We are delighted to announce two new appointments to our Trustee Board, which governs our mission to help Europe become a leader in deploying responsible carbon dioxide removal – Irena Spazzapan and Cressida Pollock. Irena and Cressida bring a wealth of experience from the fields of climate philanthropy and clean energy and climate tech investment.
“I am delighted to see the addition of strong characters from the European CDR community, with deep understanding of the challenges, joining our mission as trustees. It has been important for us to add breadth and diversity to the strong core group of trustees we have. The additions reflect the ambition core to Carbon Gap’s mission and strengthen governance during our scale up phase.” – Susan Hooper, Chair of Carbon Gap’s Trustee Board.
Irena Spazzapan leads Systemiq Capital, which has invested in several companies directly involved with carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and backs early-stage companies across the UK, the EU and North America. The restoration of climate through carbon and methane removal is one of the fund’s focus areas alongside hard to abate sectors decarbonisation, climate biotech and SaaS. Irena comes from a real assets background, coming to climate tech after spending over 10 years at Goldman Sachs Commodities. She is also a director with MiQ, the methane certification non-profit, and CWP H1 Energy, a major developer of PtX projects, which focus on utilising cheap renewable electricity to produce hydrogen, ammonia, synthetic fuels or for carbon removal.
Cressida Pollock advises on the deployment of philanthropic and commercial capital to shift the current trajectory on climate change and build towards long-term sustainable economic systems. She is the former CEO of the Quadrature Climate Foundation, a UK based philanthropic foundation which she led from its inception. During her tenure QCF granted over $500m into global, systemic and tactical efforts to combat the climate emergency. She is the former Chief Executive of English National Opera where she led the rescue and turnaround of the company from 2015-2018 and was a founding member of Somerset Capital Management, an investment fund focused on emerging markets.
“The scale of the carbon dioxide removal challenge is huge but little progress has been made to date despite clear scientific consensus on its necessity. Carbon Gap has a pivotal role to play in building consensus among the public and policymakers in the EU and UK to integrate carbon removal into climate policy.” – Tim Kruger, Trustee Board member and Chair of Advisory Board.
The existing Trustee Board members include experienced CDR advisors and corporate and trustee board members with depth in one or more CDR ecosystem area.
Susan Hooper chairs our Trustee Board. Susan has held senior executive positions across five industries in seven countries. In the last 20 years, she has utilised this experience at board level to challenge conventional thinking and drive sustainable change, reflecting her belief in the importance of living sustainably and protecting the planet.
Remi Bouteille is the CEO of Quadrature Climate Foundation, a leading philanthropy dedicated to avoiding catastrophic climate impacts for humanity. Before joining Quadrature, he co-founded Spark Climate Solutions, a non-profit organisation focused on field-building in emerging climate areas and was an advisor at the Climate Pathfinders Foundation.
Tim Kruger has been working on carbon removal since 2008. He founded and ran a multidisciplinary programme at the University of Oxford between 2010 and 2022 assessing the technical and governance aspects of all proposed techniques for removing greenhouse gases from the air. He is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Origen, a company which uses the lime cycle to remove carbon dioxide from the air. Tim also chairs Carbon Gap’s Advisory Board.
Benjamin Tincq is a climate tech entrepreneur and investor. He is a Founding Partner of Marble, a venture studio partnering with scientists, engineers and operators to create companies that solve hard climate problems. Ben first learned about carbon removal in 2017 but remained frustrated by how little this was being considered in European climate policy, even after the IPCC special report on 1.5°C which acknowledge the crucial role of CDR.
More detailed information about our Trustee Board members is available here.