[Editor's note: This article originally appeared at BusinessGreen.com.]

Hedge fund billionaire George Soros has said he plans to invest $1 billion (£633m) in cleantech, and donate $100 million to a new environmental advisory group intended to influence policy makers.

The 79-year-old, Hungarian-born billionaire announced his intentions this weekend at a climate change meeting in Copenhagen organized by Project Syndicate, an international association of 430 newspapers from 150 countries.

The announcement comes just two months before 190 nations will meet in the Danish capital to undertake final negotiations on a new climate change treaty, which includes provisions to fund clean energy initiatives in developing countries.

Although Soros declined to provide details about the type or scope of any proposed investments, he indicated that they would be based on stringent criteria and would need to actively contribute to tackling the issue of climate change.

He added that the fund would be accompanied by a new Climate Policy Initiative think tank, which will be based in San Francisco and will receive $10 million a year for 10 years.

He argued that the lobby group was necessary because the best way to drive the development of low-carbon technologies is to address the political and policy barriers that are slowing action on climate change.

"The science is beyond dispute, but how do we achieve the objectives we all know are necessary? That is a political problem," he observed.

The initiative will be headed by Thomas Heller, a professor at Stanford Law School, who specializes in energy regulation and environmental law.

Heller described the role of the body as part advisory service, part policy developer and part watchdog. It will operate in the U.S., Europe, China, India and Brazil and attempt to address issues such as carbon emissions trading, which Soros said was currently open to manipulation by investors.

Soros is the latest in a line of high-profile investors to pledge large sums to clean tech investment.

U.S. billionaire Warren Buffet has made a series of cleantech investments over the past two years, while Bill Gates and Richard Branson have also emerged as high-profile backers of clean energy projects, and Vinod Khosla's venture capital firm announced last month that it has raised over $1 billion for investment in clean technology.

Image CC-licensed by Flickr user World Economic Forum.