KKR taps Wall Street titan to enhance global climate strategy leadership

Climate-related investments at KKR will now be overseen by a trio of leaders after the firm hired a new co-head of its climate strategy.

Charlie Gailliot joins KKR in New York from Goldman Sachs, where he spent 20 years as a private markets investor and was most recently a partner and head of the energy transition and the diversified industrials investment teams.

His new role teams him with global climate co-head Emmanuel Lagarrigue, who is also based in New York, and Neil Arora, who leads the strategy in Asia from a Singapore base. They joined KKR in 2022, with Lagarrigue formerly an executive committee member at Schneider Electric while Arora was at Macquarie where he was the head of the firm’s Green Investment Group for Asia-Pacific.

KKR has invested billions of dollars in renewable energy and climate solutions since founding its infrastructure platform 15 years ago — and has committed more than $40 billion to sustainability-focused investments, including $30-plus billion to climate and environmental sustainability investments since 2010.

However, Raj Agrawal, partner and head of global infrastructure, says there is much more to do on the journey to net zero.

“Transitioning to a low-carbon economy at the pace and scale needed requires trillions of dollars in investment, and we are still seeing a significant gap in climate funding,” he said. “By forming a dedicated climate leadership team — leveraging Charlie, Emmanuel and Neil’s decades of expertise — we can sharpen our focus on the deployment and scaling of net-zero solutions and accelerate the transition of higher-emitting assets.”

The firm currently manages more than $54 billion in infrastructure and energy assets and has made over 75 infrastructure investments across a range of sub-sectors and geographies.