Penguin Perspectives Blog

A year ago, at the launch of COP26's Private Finance Agenda, David Attenborough called on the finance sector to take the lead on climate action and nature protection. He has since laid out the shocking reduction in wilderness between the 1930s to today in his 2020 Netflix documentary. In parallel, the COVID-19 pandemic has made the link between biodiversity and financial risk ever more clear.

Attractive investment cases for nature-based solutions are key to unlocking the growing interest among private capital to meet demands for nature conservation.

Flash forward: it is 2075 and we’ve set sail for the RCP 8.5 trajectory for 2100, the worst case climate scenario according to the IPCC. Imagine this: Pacific islands such as Tuvalu have long sunk into a rising ocean, heat and pollution take a toll on the global population, hurricanes and fires devastate poor communities on a regular basis, and huge swaths of Asia and Africa have become uninhabitable due to heat and drought. Quick shift back to the present: luckily we are not there. However, we are still far away from the emissions trajectory necessary for a 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming.

The core aspect of innovating to find new sources of financing for green infrastructure is identifying the multiple beneficiaries and monetizing their benefits. Green infrastructure in a city benefits all citizens’ well-being, but certain citizens, businesses, investors, and public departments will have additional financial benefits from well-designed green infrastructure. By capturing a small portion of these benefits that result from public investments, local governments can partly or entirely finance the investment and maintenance costs of green infrastructure.

By working with nature, we can avoid unleashing ‘irrecoverable carbon’ and conserve biodiversity – a cornerstone of our economic and social fabric that affects the industries we have and the food we eat. This is something that REDD+ projects (‘reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation’) are working to do.

When low income workers shift to using electric motorbikes, you know that something transformational is happening. This is the reality in Thailand now, thanks to a new brand called “CyFai”. CyFai is part of the clean EV revolution the SHIFT Asia program is championing.

Stakeholders are demanding that we #BuildBackBetter; Green loan guarantees by governments are a proven instrument to bring about positive change – and speed up sustainable recovery efforts post-COVID19.

Five years after the Paris agreement was reached, the need for global action on climate change is clearer than ever. Calls for mitigation and a green economic recovery continue to catch headlines, even if in the margins of the Covid-19 newsreel. Renat Heuberger, CEO of South Pole, writes for the Telegraph.

We are in a global economic recession. The coronavirus pandemic has slowed social and economic activity to a snail’s pace, and government after government has announced emergency economic support measures. We’ve seen a lot of strong language to reassure markets and people. But what is the strategy?

The move to net zero must happen as quickly as possible – and it must happen at scale. To achieve real, quantifiable impacts we must explore all possible policy solutions. While carbon pricing and sustainable finance are critical tools for solving the climate crisis, Martin Stadelmann argues that it is clean technology that will help us hit the bullseye on our net-zero target.