EthicalFin recently hosted a panel at the Concave Summit as part of London Climate Action Week for a discussion that captured something often overlooked in climate finance conversations: family offices aren’t just another source of capital—they’re uniquely positioned to solve problems that institutional investors fundamentally cannot.
The “Patient Capital with Purpose” session, held as part of the summit co-hosted with the Earthshot Prize, BNP Paribas, and the Commonwealth Secretariat, brought together family office leaders Christian Polman (EthicalFin | Manatu Family Office), Raad Pharaon (Programme Manager, Impact Investing Institute), and family office impact investors Kateryna Filippi and Saloni Bhojwani to explore a deceptively simple question: Are family offices living up to their potential as drivers of systemic climate and nature solutions?”
The answer, it turned out, is both humbling and hopeful.
The Time Horizon Advantage
Climate change and biodiversity restoration are multigenerational challenges. Their impacts unfold across centuries. Yet most of the capital deployed to solve these problems operates on much shorter timescales—venture funds with 10-year lifecycles, institutional investors answering to quarterly earnings calls, foundations distributing assets within legal timeframes.
Family offices operate differently. They think in decades and generations.
David Attenborough once said that “what we do now and in the next few years will profoundly affect the next few thousand years.”
This isn’t romantic nostalgia; it’s a structural advantage. When you’re investing capital that will pass to your children and grandchildren, a 30-year time horizon for your portfolio of investments suddenly seems reasonable. A restoration project that looks like a risky investment to some can look more like good stewardship to family offices. Plant trees in cities today for urban cooling, and the deepest climate benefits accrue to future generations. Most investment vehicles simply can’t afford to wait, yet family offices can. More importantly, they should.
Beyond Risk and Return: Structural Advantages
But patient capital is only part of what makes family offices distinctive. Institutional investors operate within narrow risk-return paradigms. Family offices can invest differently: backing carbon removal before prices of carbon are fully formed, funding biodiversity projects while frameworks and markets align, weathering volatility on deep-tech innovations.
This freedom to define success more broadly—incorporating values and systemic impact alongside financial returns—is crucial. The innovations bending the curve on emissions often don’t fit conventional financial categories. Family offices have structural advantages here that institutional investors simply cannot match: speed (weeks vs. months), integration (seamlessly blending philanthropy and venture investing), and the ability to build multi-decade relationships with emerging markets.
Beyond that: they can invest in carbon capture or ocean restoration because the work aligns with family values, even if financial timelines are uncertain. Institutional capital cannot.
A Question Previous Generations Asked—And We Must Ask Again
There’s a historical parallel worth considering. Previous generations of wealth stewards operated from a different premise. They asked: “What does a good society mean? What does our family stand for? How should we use our capital to strengthen the communities and systems we depend on?”
Somewhere along the way, those questions largely disappeared from wealth management conversations. The industry shifted toward optimisation of returns and minimisation of risk—legitimate goals, but incomplete ones.
With $84 trillion passing to heirs by 2045, family offices have an unprecedented opportunity to ask those questions again.
And they need to. Global stability—and thus the long-term prosperity of any family fortune—depends on sustainable food systems, healthy ecosystems, stable climate, and functioning democracy. These aren’t abstractions. They’re prerequisites for any future in which wealth retains meaning.
The contrast is stark. Visionary families investing capital to strengthen resilience and sustainability recognise this. Meanwhile, newly minted tech trillionaires are actively circumventing democratic systems. Elon Musk posted 110 times meddling in UK politics in a single week just before his record-breaking IPO. If we want a healthy, sustainable democracy and planet, other families must actively counteract these forces through where they deploy capital.
The Demographic Shift Is Here—And It’s Female-Led
Here’s a striking fact: two-thirds of wealth being inherited by 2045 will pass to women. And statistically, women are more likely to invest for impact. Research from Cerulli Associates found that women prefer values-based investing at significantly higher rates than men, and this preference directly impacts their wealth allocation decisions. This isn’t sentiment. It’s demographic reality reshaping capital flows.
Yet despite this momentum, family offices investing explicitly for impact remain a small minority of the total universe. The barriers are real: lack of playbooks, uncertainty about returns, complexity in measuring impact, limited deal flow in emerging climate solutions markets. But the barriers are falling. As frameworks mature, as evidence accumulates, as next-generation wealth stewards come into decision-making power, more capital is moving.
Ecosystem Building: Breaking Barriers to Capital
What emerged powerfully from the panel was the critical importance of ecosystem building work—highlighting the Impact Investing Institute’s efforts on place-based investing. Historically, family offices wanting to invest in specific communities or geographies faced a fundamental problem: there was no playbook. How do you construct a portfolio of place-based investments? How do you manage concentration risk while maintaining geographic focus?
Without frameworks and evidence, capital stayed on the sidelines. Now, as research accumulates and models emerge, confidence is building. Place-based investing is becoming legible to family offices—opening doors to climate solutions like urban cooling, regenerative agriculture, and coastal resilience projects that are inherently place-based.
The Moment
On the panel, panelists from the Impact Investing Institute, Impact Ventures, EthicalFin, and beyond made a consistent point: family offices are not monolithic. Not all are created equal. Some remain purely extractive, focused narrowly on financial returns. But a growing subset recognise that their long-term interests—stable democracies, functioning ecosystems, healthy societies—depend on investing capital in systems change.
That subset is still small. But it’s growing. And with trillions in wealth transfer underway, with next-generation wealth stewards asking different questions, with frameworks and evidence finally accumulating, the moment is here.
The question is simple but profound: Will family offices step forward to answer the question previous generations asked—What does a good society mean? And will they deploy the capital necessary to build one?
EthicalFin hosted the “Patient Capital with Purpose: How Family Offices Mobilise Capital for Impact” panel at the Concave Summit on June 25, 2026. The summit was co-hosted by the Earthshot Prize, BNP Paribas, and the Commonwealth Secretariat, bringing together founders, investors, and visionaries tackling climate and nature solutions across oceans, cities, food systems, and innovation. You can read EthicalFin’s full London Climate Action Week recap here and broader insights from the Concave Summit here.
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