George Polk

Managing Partner, Tulum Trust

George Polk is the Managing Partner of Tulum Trust, a private equity firm which works with family offices to make investments that have a meaningful impact on climate change. Tulum focuses on businesses which convert wasted resources into things of value, including industrial energy efficiency, waste to energy, and other resource recovery processes. Last year, Tulum bought a utility in the United States, and is now converting it from coal to gas while enhancing the profitability of the operation. Tulum primarily invests in projects or assets, aiming to generate long term, stable high cash yields while reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The objective of all Tulum’s investments is to generate excellent returns while improving the environment.

George has been applying his skills as an institution builder, investor, and philanthropist to the challenge of creating a viable and vibrant low carbon society since 2007, when he stepped out of a career as a technology entrepreneur to focus on tackling climate change.

George’s first work on climate was philanthropic. He founded and was Chairman of the European Climate Foundation (the largest funder of European work on climate) and founded Project Catalyst (which developed low carbon growth plans for countries). Together with Richard Branson, George developed the Carbon War Room, and was Chairman until its recent merger with the Rocky Mountain Institute (where he is now Chairman of the Program and Strategy Committee and member of the executive committee). In addition, George has worked with a dozen very high net worth individuals to design and implement major philanthropic strategies related to climate.

In 2008, George began to focus on how to deploy more capital into the low carbon economy. He first acted as Senior Advisor on Climate Change to McKinsey, where he advised policy makers on how to create economically credible climate policy and businesses on how to exploit the opportunities that climate change would create. In 2009 and 2010, George worked closely with George Soros to plan the allocation of $1 billion to climate-related private equity investments and served as the Soros representative on the board of the Powerspan Corporation, a carbon capture technology company which was one of Soros’ personal investments. In 2011, George founded the Tulum Trust, which invests on behalf of family offices in deals which deliver high returns while building the new low carbon economy. Tulum has now committed over $150m to low carbon resource recovery investments.

Before his work on climate change George was an entrepreneur, having founded, run, or bought a number of technology and telecommunications companies. He was most recently founder and CEO of The Cloud, the leading broadband wireless network operator in Europe, which was sold to Sky/News Corporation. George was recognized as Global Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, a Pioneer of the City of London, and has been ranked several times in the top 25 global technology agenda setters by Silicon.com. He is a graduate of Harvard University and is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and of the Royal Institute of International Affairs.