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Meet the team

Gabrielle Walker, Executive Chair

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Gabrielle is the co-founder of Rethinking Removals and CUR8. She has been working on climate for almost 30 years. She founded Rethinking Removals when she realised that the topic was not on the mainstream climate agenda, despite a growing body of science that shows it is necessary. Gabrielle gives keynote addresses on climate to corporate audiences around the world, moderates high-level debates and works as an advisor at boardroom level. She has presented dozens of TV and radio programs for the BBC, was Climate Change editor at Nature and Features Editor at New Scientist. Gabrielle has a PhD from Cambridge University and is the author of four books.

X:  @GabrielleWalk3r

LinkedIn:  gabriellewalk3r/

Delia Meth-Cohn, Integration Director

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Delia is a co-founder of Rethinking Removals and runs the Doers Club. She focuses on driving climate ambition through clear narratives and deep collaboration, breaking through siloes. She has decades of experience working with business and government at the highest levels, working with The Economist Group for 20 years.

X:  @DeliaMeth_Cohn

LinkedIn:  deliamethcohn

Agata Bangs, Finance & Operations Director

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Agata joined Rethinking Removals to set up the organisation’s legal and operational structure and is now responsible for all finance and operations. She brings 15 years of experience working in leadership positions in finance and operations across national and global charities. Having worked with a diverse portfolio of organisations in the youth sector, international development, health and humanitarian emergency response, she has an in-depth understanding of financial and operational challenges facing non-profits. Her focus is around strong financial management, good governance, smooth operations and secure systems. 

LinkedIn: agata-bangs

Louisa Cox, Programme Lead

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Louisa has worked in climate and sustainability for over 12 years, and she manages all of Rethinking Removals’ programmes and initiatives across the board. Before joining Rethinking Removals, Louisa worked at Xynteo, a sustainability consultancy which helps businesses tackle global societal and environmental challenges that are too big, too expensive and too complex to tackle alone. Louisa worked on a wide variety of the company’s largest programmes including  The Performance Theatre (a forum to help leaders address the challenges to global business that may arise in the next few years), SEALNG (an industry coalition created to accelerate the widespread adoption of liquefied natural gas in the shipping industry) and the Leadership Vanguard (big business for people and planet-positive system change). Latterly she worked as Programme Director on the Europe Delivers coalition which is a business-led coalition working to build future-fit growth in Europe.   

LinkedIn: LouisaCox

Bali Lee, Strategic Initiative Officer

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Bali joined Rethinking Removals to support the team in funding, designing and implementing initiatives to advance the carbon removal industry. Previously, Bali co-founded a mental health startup focused on providing personalised treatment strategies for patients. In her role as CEO, Bali catalysed the development of an emerging market by ensuring stakeholder buy-in across various groups, managed the development of a new scientific model and fundraised for the company. She now wants to use these skills to help tackle the climate emergency. Bali has a PhD in Neuroscience and Molecular Biology from The University of Manchester and has led research across several subjects, including inflammation induced by microplastic pollution.
 
LinkedIn: bali-lee-phd

Our advisory board

Kaya Axelsson

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Kaya Axelsson is a research fellow and head of Policy and Partnerships at Oxford Net Zero, an interdisciplinary climate change mitigation research programme at the University of Oxford. Kaya has earned distinction for her research on climate policy successes in politically unlikely environments. Her current research focuses on deliberative processes for improving corporate climate governance, with specific reference to scope of responsibility, equity, and credible use of carbon markets. Kaya is the lead co-author of the Oxford Net Zero Aligned Offsetting Principles and other recent publications cover how companies can advance work across their Spheres of Influence towards global net zero goals. Kaya has served as an expert advisor on net zero policy for the UN and the International Standard Organisation. With 15 years of experience in social equity and environmental management, Kaya speaks and consults regularly for organizations and initiatives on their sustainability strategies. 

Will Turner

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Will oversees Conservation International’s climate portfolio and is founding director of the Center for Natural Climate Solutions, a world-class team of scientists and practitioners designing solutions to scale at the speed required to address the climate crisis.

​​​​​​​​Will is an engineer and a scientist with more than 20 years of experience working to sustain and restore Earth’s ecosystems for the benefit of the people who depend on them. His scores of peer-reviewed studies and popular articles explore topics such as climate change mitigation and adaptation, ecosystem services, conservation planning, ecological monitoring, biogeography, animal behavior, and the relationship between nature and human societies. His research and approach to solving problems have helped him become a trusted voice for governments, companies, and partners globally.

Kerry Constabile

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Kerry is a climate change leader with more than 20 years’ experience driving global organisations to decarbonization. She has managed net zero and carbon removal programs for Standard Chartered Bank and Google and was a Founding Member of the first carbon removal Advanced Market Commitment (AMC), Frontier.

Prior to Google, Kerry spent seven years managing climate change and innovation initiatives in the United Nations Secretary-General’s Office, spanning the terms of two Secretary-Generals, Bahn Ki Moon and Antonio Gutierrez. She led the Paris Agreement cities and municipal finance strategies with Climate Special-Envoy Michael Bloomberg’s office and developed country strategies for the Paris Agreement with UNFCCC and the French government.

Originally trained in economics and environmental science, Kerry has led climate and sustainable development policies and funds within the public sector, banks, pension funds and hedge funds throughout her career. She serves on the Energy Technical Advisory Committee for the Gold Standard, the Technical Advisory Group for the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), conducts research on economic incentives for net zero and renewable energy transitions with the Oxford Environmental Change Institute, and has contributed to three IPCC reports.

LinkedIn: kconstabile

X: @kconstabile

Jim Mann

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Jim Mann is the CEO & Founder of UNDO. With a background in ecology, combined with extensive experience in scaling businesses, Jim was drawn to the fight against climate change and the ecological disaster it’s bringing with it. In 2019 Jim co-founded The Future Forest Company – a reforestation effort with a mission to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and restore biodiversity across the UK.  

Realising that tree planting could only go so far in helping solve the climate crisis, UNDO was born with the aim to deliver large-scale carbon removal projects with a permanence of 100,000+ years. With pioneering enhanced rock weathering technology, UNDO generates durable, high-quality carbon removal credits to support businesses on their pathway to net zero. UNDO aims to be the first company to remove one million tonnes of CO₂ by 2025, a first step towards billion-tonne scale global operations. This nature-based process also improves soil fertility, food security and the health of our oceans.

When Jim is not busy creating a liveable planet for future generations, he runs competitively at ultra-distance, his favourite events being 100-mile or more mountain races. 

X: @jimmann23

LinkedIn: mannjim

Dai Ellis

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Dai Ellis is a mission-driven entrepreneur with a track record of founding and scaling high-performing nonprofit and for-profit ventures across climate, health, and education. He is a global thought leader on field building and market shaping for social impact.

Dai is the founder and CEO of Cascade Climate, an independent nonprofit working to dramatically accelerate progress across “open-system” climate interventions that can directly alter the course of the climate emergency by harnessing natural biogeochemical systems already operating at planetary scale.

Earlier in his career, Dai led the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s pioneering work on market shaping for drugs, vaccines, and other health products in the Global South. Between his time in global health and climate, he spent the better part of a decade building education ventures, including a VC-backed pan-African network of K-12 schools called Nova Pioneer offering world-class education at affordable tuition levels. Dai has also worked extensively as an executive coach to climate tech founders and CEOs with a wide range of clients including Arcadia, Sealed, Running Tide, and David Energy. 

LinkedIn: daiellis

X: @DaiEllis

Eli Mitchell-Larson

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Eli Mitchell-Larson leads the team at Carbon Gap, a new independent and philanthropically-funded carbon removal advocacy NGO in Europe. At Oxford Net Zero, he develops policies and frameworks to deliver enduring net zero emissions. Recent work includes the Oxford Offsetting Principles and advising Fortune 500 companies on carbon removal procurement at Carbon Direct. Previously, he worked as an impact investor (New Island Capital) and off-grid solar entrepreneur (SunFarmer).

X:  @EliMLarson 

LinkedIn:  eli-mitchell-larson

Chris Neidl

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James I Mwangi

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James is Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer at Africa Climate Ventures. 

He leads strategy, transactions, and operations across Africa Climate Ventures. Prior to founding the studio, James co-founded Dalberg Advisors in New York in 2002, before founding Dalberg’s Africa business in 2007. He served as Dalberg Advisors’ Global Managing Partner from 2010- 2014, and as Dalberg Group’s Executive Director from 2014-2022.

In 2021, James founded the Climate Action Platform for Africa, a not-for-profit organisation that aims to help Africa achieve broad-based economic growth through climate action leadership.t

James is an early investor and board member of Koko Networks, a Non-Executive Director of Old Mutual Limited, and the Board Chair of One Acre Fund. In 2022 James received a Climate Breakthrough Award, and he is also an  Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellow, a WEF Young Global Leader, and a member of YPO. He holds a degree in economics from Harvard University and is a Yale World Fellow.

LinkedIn: james-mwangi

X: @James_I_Mwangi

Carlijn Nouwen

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Carlijn Nouwen is a co-founder of Climate Action Platform – Africa, a novel platform that works to help unlock Africa’s potential as a global hub for climate action, underpinning a new climate-smart model of economic growth and inclusive livelihoods. The platform’s work is informed by the realisation that Africa’s demographics, growth trajectory and natural resource endowments, coupled with its extremely low levels of current carbon emissions, allow the continent to aspire to not just net-zero but a substantial net-negative carbon footprint sooner than any other part of the world. Carlijn has focused on CAP-A full-time since October 2021, leading its data and analytics work and shaping both CAP-A’s strategy and its various programmes.

Carlijn’s work focuses on competitiveness, inclusive industrialisation and inclusive business and investment in Africa. Prior to founding CAP-A, she spent nearly a decade as a partner with Dalberg Advisors in Africa, leading Dalberg’s inclusive business work. In this role, she developed and pioneered Dalberg’s toolkit on competitiveness assessment and investment prioritisation, leading tens of projects in this space across sectors and countries for public, private and social sector clients. Prior to Dalberg, Carlijn spent 7 years at McKinsey and Company in the Netherlands and worked for the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She holds a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering and Management Science (cum laude) from the Eindhoven University of Technology.  

LinkedIn:  carlijn-nouwen

Kevin Rabinovitch

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Matt Isaacs

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Matt is co-founder and managing partner of Counteract.  Launched in early 2021, Counteract was the world’s first dedicated carbon removal venture firm investing in short and long cycle carbon removal and sequestration solutions and enablers.  Counteract’s mission is to catalyse 5 billion tonnes of carbon removal by 2050.

Prior to Counteract, Matt and his Counteract co-founders, Andy Bonsall and Andrew Shebbeare, worked together on multiple entrepreneurial endeavors in technology and data driven industries in fintech and marketing/tech.  They are best known for founding and growing the global media agency Essence, now Essence Mediacom, a 10,000 person global media service business.  WPP plc, the world’s largest marketing services group, acquired Essence in 2015.

Matt is also co-founder and chair of purpose-driven business ‘action tank’ ReGenerate and advisor to education systems change charity Big Change.

LinkedIn: matt-isaacs

What is Rethinking Removals?

Rethinking Removals is a collaborative not-for-profit organisation. We support the exponential growth of the carbon removal industry so it can have climate impact. We:

  • Identify what needs to be implemented or unblocked to accelerate progress. 
  • Reframe the way carbon removals are seen, by creating space for difficult conversations around the often toxic issues that are holding back progress.
  • Activate the high leverage pressure points where intervention has maximum impact.
  • Work with many different partners to make change happen on the ground.

We want to amplify the efforts of the amazing people working to make carbon removals a reality. Get in touch – we love to talk!

Six specific and interrelated outcomes we want to achieve:

Reframe the narrative to get clarity and alignment, while addressing fault-lines

Narrative

We need to reframe the narrative(s) on removals to get clarity around language, develop solutions to address fault-lines such as the moral hazard, global south/global north inequity and nature/technology, and get alignment on the role of removals in decarbonisation strategies.

Create sufficient long-term, predictable demand to incentivise supply

Demand

We need sufficient predictable demand for high-quality removals from corporates and governments to ensure long-term supply – through buyers’ pools, long-term offtake agreements and advance purchase mechanisms

Help governments to develop effective policy through learning by doing on specific projects

Policy

We need interested governments in both the global South and global North to “learn by doing” how to identify and implement policies, incentives, regulations and targets to get high-quality removals started, demonstrating their reality to others, while working through issues around both accountability and benefits.

Align around quality assurance principles while standards and methodologies are being developed

Quality assurance

We need to align around principles and guidelines that define and encourage high-quality removals, setting a common foundation for more detailed work on standards and methodologies to ensure clarity around both accountability and benefits.

Facilitate mainstream financing by developing practical investment models

Finance

We need to facilitate mainstream financing for carbon removals by developing practical investment models and aligning these with policy and accounting outcomes.

Ensure a pipeline of high-quality projects to enable exponential growth

Pipeline

We need a pipeline of high-quality carbon removal projects and sufficient human capital in place in multiple locations in the global North and South to enable the exponential growth required to reach the UNFCCC target of 100 Mt per year removal capacity by 2030 and to mature to continue exponential growth to 2050.

How we are funded

Rethinking Removals is a not-for-profit organisation. It is supported by membership fees from the Doers Club, grants from the Quadrature Climate Foundation, Lob’s Charity, Fred Mulder Foundation and private donors. We also have pro bono contributions from CUR8, Carbon Gap, Climate Action Platform Africa, Exponential Roadmap Initiative and OpenAir Collective.

We are currently working on funding for the 2025 programme. If you are interested in supporting us, please get in touch.

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