Meet Paul Moinester: Building Climate-Resilient Financial Management with Topo Finance

Climate action is often understood through visible interventions like renewable energy projects, electrified transportation, and resilient infrastructure. However, one of the most powerful levers for climate progress operates in the background of everyday life: financial management.

The Russell Family Foundation’s grantee  (TRFF), Topo Finance is working to transform this hidden lever into a central strategy for climate action. We spoke to Paul Moinester, Founder and Executive Director of Topo Finance, about his organization’s work to define and institutionalize a new field of practice: climate-resilient financial management.

From Climate Advocate to Financial System Reformer

Paul Moinester did not begin his career in finance. “I’m a climate person before I am a finance person,” he explains. For more than fifteen years, he worked across environmental policy and advocacy, including on Capitol Hill and in frontline communities. 

In 2020, a seemingly ordinary conversation reshaped his understanding of climate leverage. At an outdoor industry event, he met with representatives from a bank. What he learned was deceptively simple but transformative: when individuals or companies deposit money, banks do not hold it passively. Those funds are redeployed across the economy.

“Banks take that money and they deploy it out across the economy,” Paul explains. “Every dollar enables a measurable climate impact when banks lend or invest it into the real world.”

Research from Topo Finance supports this, showing that approximately 20 percent of deposits in the largest U.S. banks flow to the world’s most carbon-intensive industries. At the same time, Bloomberg estimates that roughly $200 trillion in capital will be required globally by 2050 to fund a just and effective climate transition.

For Paul, this revealed a profound opportunity. “By taking a more active role in managing where our money flows as it moves through the financial system, we could direct capital at scale to accelerate a more just climate transition,” he says. 

Making the Carbon Footprint of Cash Visible

Topo Finance began this work with a research question few in the sustainability field had considered: Could you measure the carbon footprint of a company’s cash holdings and tie it back to their corporate sustainability goals?

In 2021, as major companies were strengthening net-zero commitments, Paul and his team began asking whether those commitments accounted for how companies managed their banking and investments. “We just started asking the question: what does this mean for a company like Apple or Microsoft or Google who has over $100 billion in their bank account?” 

Topo developed a methodology to measure emissions associated with corporate cash as it moves through the financial system. The findings were striking. For many large technology companies, emissions tied to banking and investing exceed all other emissions, including product use.

Perhaps more revealing was the reaction. When Topo shared these findings, most sustainability teams had never considered banking as a source of emissions. “Every single one looked at us with blank faces,” Paul notes. “They had no idea what we were talking about.” 

This gap between climate ambition and financial practice became the core opportunity.

Today, Topo Finance works with more than 32 global companies collectively valued at over $1.2 trillion. In 2025, operating on a budget under $1 million, the organization directly advised on over $40 billion in capital. Paul describes this model as uniquely catalytic: “A few hundred thousand dollars can provide support that enables us to advise on where billions of dollars end up flowing.”

From Insight to Implementation

When Topo began its work, no established infrastructure existed. There were no standardized tools for measuring the carbon footprint of corporate cash, no established playbooks for treasury teams, and no communities of practice linking sustainability professionals with financial decision-makers.

Support from TRFF and others provided the capital necessary to move from insight to implementation. Foundation support enabled Topo to refine its methodology, pilot approaches with major companies, and build practical tools that translate theory into institutional practice.

Paul emphasizes the importance of this backing. “We’ve essentially spent the last four years building a practice from scratch,” he explains. That work requires flexibility, patience, and the ability to experiment in a space that sits at the intersection of sustainability and corporate treasury.

Topo has been able to move beyond publishing research and toward building a functioning ecosystem. The organization established a U.S.-based working group focused on decarbonizing corporate cash and, more recently, launched the Strategic Treasurers Alliance, convening 20 treasury leaders from major global companies representing more than $800 billion in market value.

Changing Conversations Inside Institutions

Topo’s approach is grounded in financial pragmatism. “Banking is an inherently rational system,” Paul explains. “If you can show somebody they will make more money doing it, or they will lose more money doing something by not doing it, nine times out of ten they will do it” .

One company Topo advises had long required emissions disclosures from its supply chain partners, but had never asked its banks similar questions, even though those banks were responsible for emissions that dwarfed the company’s total carbon footprint.

Once companies begin engaging their banks directly, sustainability teams within financial institutions welcome the dialogue. And banks are starting to respond to customer demand by building novel sustainable financial products for them.

“We recently learned that one of the six largest banks in the U.S. just launched their first ever sustainable cash management product, thanks to a company we advise asking for it.” Paul says. “This demand signal is critical and banks are responding to it. That’s because for banks, their approach isn’t ‘if we build it, they will come.’ Instead, it’s ‘if you ask for it, we will build it.’”  

Overcoming Barriers in a Shifting Landscape

The field of climate finance has experienced volatility. Political headwinds have chilled some public commitments. The rapid expansion of ESG-branded products created what Paul describes as an “ESG gold rush” that was not always grounded in fundamentals.

Despite these developments, the market continues to evolve. Renewable energy and climate technologies are scaling. Banks are increasingly aware that green finance can be profitable. Demand from sophisticated corporate clients generates meaningful opportunities.

Topo operates in this pragmatic space, aligning risk, return, and climate impact. “It’s the greatest unseen climate opportunity that we have,” Paul says.

A Long-Term Vision for Institutional Change

Paul refers to this work as “the biggest little niche in the world.” Topo’s research shows that U.S. companies hold more than $7 trillion in corporate cash, which generates emissions equivalent to 20% of the United States’s total annual emissions. 

And this is just U.S. corporations. Companies, foundations, universities, governments and individuals around the world hold many more trillions in cash. Aligning even a fraction of that capital with climate goals would materially shift trillions into the climate transition.

The long-term objective is institutionalization. Paul envisions a future in which climate-resilient financial management becomes standard practice, integrated into accounting frameworks, treasury strategies, and financial product design. “One day,” he says, “this becomes just part of how all companies and organizations do business.”

TRFF’s partnership reflects a belief in that long horizon, as Topo works to transform a compelling insight into an emerging field capable of influencing trillions of dollars in capital allocation.

Looking to the future 

What Topo Finance and TRFF are demonstrating is that climate action does not only happen at the edges of the economy; it happens at the center of it. Our financial practices and how we  manage everyday cash, liquidity, and capital allocation are not climate-neutral. They shape what gets built, what scales, and what future becomes possible.

By backing Topo at an early stage, TRFF is helping build a new field at the intersection of finance and sustainability, as well as the practical infrastructure needed to drive change: data, tools, methods, and communities of practice that enable institutions to align financial management with climate goals. 

This is catalytic climate finance in action—not only funding solutions directly, but also creating systemic change by building global solutions that enable far greater flows of capital to move in the right direction.

If the next era of climate leadership is about integration rather than isolation, then treasury teams, CFOs, and financial institutions will have a defining role to play. Topo’s work points to a future in which climate-resilient financial management is no longer a niche innovation, but a standard business practice—and where the “hidden lever” of finance becomes one of the most powerful drivers of a healthier, more resilient planet for all.