tell us your background and then what led you to Terraset.
Adam Fraser: “Inspiring” is very gracious of you, Richard! I wouldn't use the word myself, but thank you for having me. I feel so fortunate in what we've been able to do with Foundation House and so grateful to you for engaging us in that network and in the special place that you have there. I'm from the UK originally from the north of England, the Lake District, very rural mountains, hills, rivers and lakes. And now I live in Brooklyn, which is about as much the opposite of that as you can be…
Richard Zimmerman: Hah, you’re right.
Adam Fraser: And I’ve been here something over 10 years. I have spent my career on a path that feels very logical now but maybe wouldn't if you mapped it out in advance. I started as a journalist straight from university writing about the world of sport. As I did that, I started writing more about the social impact of sport and the business behind it. Then that took me on a path where I started working on the commercial side of sport and its social impact. Working with a lot of athletes around their social impact, and over time that then took me to the point that in 2014 I became the Fundraising Lead, and then a few years later the Chief Executive of the Laurius Sport for Good Foundation which was founded under the patronage of Nelson Mandela after the role he saw sport play rebuilding post-apartheid South Africa. Laurius is an amazing organization, and it's primarily a grantmaking organization, but it does a whole range of other things in 50 countries around the world with about 300 grantees across areas as diverse as gender equity and employability and education and a whole range of amazing courses. It does some climate work, but it also doesn't do a huge amount of climate work.
A few years ago, I really started feeling an itch to be doing more in this space when I was thinking about having an impact. Maybe it was having kids, maybe it's seeing what's happening on the planet. All of those things really driving me into thinking I want to do more in the climate space. And as I was looking for what that could be or the different ways I could do that on a voluntary basis or in my spare time or as a career path, I was lucky enough to meet the team who had come up with the idea of Terraset and who now represent my Board of Directors; they include some people you know very well, and the proposition that was put on the table was really simple.
It was like we're trying to build something here that doesn't yet exist. We are trying to build a way to move catalytic philanthropic capital to high impact under-resourced climate solutions.
And back then in 2023, it was really about carbon dioxide removal; How can we scale this sector that needs to scale? But it's since expanded into other areas like methane abatement and refrigerant destruction. We're really always looking for what are those underfunded areas and where can we be catalytic, and as I said, that's where my career path starts to feel quite logical to me because going right back to being a journalist, you're looking for those threads to pull on and then through the commercial and social impact and fully nonprofit side I feel very fortunate it's brought me to this point.
Richard Zimmerman: Yeah, that's really interesting and I know you must’ve had a number of amazing experiences along that journey and working under Nelson Mandela and in that organization. Are there some things that you learned or parts of you that either became more during that time or always part of you that you're bringing to this?
Adam Fraser: And when you work with an organization that carries some legacy of a figure like President Mandela that will always rub off on you.
I think the thing that rubbed off on me more than anything…let me say two things. Number one was the idea that things aren't impossible. Everyone knows that there's a famous quote by President Mandela: “Everything seems impossible until it's done.” And that's really how I approach this work, with that mentality.
But I think also there's something to President Mandela's power of bringing people together around a cause and not pointing fingers and not blaming and not focusing on opposition and polarization and all the things that we see so much of in the world right now, but kind of saying, what are the common points? How do we work together? How do we achieve more as a whole than as the individual parts and I think that's something that Laurius really embodies at a cultural level, in how it works with its grantees, how it works with the athletes who support it, and our ambassadors. It's something I try and bring forward now and I think it's so crucial in this space where we would all say this work's underfunded and people are scrabbling for their piece of it and could be seen as competing, but actually we're trying to solve the same fundamental problem and it's something we can do faster and more effectively together.
Chapter 2
Richard Zimmerman: Okay, take those experiences, and also as you mentioned the journalistic skills that you had, this feeling about overcoming the impossible, right? And then the connectivity and the community and the collaborative spirit from all of that..and I think all of that is part of you as I've gotten to know. Now you're tackling what is also seemingly an insurmountable issue. How do you bring that into Terraset? How does Terraset work in order to integrate that and also connect to the outside world in what it does?
Adam Fraser: I would say from a personal perspective, the great thing about being in this role, despite more exposure to all the challenges facing the planet, that my climate anxiety has gone down somewhat because I see all the incredible people trying to bring solutions to bear, the innovation that's there, the smart genius people trying to solve it. And it gives me a huge faith that we can solve this despite how impossible it feels.
And also, what is contrary to that is the urgency of the situation. This is a time that we are coming up on some different irreversible tipping points, that we're coming up with different challenges, and that we can find ourselves kind of on the verge of a clean energy revolution at the same time as really being stuck in a lot of the ways we've done things over the last however many decades.
And if we don't make the right switches at the right times, it will be too late. And that's something that we really try and emphasize at Terraset, and we could really easily think that we're doing a good job: “oh, we raised a few million dollars this year” and “we did this work”, and I'll talk more about what that is in a second, but we don't ever really think that way. We're kind of always trying to think of like, “How can we make each dollar go further, go faster, and actually have an impact?,” because now is the time. There's that funny thing we would say, and I think about all the money sitting in donor advised funds (DAFs) and private foundations: “if you are saving this money for a rainy day… it's raining”, and that's the kind of push.
Richard Zimmerman: Yeah. Really good point. And a couple of touch points to Foundation House. We take a systems to solutions approach and one of the many, THE major system, is the consciousness system. How are we individually and collectively? And we're doing more and more work about climate and consciousness through our Climate and the Mind series. So you have to look and deal with your own consciousness: individual, collective, and then try to move that forward with the urgency that you said. And also with the positivity because this is tough stuff and either people who have been doing it a long time are weary or people new to it are afraid, and so you got to sort of flip the switch or move up a notch from those to then say, "Okay, however, I can go forward”, and we're going to do our best with everything that we have and we're going to bring those values and connectivity and everything else you mentioned before to it also because you have to continue to feed it and sustain it. And it sounds like that's what you're building at Terraset. So, love the reflection on that and also get into really what does Terraset do?
Adam Fraser: Yeah, I think my reflection on it comes back to what Terraset does: We're a 501c3. We are a nonprofit focused on driving that catalytic capital to high impact climate solutions. And the reason that's important is that the philanthropic market is something like a $900 billion per year market now.
But of that, only 2% go to anything to do with climate change and only a naught 0.1% to what you would think of as greenhouse gas removal, as I look at that as the core of our work. So there's a fundamental disconnect between the amount that people worry about climate change or think about climate change, where it will consistently rank as an area of concern, and something that people would like to see change at a policy level, an individual level, an organizational level, and then how people actually use their funding, use their philanthropic capital.
And I’m always very curious as to why that is. I spend a lot of time thinking about why it is. And I think a huge part of it, as you just said, is that it almost seems like too big a problem to people, that they're kind of like, “this is just such an existential crisis for our species…” or that “what's the $1,000 or the $10,000 or the million dollars that I can spend on this going to do?” And that presents a barrier because actually it's by bringing those things together and inspiring that action that you can start to make a difference. I think it's also an area where people look to others to take responsibility. We think government should do this, we think super polluters should be taking action now and responsible for their actions in the past, we think corporate should do this, and we think other people should do that. And all of those are really valid perspectives, but again, the lessons I would take from my career are sometimes you just have to step up and do things and claiming that other people should do them is never going to be the solution.
So Terraset as a 501c3. We raise philanthropic capital from family offices, from donor advised funds, from foundations, and then we try to deploy it to those climate solutions and we try to do that in innovative ways. So we don't generally just make grants to them and we don't just give money away to what seems like a good cause. We're really trying to identify things that are dramatically scalable, but where some philanthropic funding now, deployed in a range of different ways, can be that jump start for them, or take them from A to B or 0 to 10, or however you want to think about that. And the mechanisms we're using to do that are a whole range of diverse things that we found people actually really engage with. So we started early pre-purchasing carbon removal; paying now for removal that will happen later. And then we developed that model further with the backing of the Schmidt Family Foundation to a revolving fund where we could pre-purchase some removal and methane abatement and refrigerant destruction, and when it's delivered to us, we can resell it to corporate buyers and redeploy it.
And we look at what that means for engaging with the capital sitting in donor advised funds, because if we could redeploy that money, we could even repay a loan or we could build on those things in different ways. And it's actually a very fresh bit of news for us. One day ago, as of the time we're talking, we were named as a finalist in the Finance for the Future Awards, which is run by Accounting for Sustainability and Deloitte and others. And we were recognized on that short list with the London Stock Exchange and First Abu Dhabi Bank and other big asset managers and banks. For that to be where we sit as a climate nonprofit seems almost strange, but feels very right to me in how we're trying to think about this and how I know you think about this at Foundation House in terms of catalyzing capital and having an impact
Richard Zimmerman: Okay, a lot of things to touch on here too. So after your retreat…and we'll get to your retreat in a minute… you were part of our Catalytic Capital conference and the big story there is that there's a lot of capital, whether or not it's investment capital or grant capital or philanthropic capital out there in the world, how do you get it pointed in the right direction? What layers? How can I do that? And there's a lot of tools for that.
I know a little bit about what you all do, meaning the broader topic of how do you sort of remove more from the atmosphere in different ways, and of course there were the carbon markets and all of those things. I had always thought about that more as investable dollars versus philanthropic. I feel like you have forged a new path by creating the avenue for philanthropic capital to come in this space. So to me that's very innovative, and if I was a philanthropist or an impact investor I'm thinking, ”I care about this or what are the certain avenues for doing it?”The other thing is, “I want to be catalytic with my capital,” and so it's the scrappy newer organizations, and I know you're beyond scrappy now, but you're startup and x number of years ago and with an innovative idea that by supporting you is very catalytic in it to itself. Beyond the fact that what you do is catalytic.
Adam Fraser: Yeah, I definitely don't think we're beyond scrappy. I think that keeping scrappy for as long as we can is a really key part of that mentality. And I agree with you, I think a couple of things. Firstly, people have this mindset, and we talked about it a lot that day at Foundation House, we talked about it as…at our retreat, but with so many other great people at that forum, people have this mindset of my philanthropic capital is over here and my impact capital is over here, and maybe they think a bit about impact investing in the middle, but really it's like this capital is a tool to achieve something. Sometimes that's achieving market rate returns. Sometimes that's achieving social impact or environmental impact. Sometimes it's a combination of those things. And these lines that we put up around things are sometimes a result of the tax code and sometimes they're somewhat artificially created.
And I think when we can get beyond thinking that and start to think, “what's the impact I want to have and what's the most effective way for me to do it,” is the key thing. I remember talking to Alex Roetter and Chris Wedding, the founders of Terraset at the time that they'd had the idea and they'd launched it, and I remember listening to them talking about it on Chris's podcast and they were saying: “Well you know it's a very simple idea, yeah anyone could register a nonprofit and go and do this work". And that's true, and that's wonderful that it's a simple idea, but it was a simple idea that no one else had done. And I think we keep looking for those simple ideas that no one else is doing. You see this pool of capital here and there's need for it here. What's the fund or the structure or the mechanism that we can use to join those dots?
Richard Zimmerman: And big shout out to Chris Wedding by the way, he’s good friend of mine and founder of Terraset as you mentioned, and the one that introduced us and of course he's a fantastic climate coach as well and a super expert in the industry.
Chapter 3
Richard Zimmerman: Okay, so let's get kind of specific if we could. I have X amount of money and I want to figure out what to do with it, and I care about climate and I'm also caring about emissions, that's an important space for it because I know the end effect of emissions is what's happening to the atmosphere, so that might be my kind of zone. Now I could also spend time on mitigation and abatement. I think you all are a little bit more about removal, but maybe broader, but I’d like to hear about that…and I could do different things with my regular investment capital and try to get some kind of return for it and…or I could get a different kind of return in my philanthropic capital, my grand capital. Either way I get it to you, right, let's say it's in my DAF. It goes to you, what happens? What happens with the organization and then what happens in terms of the world, the ecosystem?
Adam Fraser: Yeah, as framing it, I would say: every climate model with any credibility: the UN, the IPCC, etc. involves carbon removal at a massive scale. We as a planet emit 50 billion tons of CO2 every year. We'll just talk CO2. We could talk methane, we could talk other things, but we emit 50 billion tons of CO2 every year. We need 90-95% of that to stop. So that is the abatement, the emissions reductions, everything on that side. But even if that does stop, every model has us removing, let's say, an average of 10 billion tons per year from the atmosphere. And we're just nowhere near that and nowhere near to being on the right path to it. Which means even our, you know, most established models are overly optimistic unless we can really catalyze that space. Even if we did catalyze everything and achieve it and all emissions stop tomorrow, you still have a couple of hundred years since the industrial revolution of constantly increasing greenhouse gas emissions. And the thing with carbon dioxide is it stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years and that warming effect continues. So we've got to tackle those legacy emissions as well. That's why Terraset, a core part of our focus, has been carbon removal. Different solutions that we can fund that actually take CO2 out of the atmosphere. And that could be methodology that's adding alkaline solutions to water so that it binds more carbon in an acid base reaction. That can be direct air capture, which are the things people mostly think about in this space, you know a big fan sucking in air and removing the CO2 and releasing the rest. It can be a whole range of other methodologies that incredible scientists are coming up with. We try to identify those and then we try to use your money to figure out the thing that will most help them. So, as I say, that could be going to a company that is a startup, and I say company, some of these are for-profit, some are nonprofits, some are social enterprises, we're more interested in the solution. But, a company that has a way of doing this and they're looking for their first buyer, their second buyer, to actually pay them to perform this service. And part of the reason that I say that in that world, we act as a buyer rather than a grantmaker, is that we found that by purchasing from those companies, we're revenue on their balance sheet, which makes them more attractive to investors and more attractive to project finance. So we can give them that money and know that it unlocks more money and sometimes that's direct. We've made purchases which have directly unlocked follow on debt capital from banks and sometimes it's indirect: we've made a purchase and they had a phone call from an investment organization saying, “we saw this, what do you think about them?,”“we're thinking an investment.”
Richard Zimmerman: And when you say purchases, in general, is it credits? What would you say, and can you explain that?
Adam Fraser: Yes. You can think of credits in this way almost as a way of keeping score or measuring tons of CO2. People think of, sometimes the voluntary carbon market and the world of offsets and they think, "that's not how we or I deploy my money” or “that's not a thing here," but really, it's a credit, in terms of carbon removal, is a measurement of a ton of CO2 that's been removed from the air by one of these methodologies. So if we go and buy one carbon removal credit, one ton of CO2 or a thousand or 10,000, we are paying for that amount of CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere.
And what you then also have is technically an asset. Those credits are a tradable commodity. So that's why it's a purchase of that. You can then as a buyer retire those, they’ve happened, you've taken them off the market, you've paid for that carbon to come out of the atmosphere and be sequestered somewhere and that's it, or you can trade them. And that's when people talk about the carbon markets, often it's about the sort of the trading of carbon credits. And again, we feel that there's a world where all of those things are important. We have donors who say, “I am thinking about my footprint, I’m thinking about my impact, I want you to take these credits and purchase them and then retire them on delivery,”and that's the end of the story.
And we have others who say, “I want to catalyze growth and see my money repeat again and again and use your revolving fund to purchase these and then when you take ownership of those credits, resell them to corporate buyers and redeploy that money.”
Really, as I said before, it's how people think about that money as philanthropic or investment capital or for profit money or things that they're buying and selling, is less relevant to us than: “what's the solution?”, “what’s the financial mechanism by which we can best support it?”, and “what impact does that drive?”
Richard Zimmerman: Got it, so I feel comfortable then, as somebody who's going to give you money, that you'll look at all the various opportunities and choose the best ones that you, in your viewpoint, to do this with and build relationships with them.
Adam Fraser: We have something over 300, possibly now 400, different projects around the world who have applied to us for funding and gone through at least some stage of our diligence funding. We have a portfolio of about 25 that we've moved money to across a range of those methodologies in carbon removal, and some methane abatement, which can be plugging abandoned oil and gas wells or it can be work landfills or rice farming and in refrigerant destruction, which is another whole fascinating area where all the refrigerants we've used as humans in everything from AC’s to industrial complexes, unless they're disposed of properly, those also leak into the atmosphere and have a warming effect. And there's plenty of parts of the world where they're not disposed of properly.
So again, we have that portfolio of 25 organizations we're working with. We have the pipeline of hundreds and often we're trying to match things up. I mean, you might come to me as a donor and say, "Look, I care about something that's aligned with nature and I care about agriculture and I care about Subsaharan Africa and livelihoods there", and we might say, "well, we know an amazing biochar project in West Africa that is improving soil quality and taking carbon dioxide out of the air, that's where we should use your funding."
You might say, “I care about rice methane abatement across Southeast Asia, is there a portfolio of companies who could do that work?”, and we might say, “yeah, we know one and we could go and find a few more.” Or we might say, “we don't know, but let's try and figure it out together.” So, we will do the diligence, we'll do the research, we will make sure that money is deployed as impactfully as possible but we also definitely take donor areas of interest into account in that.
Richard Zimmerman: Got it, great. Okay, that is all really helpful to me to understand more and very impressive all the work you're doing.
Chapter 4
Richard Zimmerman: The retreats…a little bit of experience to that and then maybe have that lead to the future, and maybe it's the future of your organization, but the future of the cause as well.
Adam Fraser: Yeah, I'll say for anyone who's never been to Foundation House, it's an incredible space. I'm very jealous of the fact you get to spend so much time there. But it's an incredible space to go for an event for a couple of hours or, if you were as lucky as we are, as we were on the residency and the retreat that you hosted us for, somewhere we were lucky to spend a few days.
We spoke about Chris before, and he and I had a conversation before the retreat about how there's something special about the fact that we only have these people together in this place at this time, that only happens once. Even if you have the same people at the same place, it's a different time. And there's something really powerful about taking a step away from our daily lives and what we're doing and being at our desk and saying, “Actually, we are going to intentionally be in this amazing space and we are going to devote ourselves for a few days to figure out, what are we actually building? How do we have the most impact we can? What should we stop doing? What are we doing that's a waste of time? Why are we still pushing this thing that maybe made sense two years ago, but it doesn't make sense now and what should we be doing in two years that we haven't even thought of yet?” And so being able to spend time with our team and our board, really digging into that in the space that Foundation House provides is just a real privilege.
I actually was, coming back to real life. I'm very happy in my life. I love where I live. I love my family. You know, all the things that make it a joy to come back from something like that. I was also like, "oh no, this is coming to an end”, and it feels such a special place to have been.
Richard Zimmerman: Thank you, well you're welcome back anytime.
Adam Fraser: We’ll definitely take you up on that!
Richard Zimmerman: And then future vision…
Adam Fraser: The key thing we kept coming back to…I said before: ”why are we doing this?" And there are different ways you can look at our work and the core thing that we kept saying was that we believe our work makes every dollar go further and faster for climate solutions. And I think that's our pitch to donors, that’s our pitch to people who care about this work.
There are a lot of amazing causes that you can support and I encourage people to support all of them. If you want to focus on cleaning up a lake that you live close by or cleaning up a community garden, you should...like those things really matter.
But we believe we've identified the areas that will have the most impact on tackling climate change and we want to move as much money to them as quickly as possible in ways that then catalyze more funding or recycle or continue to have an impact. And I think again at the retreat that's something that sometimes any of us can get lost in the work. We can get lost in the thing we're doing. For us the pre- purchases, the revolving fund, the blended capital and not why we're doing it. And that's a really important distinction, like all of those things are the engine, but the actual solutions are what the engine is driving and I think it was just an amazing few days to focus on that and then come into the forum that you held with so many other great funders and investors and thinkers all trying to take a different version of that mindset into their work.
Richard Zimmerman: And Terraset said in one year, two year, five year? What do you...how do you feel? Just a little snapshot obviously.
Adam Fraser: Yeah, it's a great question because if you'd asked me a couple of years ago, I would have said, “just what we're doing now but at more scale”, and if you ask me now I'd say, “what we're doing now but at more scale”, which, there's something about the human mind because that has not been what's happened over the last two years, you know. We are not doing the same things we're doing. We've expanded across new impact areas, we've expanded across new funding mechanisms. I would like to think that Terraset in two or three years is still really innovating and coming up with the solutions and the mechanisms that don't yet exist for the climate solutions that need to exist. And hopefully that's because other people have also taken some of the models that we've been building and said, “oh, we could apply that,” or “oh, that works with philanthropic capital, maybe that could work with my investment capital,” or “maybe I could do this in a different way," but there will always be more climate solutions we need to find and fund and support. And so I see Terraset as both scaling what we're doing now and continuing to find the things that we don't even know yet.
When I first met you back in 2023, I'm not sure I'd ever even heard about refrigerant destruction. And suddenly, I spent a lot of my time thinking about it, and I'm fascinated to know what that thing will be in two years time.
Richard Zimmerman: Great. So just to wrap it up, first of all, I've really enjoyed getting to know you over the last couple years, and even more recently, and your organization Terraset. I think you're really on to something and I think you're giving this path, as we said, to a whole other pool of capital. We're going to try our best to tell your story.... all the good work you're doing, but also get the word out to the world and that people start to see on any platform, “oh wait, this is an alternative I didn't know about.” And so I think, obviously you're a real first mover in this, and we're honored to have you at the retreat. Please come back and come speak at anything as well, and keep doing the good work and I enjoyed meeting you, I enjoyed speaking to you today.
Adam Fraser: Thank you so much, Richard. Thank you for everything you do.
Richard Zimmerman: Okay, thanks. Take care.
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