There is a valley in southern Peru where a reforestation project has been running for years.
The land is communally owned. The municipal government signed on. A university forestry department carries out the forest survey. Tens of thousands of trees are in the ground, and most of them are alive, which anyone who has planted a tree at altitude will tell you is not a given.
There is also an investment committee in Frankfurt. The fund has an impact mandate written into its documents, capital that must be deployed into precisely this kind of asset, and a team that would like to deploy it. They are not cynics. Several have spent their careers trying to get money into the ground rather than into a slide.
I have spent years on both sides of that gap.
What I have watched, again and again, is that the two rooms do not transact.
For a long time I thought I was watching a communication problem. Get the right people on the same call, translate the acronyms, fix the deck, and the capital would move.
I no longer believe this.
The two rooms understand each other perfectly well. They simply cannot use each other's evidence.
In the valley, evidence looks like this. A signed accord with the community. A municipal decree. A forestry professor with thirty years in the region who will tell you, without hedging, which slopes will hold and which will not. The fact, locally understood, never written down, that everyone knows who is accountable if the trees fail.
That is not weak evidence. In that valley it is the strongest evidence that exists.
In Frankfurt, evidence looks like this. A recognised methodology. A third-party validation. A buffer pool. A legal opinion on title. An auditor whose insurance covers the number they signed.
Also not weak. Also, in the valley, close to meaningless, it describes almost nothing anyone there can act on, and it costs more than the project's annual budget to produce.
Neither room is wrong. Neither is lying.
What separates them is not a difference of opinion about whether the project is good. It is that the project's evidence cannot be read by the institution, and the institution's evidence cannot be produced by the project.
Call it illegibility.
Illegibility has a property that makes it nearly invisible: it leaves no record.
A deal that is refused generates a memo. A deal that never reaches the table generates nothing.
When we measure the climate finance gap, we are measuring the projects that got close enough to be turned down. The larger number - the projects that were never legible enough to be considered - appears in no dataset, because there is no dataset of things that did not happen.
Last week the EU announced €100 billion for industrial decarbonisation. Of 208 projects that already received signed Innovation Fund agreements, 16 are operating. Less than 1% of committed funds have been paid out.
The valley is one instance of a pattern that shows up everywhere.
Between those two rooms there is a function.
It is not sales, both parties already want the transaction. It is not consulting, the deliverable is not a recommendation. What is missing is a form in which each party's information can be used by the other.
The function knows which of a project's twelve genuine strengths are the three an investment committee can underwrite. It knows what an institution is actually asking when it asks something that sounds bureaucratic. It knows which requirements are real and which are habit.
And it absorbs being disliked from both directions.
To the project, it sounds like the institution. To the institution, like an advocate who has gone native. That is not a failure of the role. It is the role. Standing in a gap means being on nobody's side of it.
I spent years doing this informally. Now it's what I do - formally, for climate-tech companies trying to close the distance between their technology and the market that should be buying it.
Across the Europe-Americas corridor. In Zurich, Frankfurt, Lima, Santiago. In the languages these deals actually close in.
The trees are already in the ground.
If you're building something where the gap between what you have and what you need is commercial - not technical - reply directly.
— André