Lorenzo Bernasconi

Lorenzo is senior director of Impact-First Investment Solutions at Climate Lead, where he leads the sourcing, curation, and development of high-impact climate investments globally. His work connects family offices and investors with these opportunities, helping them deploy capital at scale into climate solutions.

Lorenzo brings more than two decades of experience across asset management, philanthropy, and strategy consulting. Most recently, he was founder and CEO of Carbon Balance, which provides climate finance advisory services to help institutions deploy capital for the climate and energy transition. Prior to this, he was Global Head of Climate and Environmental Solutions at Lombard Odier Investment Managers, where he built a carbon and nature investment platform, and led innovative finance and impact investing at The Rockefeller Foundation. He also served as Founding Board Chair of the Emergent/LEAF Coalition, which has mobilized $1.5 billion for the protection of tropical forests. He began his career in investment banking at UBS and later worked at Boston Consulting Group and Dalberg Global Development Advisors.

Lorenzo has a bachelor’s degree from the London School of Economics and an MPhil and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and was a research fellow at the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University. He is a CAIA Charterholder, sits on the board of Spring Bank, a community bank in the South Bronx, and is a co-founder and board member of the Independent Social Research Foundation.