John Earhart

John Earhart co-founded the Global Environment Fund (GEF) with Jeffrey Leonard in 1990, building it on the principle that well-deployed capital can deliver both strong financial returns and measurable environmental improvement. He has served since inception as a founding shareholder and Chairman of the Board. Over more than three decades, GEF has invested roughly $1 billion in clean energy, energy and resource efficiency, environmental services, and sustainable forestry businesses worldwide, both from its own balance sheet and through the private funds it manages.

A professional forester by training, Earhart focuses heavily on GEF's forestry and natural-resource investing, and assumes primary oversight of the firm's environmental analysis, compliance, and outreach. He has acted as a technical advisor and helped structure private equity investments, project finance, and international grants for major forest-management projects, particularly across the tropical Americas.

Before founding GEF, Earhart served as a senior fellow at the World Wildlife Fund and The Conservation Foundation, and earlier as associate director of the Peace Corps in Paraguay — experiences that grounded his later emphasis on emerging-market environmental investing. He holds a B.S. from California State University, Sacramento, and a Master's of Forestry from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (now the Yale School of the Environment).

• Invests where "changing energy, environmental, and natural-resource constraints or needs have resulted in business and financial opportunities" — i.e., the intersection of sustainability and financial return.
• Core themes: growth capital for technology-enabled and value-chain businesses in key growth markets, and the sustainable management of forests and other natural resources.
• Sectors: clean energy, energy/resource efficiency, environmental services, safety and security, and sustainable forestry.
• Stage and structure: primarily growth and private equity (the firm has run ~23 private funds, e.g., the Global Environment Emerging Markets Funds I–III, GEF Clean Technology Fund, GEF Latin America Fund, South Asia Clean Energy Fund, and GEF Africa Sustainable Forestry Fund), with occasional earlier-stage and Series A deals.
• Geography: explicitly global and emerging-market-oriented (Latin America, India/South Asia, Africa), alongside U.S. growth investments.