Making the jump from global energy and mining to natural capital early in her career, this year's young professional/rising star, Maria Gonzalez Senac of Climate Asset Management, says her experience to date has helped her to better understand and address the challenges that the industry faces.
Having started her career as an investment banking analyst in the natural resources team at Goldman Sachs, Gonzalez Senac's career took her to the global energy and mining teams of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) as an investment analyst. Her experience at IFC allowed her to understand how to integrate impact considerations into investment decisions for infrastructure projects, particularly in emerging economies.
However, it was her desire to focus on natural capital that led her to Climate Asset Management.
Since joining its natural capital investment team as an associate in 2023, Gonzalez Senac has been involved in many of Climate Asset Management's key nature transactions over the past year.
"2024 has been a year of change to me," she explains. "Having come from an infrastructure background, I started to understand what investing in natural capital means by engaging in our agricultural investments in Spain and Portugal and Climate Asset Management's first forestry transaction in New Zealand."
Gonzalez Senac led the financial analysis process and due diligence for the New Zealand transaction – one of the few redwood assets in the country – an 8,600-hectare forestry acquisition by its Natural Capital fund that aims to protect and restore the native forest, generate additional carbon sequestration and make improvements to its biodiversity.
She continues: "I was involved in raising a financing package for our Iberian agricultural portfolio – a 1,900-hectare brownfield acquisition, which was challenging and showed how a lot of investor education is still needed to be able to deploy capital at scale in a sector that is not yet institutionalised in many geographies."
Gonzalez Senac has also played a key role in Climate Asset Management's 500-hectare project in Spain's Extremadura and 1,400-hectare farmland project in Portugal.
As an ambassador for Climate Asset Management, Gonzalez Senac has represented the investor at various industry events and was appointed as an investment manager in April 2024.
"The award means three things to me," she says. "Firstly, it is extremely meaningful given that it is not only recognition of my contribution by my colleagues who nominated me, but also recognition from an external independent team of judges who know our space and what it takes to overcome our daily challenges.
"It is also a source of motivation to keep working hard and progressing my career as I have been doing to date. Finally, I hope it serves to motivate young professionals starting out their career in finance to focus on impact from the start, as impact investing is sometimes viewed as something to focus on at a later stage of one's career.
"The key challenge entities like Climate Asset Management face is that institutional investors do not yet have a specific allocation for natural capital, which makes it hard for them to understand the asset class," she adds. "However, I think this gives us a great opportunity to position ourselves as leaders in the space, ensuring that there is an understanding of the key role natural capital has in the fight against climate change, both from a mitigation and adaptation perspective."
