By Maria Bregman, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Creativitys.UK (77K+ monthly readers) and heads a media network reaching nearly 2M readers annually. A UK Global Talent, cultural strategist, documentary filmmaker, and writer, she bridges art, technology, and global business. She shapes the critical narratives driving the impact economy, and is a Contributor to Esquire, ELLE, and Tier-1 media.
London’s Palace of Westminster has hosted many consequential conversations over its eight-hundred-year history. But on the evening of March 19th, 2026, when approximately 300 delegates from more than 40 countries filed into the gilded chamber of the House of Lords for the opening reception of CC Forum London, the subject was not war or sovereignty or constitutional reform. It was money – specifically, how money moves when the planet is running out of time.
Over three days, across three venues – the House of Lords, The May Fair Hotel in Mayfair, and the Georgian elegance of Dartmouth House – CC Forum London assembled an unusual coalition: institutional investors and indigenous Amazonian leaders, quantum physicists and coral reef scientists, former Norwegian deputy minister and Wall Street fund managers. The result was something more valuable: clarity about where the fractures lie, and where the opportunities are.
The forum opened with a geopolitical briefing that set the tone for everything that followed. Lord Marland of Odstock, Chairman of the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council, delivered a keynote titled The Trump Effect that made explicit what most in the room already understood: the United States has withdrawn from environmental accountability at a scale and speed that most European observers underestimated.
The consequences are not theoretical. During the afternoon panel on resilient capital, a Wall Street fund manager whose portfolio focuses on water technology offered a stark assessment:
“Trump came in and dismantled 60% of the EPA within the first three months. That means six out of ten people at the agency supposed to police the environment in the US – gone forever, not coming back.”
His response was not to abandon the US market but to recalibrate his fundraising geography entirely. Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia are now expected to provide 80% of his capital, because those regions still price environmental risk into their investment decisions.
The thesis driving this geographic shift is straightforward: capital does not disappear when a government withdraws from a sector. It relocates. And it is relocating toward jurisdictions and managers that can demonstrate their returns are not built on externalized environmental costs.
Microsoft’s investment in a Zurich-based water filtration fund was cited as the paradigmatic example. The tech giant is not investing out of altruism. It needs access to water treatment technology for its data centers. This is the corporate turn that multiple speakers identified: even as pension funds and traditional asset managers remain hesitant, corporations with direct operational exposure to climate and resource constraints are actively deploying capital into solutions.
The water crisis is not hypothetical. Ninety-nine percent of the US population, according to the fund manager, carries detectable levels of PFAS – per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or “forever chemicals” – in their bloodstream. These compounds do not degrade. They accumulate. The question is not whether they cause harm but when the tipping point is reached for cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and other chronic diseases linked to chemical exposure.
Bradley Loiselle, Founder and CEO of Arctic Freshwater and Pure Water, reframed the water emergency in a single, arresting formulation during his fireside chat with Richard Quest: Freshwater is not disappearing. It is leaving the human system. The Earth is not running out of water. The problem is that water is migrating – into glaciers, deep aquifers, contaminated reserves – faster than infrastructure can adapt.
For investors, the implicatio онn is clear. Water technology is not an ESG niche. It is critical infrastructure for the next hundred years.
The most audacious project presented at the forum – and the one with the clearest gap between its importance and its funding – was described by Marianne Hagen.
The Seabed Curtain Project targets the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, which glaciologists describe as the most dangerous piece of ice on Earth. If it collapses – and current models suggest it is accelerating toward that outcome – global sea levels rise by 65 centimeters within decades. Coastal cities from New York to Shanghai face catastrophic flooding.
The engineering solution Hagen described is deceptively simple. Warm ocean water is reaching the base of the glacier and melting it from below. A flexible curtain, anchored to the seabed and positioned along a natural underwater ridge, would deflect enough of that warm water to slow the melting process significantly.
The project is not attempting to reverse climate change. It is attempting to buy time for mitigation efforts to take effect.
The cost structure reframes the conversation entirely. The next phase – an underwater observatory and 3D seabed mapping – requires £10 million. Full implementation is estimated at $80 billion. New York City is currently spending that same sum just to defend its own coastline. The Seabed Curtain would protect every coastline on Earth.
Hagen’s framing was clinical: this is not environmentalism. This is infrastructure economics at planetary scale. The project is supported by UArctic and the Tom Wilhelmsen Foundation, but it remains dramatically undercapitalized relative to its potential impact.
For the family offices and institutional investors in the room, the pitch was implicit but unmistakable: the highest-return infrastructure investment available may be a curtain at the bottom of the world.
Daniel Doll-Steinberg, Co-Founder of EdenBase and the force behind QBASE, a new quantum technology hub in London, delivered a keynote that connected physics, capital, and climate in a framework most of the room had not previously considered.
His thesis: every major technological revolution – from steam engines to semiconductors – has accelerated resource consumption. Quantum computing represents the first technology wave that moves in the opposite direction.
“We currently use 7% of the world’s energy just to break the nitrogen bond for fertilizer production, because we don’t understand how nature does it. We’re brute-forcing it. Quantum simulation will allow us to replicate the biological process. The same applies to photosynthesis, to materials science, to drug discovery.”
Dr. Eloisa Angeles, Principal of the Edenbase Quantum Fund, translated this into investment language: impact is no longer optional. Companies that cannot optimize resource use will be priced out by competitors who can. The quantum transition makes environmental efficiency and profitability the same thing.
Prof. Michael Mainelli, former Lord Mayor of London and Chairman of Z/Yen Group, noted that governance infrastructure is already being built. While politicians debate AI regulation, professionals have established ISO 42001 – a global standard for responsible AI use, adopted by 70 countries. The message was clear: the infrastructure of the next economy does not wait for political permission.
The afternoon panel Should We Invest in Net Zero? was the forum’s most combustible session. Moderated by Richard Quest of CNN Business and Nana Akua of GB News, it brought together voices that rarely share a stage.
Jochen Wermuth, Partner at EU ClimaTech Scale-Up Fund and one of Europe’s largest climate investors, was categorical:
“As an economist and a physicist, I can tell you: if you have energy at 30 cents per kilowatt-hour – like diesel, like nuclear – building it is economically insane. The UAE is producing baseload renewable energy at 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. The only sector receiving subsidies today – four trillion dollars annually – is fossil fuels. Wind, solar, batteries, green hydrogen. That is the answer.”
Lois Perry, British political commentator, dismantled the room’s consensus with surgical directness:
“The United Kingdom is responsible for less than 0.8% of global emissions. Even if the entire world achieves Net Zero by 2050, global temperature is reduced by a marginal 0.1 degrees. To deny developing nations access to fossil fuels – nations where girls cannot do their homework because there is no electricity – is a fundamental act of colonialist arrogance.”
Her most explosive prediction:
“I advise everyone in this room earning money from the Net Zero agenda to start looking for alternative employment. Nigel Farage will cancel every single subsidy on this scam the moment he comes to power.”
Ed Gemmell, Leader of The UK’s Climate Party, offered a counter-prediction:
“Within five years, the loudest advocate for Britain leading the clean industrial revolution will be Nigel Farage himself. He is not stupid. He will see the economics and claim it was his idea all along.”
Per Wimmer, Chairman of Wimmer Family Office, occupied the pragmatist middle: nuclear must be part of the energy mix; fossil fuels will remain necessary for decades; green energy must be commercially self-sustaining or it is not genuinely sustainable.
What made this panel extraordinary was not that it reached consensus – it did not – but that it held the disagreement without collapsing into performance. The audience stayed engaged. The disagreement was real, and it was allowed to remain real.
This is the CC Forum model: put incompatible positions in the same room, moderate with precision, let the audience decide.
Austin Martin’s willingness to name the commercial tension at the heart of Coral Vita’s business model was one of the forum’s most refreshing moments of honesty. Most impact founders perform purity – they emphasize mission and downplay the business model. Martin did the opposite.
Coral Vita’s technology works. Land-based coral farms can produce coral at rates far exceeding natural growth, and the survival rate of transplanted coral is 90%, triple the industry standard. The question is who pays for it.
The answer, Martin explained, is development companies undertaking large-scale coastal infrastructure projects – land reclamation, breakwater construction, port expansion – that will destroy existing reefs whether Coral Vita exists or not. Those companies face regulatory and reputational pressure to mitigate that damage. Coral Vita provides the mitigation.
The risk, Martin acknowledged, is that this positions Coral Vita as enabling development that might not otherwise proceed. That is the greenwashing accusation the company is acutely aware of and actively working to avoid. But the alternative – refusing to engage with the development market – means the reefs are destroyed anyway, with zero mitigation and zero restoration.
This is the impossible tension that serious impact companies navigate. Martin’s willingness to state it plainly, in front of investors and competitors, was notable.
The afternoon of Day Two took an unexpected turn. The arrival of Hereditary Chief Phil Lane Jr. alongside indigenous leaders from the Brazilian Amazon – Waihiri Hekurari Yanomami (President, Urihi Yanomami Association), Tapi Yawalapiti (President, Aritana Institute), and Enoch Marubo (President, Kapyvanaway Association) – shifted the entire register of the conversation.
Flora Dutra, Co-Founder of the 4rest4all Foundation, presided over what was described as a Global Launch: the formal introduction of an organization designed to bridge indigenous land stewardship with international conservation finance.
Phil Lane Jr.’s keynote, An Indigenous Sustainable Investment Blueprint for Humanity’s Future, made an argument that was not sentimental but systemic: indigenous communities are the most cost-effective conservation infrastructure on Earth. Territories under indigenous stewardship consistently show lower deforestation rates, higher biodiversity, and greater carbon sequestration than comparable protected areas managed by state or private entities.
The investment case is not charity. It is the highest return per dollar in the entire conservation asset class.
Lane’s call was for a new financial architecture that directs capital not through the intermediary of international NGOs or state agencies, but directly to the communities that have been stewarding these ecosystems for thousands of years.
The presence of these voices at a Mayfair hotel, speaking to family office principals and quantum fund managers, was itself a statement. The forum was doing exactly what it claims to exist for: putting the right people in the same room.
Beyond the macro-level debates, CC Forum served as a showcase for companies building the physical infrastructure of a post-carbon economy. Several warrant particular investor attention.
Lithium Harvest, led by Chairman and CEO Sune Mathiesen, extracts battery-grade lithium directly from the produced water and geothermal brines that flow as byproducts of oil and gas operations. The lithium was always there. We were simply discarding it. The technology turns the waste stream of the fossil fuel era into the raw material of the electric vehicle transition.
EHP Technology / Enover, presented by Malik Çaglar (Chairman, M.C. Investment Holding UK), offers heat exchange and energy efficiency systems with applications across industrial, commercial, and residential sectors. In a global economy where approximately 40% of all energy is consumed as heat – most of it generated and dissipated with staggering inefficiency – superior heat management is not niche technology. It is foundational infrastructure.
Hykin Energy, advised by Emil Luth, converts the kinetic energy of river currents and ocean flows into baseload power through deployable turbine systems. Unlike solar and wind, hydrokinetic energy is continuous and predictable. Unlike large-scale hydropower, it requires no dams and causes minimal ecological disruption.
Novius, represented by Company Director Craig Evans, provides rapidly deployable power and communications restoration for the first critical hours after natural disasters. When floods, wildfires, or earthquakes strike, communications infrastructure typically fails first – precisely when it is most needed. Novius’s systems are designed to function in that gap, before conventional relief organizations can establish alternatives.
29acacia, led by CEO Sarah Angold, is working on sustainable materials innovation for the fashion industry – one of the world’s most polluting sectors and one beginning to face genuine supply chain pressure from both regulators and consumers demanding transparency and reduced environmental impact.
Each of these companies represents a specific answer to a specific problem. Collectively, they represent the cohort of technologies that serious climate capital is backing now, not in five years.
The most electrifying performance of the forum came from Robert Rubinstein, Chairman and CEO of TBLI Group, whose keynote on family office legacy rapidly abandoned diplomatic language entirely.
Rubinstein has spent decades building the infrastructure of impact investing – measurement frameworks, investor networks, ESG education programs. He has run out of patience for the industry’s self-congratulation.
His diagnosis of the talent crisis facing companies without credible sustainability commitments was blunt:
“It’s getting harder and harder to attract great talent if you stand for nothing. I taught MBA students. I know what they’re looking for. They’re going to look at their company’s brochure with the photo of children in Tanzania drinking milk, and realize they actually work for a toxic company.”
He cited Shell’s Brent Spar crisis and Dow Chemical’s napalm production during the Vietnam War as historical examples of how environmental reputation translates directly into talent acquisition capacity. The next iteration of this dynamic, he argued, is already underway.
On the £84 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer currently in motion, Rubinstein was characteristically direct:
“All the research shows the next generation are going to fire all of their wealth managers. I don’t think the future will be saved only by the young – I can’t even get them to clean up their room. But there will be substantial change. And wealth managers without credible impact products will lose their clients.”
His most radical claim was that deal scarcity in impact investing is a myth perpetuated by investors looking in the wrong places:
“Everyone says they can’t find deals. I always ask: where are you looking? Bloomberg? Reuters? What ghetto do you operate in? The largest employer in the world is small-scale agriculture – 1.4 billion people. Are they all going to become coders?”
He cited public transport infrastructure as the archetypal overlooked opportunity: double-A rated bonds, technology-risk-free, essential services, measurable decarbonization – and almost entirely ignored by private wealth management because it lacks the glamour of quantum computing or biotech.
His closing remarks, prompted by his publisher requesting he tone down his forthcoming book, became the forum’s most-quoted moment:
“My publisher called, touching their pearls, wanting me to remove exclamation marks and scrub profanity. God forbid someone feels discomfort in this sanitized world. If you’re tired of the homogenized, pasteurized corporate bullshit and actually give a damn about building an ecosystem of radical truth-seekers, let’s go. If you’re easily offended, there’s a lovely coloring book in the next room.”
The room laughed, then went quiet, then applauded.
This emphasis on intergenerational wealth and legacy extended beyond the main stage to exclusive gatherings within the forum’s framework. As an event partner of CC Forum, Fem Capital Salon hosted a dedicated six-hour session for VIP delegates, carving out a space to discuss new centres of influence.
The salon focused on three core pillars: private wealth, future-fit leadership, and feminine principles – defined not as a gendered concept, but as a recalibration towards stewardship and continuity. Christine L. Koetsier, Founder of Fem Capital Salon and a member of the CC Forum Organising Committee, observed a distinct evolution in the room’s mindset:
“What stood out most this year is a clear shift from capital as a purely financial instrument to capital as a directional force – shaping systems, leadership, and long-term societal outcomes.”
In these more intimate settings, the conversation moved beyond transactional deals into responsibility, proving that capital must be guided with intent and accountability across generations.
CC Forum is now in its thirteenth edition. It has been hosted in London, Monaco, Zurich, Bahrain, and Paris. It has featured keynotes from Ban Ki-moon, Dame Jane Goodall, and HSH Prince Albert II of Monaco. Its 2026 London edition opened with a reception in the House of Lords and closed with an intimate salon at Dartmouth House.
What distinguishes CC Forum from the dozens of sustainability and impact investing conferences that crowd the global calendar is curation. Max Studennikoff, the forum’s founder, has built a gathering that allows genuine disagreement, features speakers who rarely share stages, and creates the kind of proximity between ideas and capital that occasionally produces outcomes.
The Seabed Curtain needs £10 million. Coral Vita needs strategic partners in the Gulf development market. The 4rest4all Foundation needs institutional investors who understand conservation ROI. EdenBase needs limited partners for its quantum fund. Bradley Loiselle’s water technology funds need family office capital that can wait five years for infrastructure investments to mature.
All of these needs were in the room. So was the capital to meet them. Whether the connections convert into actual transactions will become clear over the next six to twelve months. But the forum did its job: it created the conditions for those transactions to become possible.
For investors searching for exposure to impact opportunities that are technically validated, commercially viable, and aligned with regulatory trends rather than fighting them, CC Forum remains one of the most efficient discovery mechanisms available.
The conversation is moving.
For strategic media collaborations and editorial partnerships: mariabregman.com
About the Author:
Maria Bregman is a UK Global Talent visa holder, cultural strategist, documentary filmmaker, and the Founder & Editor-in-Chief of Creativitys.UK. She shapes critical narratives driving the impact economy and regularly contributes to international publications including Esquire and ELLE. She attended the CC Forum London 2026 as an officially accredited media partner.
