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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The global economy is slowing down. The US economy is also slowing down. A major contributing factor to both is the widening gap in new income generation, between the super-rich and everyone else. It is now widely argued we are living through a “new Gilded Age”, where high-powered, high-visibility interests prosper and everyone else struggles.…
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REPORT FROM DAVOS The World Economic Forum has identified all 5 of the leading global risks as related to climate and environment: Extreme weather Climate action failure Natural disasters Biodiversity loss Human-made environmental disasters Climate breakdown is accelerating, and global carbon emissions are not declining. The loss of climate stability is not a small or…
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A federal appeals court ruling dismissing the case Juliana v. United States—commonly known as the youth climate lawsuit—is founded on a logical incoherence: the Courts exist to redress grievances, yet the ruling says they are not empowered to do so. The Constitution of the United States, the 1992 Climate Convention (a ratified treaty and so…
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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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Studies of significant changes to the Jet Stream—a fast-moving river of air that plays a major role in regulating climate patterns—show increasing risk of prolonged catastrophic drought and threats to the human food supply. Scientific American is reporting: extreme jet stream patterns like those of 2018 may be getting more common and more extreme, representing…
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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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2020 New Year’s Letter from Geoversiv’s Founder Dear Friends, As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, Geoversiv aims to reiterate the importance of embracing complexity, committing to critical thinking, and supporting the spread of creative collaborative innovation for social good and the health and wellbeing of people and planetary systems. In 2019,…
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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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How much do we value human freedom? For thousands of years people of all variety of experience and influence have debated whether free will exists and which universe would be more full of virtue and good fortune—one that is fated or one that is free. Today, technology is flooding our experience with hard-to-trace information and…
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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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