CC Forum London 2026: Where Climate Investing Meets Serious Capital

The debate around sustainable investment has spent the last couple of years getting complicated. ESG , once the consensus direction of travel for institutional capital , has become politically contested in ways that would have seemed unlikely five years ago. Major banks have quietly walked back public commitments. Fund managers are hedging their language.

And yet the underlying problems that made sustainability a business imperative in the first place have not gone away. If anything, they have accelerated.

That tension sits at the heart of CC Forum, which returns to London this week for its thirteenth global edition. Running March 19–21 across Mayfair, opening at the House of Lords on Thursday evening and moving to The May Fair Hotel for the main conference on Friday, it brings together institutional investors, fund managers, entrepreneurs, scientists and policymakers for three days of conversation that is less interested in consensus than in clarity.

The Question Nobody Wants to Answer Directly

The flagship debate — Should We Invest in Net Zero? — signals the tone immediately. This is not a room full of people who have already agreed with each other.

Lord Marland of Odstock, who opens proceedings at the House of Lords, has framed his keynote around what he is calling The Trump Effect: the concrete ways in which the current geopolitical climate is reshaping the calculus for anyone trying to deploy capital into the green economy over a meaningful time horizon. For businesses that built strategies around a particular trajectory of climate regulation, that conversation is long overdue.

A Multi-Billion Bet on Antarctica

The headline announcement is harder to dismiss than most things that get unveiled at conferences. The Seabed Curtain Project — a multi-billion-dollar engineering initiative to slow the collapse of Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier — will be presented by its Co-Lead Marianne Hagen, a former Norwegian Deputy Foreign Minister, directly to investors with the capacity to fund it.

The Thwaites Glacier, widely known as the Doomsday Glacier, sounds like science fiction until you look at what its collapse would actually mean for coastal infrastructure, insurance markets and the balance sheets of businesses with real exposure to sea level risk. At that point it becomes a very conventional capital allocation question.

Water, the Amazon and the Deals in Between

Elsewhere in the programme, Bradley Loiselle of Pure Water and Arctic Freshwater delivers a keynote that reframes the global water crisis as a supply chain and infrastructure investment story rather than an environmental one. His framing—that water is not disappearing but leaving the human system— is the kind of precision that changes how a problem gets priced.

Also launching at the forum is the 4rest4all Foundation, representing the collective voice of the Amazon's indigenous tribes on issues that increasingly intersect with corporate exposure to land use, carbon markets and commodity supply chains.

The Room That Matters

The speaker roster includes Professor Michael Mainelli, former Lord Mayor of the City of London; Paul Hutchinson of Bridge Investment Group; Simon Littlewood of LI Family Office; and Eric van der Kleij, the entrepreneur behind Level39. Family office and institutional capital are both represented — which tends to be where conversations that actually result in term sheets happen.

The forum closes Saturday with the Fem Capital Salon at Dartmouth House — a full standalone programme for women investors and entrepreneurs that CC Forum runs as its own event rather than a footnote to the main conference. The capital gap between male and female founders remains one of the most persistent structural inefficiencies in investment. CC Forum has chosen to treat closing it as a commercial opportunity, not a PR exercise.

Why It Matters Beyond the Conference Room

What CC Forum has always understood is that the gap between available climate capital and deployed climate capital is largely a relationship and information problem, the right people not being in the same room, at the right moment, with the right projects in front of them.

In London this week, at least, the room looks right.