Climate Confident Why Traditional VC Is Failing the Climate, and What Comes Next
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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Credits
Music credits - Intro by Joseph McDade, and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played, and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper