The biggest growth opportunity in finance is climate-aligned investment and innovation. In 2018, all major asset classes struggled to earn. Cash was the asset class that expanded the most, signaling a pull-back from new investment and a wait-and-see attitude. In 2019, trade tensions spurred worries of a global economic slowdown that could lead to recession.…
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Tracking of interacting compounding risks shows higher value of financing external returns. Resilience is the ability to weather and emerge from shock events. Resilience intelligence is the complex work of understanding whether we are positioned to do so. Structured, evolving guidance, rooted in Earth systems science, is critical for achieving reliable ongoing operational resilience. The…
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In a company Letter to Clients and CEO Larry Fink’s annual Letter to CEOs, BlackRock—the world’s largest asset manager—has declared it will from now on treat sustainability as its “new standard for investing”. The Letter to Clients takes the view that: Resilient and well-constructed portfolios are essential to achieving long-term investment goals. It goes on…
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The Resilience Intel initiative is a coalition effort to develop critical analysis, aggregated reporting strategies, financial innovation, and technological platforms to support the expansion of climate-smart finance to encompass all mainstream finance. The Resilience Intel Charter maps out a strategy to: Network science data to finance, Build climate intelligence, Track external returns on investment, and…
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In an effort to restructure the narrative about the global co-creative and political response to dangerous climate disruption, Eric Holthaus has published a vision for “what this decade could look like, if we do what we need to do.” Holthaus’ 2030 vision starts out noting that: Centuries of evidence have shown that storytelling can change…
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A week before Christmas, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, wrote in the Financial Times that the UK is now stress-testing banks for climate risk and resilience. Specifically, he writes: Modelling for the full extent of climate-related financial risk is complex and challenging. Britain can lead the way next year, when we…
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In July, The New York Times reported: The rating agency [Moody’s] bought a majority share in Four Twenty Seven, a California-based company that measures a range of hazards, including extreme rainfall, hurricanes, heat stress and sea level rise, and tracks their impact on 2,000 companies and 196 countries. In the United States, the data covers…
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Our collective response to climate disruption will shape the future of finance, innovation, and everyday wellbeing. The Pre-COP meetings in Costa Rica made clear that stakeholders and major institutions are looking forward to new and more ambitious commitments from nation-states at COP25 in Chile in December. Chile’s COP25 Presidency has called for integration of ocean…
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The following brief is an outcome document from the High-level Climate and Energy Dialogue held on April 20, 2017, at the UN Foundation in Washington, DC, as part of the series Accelerating Progress, Advancing Innovation. The dialogue was moderated by Rachel Kyte, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General and CEO Sustainable Energy for All. The…
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Global heating is happening faster and with deeper compounding impacts than we had expected. Sir David King, former chief science advisor for the government of the United Kingdom, is calling for an upgraded long-term goal of net-zero by 2040. Simple arithmetic shows there is not enough money in circulation to cover the extreme costs of…
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Catalyzing Resilience Value through Nature-Based Solutions Resilience is the ability to weather and emerge from shock events. Resilience intelligence is the complex work of understanding whether we are positioned to do so. Structured, evolving guidance, rooted in Earth-systems science, is a critical tool for achieving operational resilience and shared prosperity. Human wellbeing is enhanced by…
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