Mark Gallogly ’86

THE CATALYZER

IN THE YEARS after Mark Gallogly met his wife, Lise Strickler ’86, at CBS in the late 1980s, the two would regularly abscond from New York City to hike the Adirondack Mountains. Strickler was already a devoted environmentalist, and she and Gallogly would talk about the impacts of acid rain on the landscape they loved — and, eventually, about the notable improvements in the place as it gradually responded to national policies, activism, and investments by coal plants that together conspired to reduce the harmful pollution.

“I saw this obvious deterioration of an environment that was stopped, and ultimately regenerated, through a series of decisions around public policy and around business,” Gallogly says.

Now, he’s found a way to align himself with the type of regenerative force — one that grows out of a collaboration between government, business, and environmental advocates — that he first noticed at work in the Adirondacks.

In 2015, Gallogly and Strickler founded Three Cairns Group, with a focus on the climate crisis through venture investing, philanthropic initiatives, and public policy advocacy. Gallogly now works with Three Cairns full time, after retiring in December 2020 from Centerbridge Partners, a $28 billion private equity, real estate, and credit investing firm that he co-founded. Before Centerbridge, Gallogly worked with the Blackstone Group for 16 years, where he was head of global private equity. He also served on President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness from 2010 to 2012 and on the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board from 2008 to 2010.

At Three Cairns, Gallogly applies the expertise he’s amassed during his 35-year investment management career. One arm of Three Cairns is venture-capital focused; the firm has stakes as a limited partner in several climate-related venture firms and is also a direct investor in companies addressing climate change through new technologies and services. In this part of its business, Three Cairns seeks a return on its missionfocused investments.

Separately, Three Cairns and its founders act as philanthropists seeking to ameliorate the climate crisis, without an eye on returns.

“We’re trying to identify cracks in the ecosystem of finance around climate,” Gallogly says, “and figure out how we can form partnerships to help fill those cracks and provide new services that don’t currently exist.”

One of these philanthropic efforts is a new fund focused on the Global South called Allied Climate Partners (ACP), which will seek to invest in project development in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. In many regions in the Southern Hemisphere, Gallogly explains, risk-oriented investment capital is often not available or accessible, which removes a key part of the necessary growth cycles of businesses and projects. “The idea,” he explains, “is that ACP would be that risk-oriented party.”

Another of Three Cairns’ philanthropic initiatives (recently announced at COP27 in Egypt) is the Global Carbon Trust, a partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies that is designed to strengthen the rigor of global carbon markets and reduce greenwashing. One of the Global Carbon Trust’s missions is to structure term-limited contracts for carbon credits and introduce them into a carbon market where, currently, carbon credits are created on a permanent basis. Gallogly believes the introduction of term-limited credits represents a crucial step in the maturation of the global carbon market because it means, for one thing, that third parties like insurance companies can step in to insure the credits, eliminating buyers’ risk and enabling the carbon market to scale. What’s more, term-limited carbon credits would mean that after the specified term, the owner of a carbon credit-generating forest, for example, can sell it again and is incentivized to employ the latest technology to increase the carbon storage capacity of that forest.

“The market needs a standardized, term-limited, well-documented contract and one that is monitored and verified over time,” Gallogly says. “All of this creates alignment around a mission.”