Banking on Nature is a tale of two banks, in fact a tale of two governors of the Bank of England, the first and the last. The story starts with the first governor of the bank of England, a man called William Paterson and his disastrous Darien colony in Panama, the remains of which were uncovered as part of a scientific and archaeological exploration I joined as a young explorer. William Paterson didn't bank on nature, and it cost him dearly. But the last governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney did. His global Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosures together with Mic ..read more

Did you know that each elephant's footprint has a unique pattern which can be used to identify individuals? In the natural world, evolution tends to make animals bigger, But even the biggest creatures, like elephants, can be extraordinarily gentle with their footprint. In the financial world size matters too. Banks and financial institutions are all getting bigger. In fact, there's a fascinating statistic that the largest 1% of the world's financial houses manage over 60% of total industrial assets. Can you imagine the concentration of power that means? So what kind of a footprint does financ ..read more

What could you do with a billion dollars to save nature? The answer could be a billion dollar landscape bond - a form of green bond that could protect nature while existing in the world of big finance. This podcast will take you on an expedition from bat-infested caves to palm oil plantations and how the idea for the first billion dollar bond was created. It's a staggering statistic that 50% of the world's palm oil comes from small families with a couple of hectares, who are trying to feed and educate their children. But palm trees only live for about 25 years, and many of these families ..read more

Today’s podcast is about chain reactions, and why they matter. Where our food comes from and how it affects nature is a big story. Supply chains are one of the leading causes of rainforest deforestation. I’ll give you an example of why. You probably know that Africa has the Big Five: lions, elephants, leopards, rhinos, buffaloes. Rainforests have got the Big Four. These are the four things that we need to bag if we're going to stop the destruction of the rainforests, and they are: beef, soya, palm oil and paper and pulp. These Big Four are responsible globally for about 60-70% of all the dest ..read more

Over the last 50 years, catastrophic weather-related events have dramatically increased in frequency. Just to put it into perspective, in 2018, there were 42 catastrophic events that cost more than a billion dollars each. Why? The concern is that as the planet warms, the sea surface temperature rises. And even the smallest increase in sea surface temperature has the potential to significantly increase the strength of a hurricane. Just last year in Britain, storm Ciara and Dennis were estimated to cost around £350M in damage. This comes at a huge cost to insurance companies. A cost which ultima ..read more

We need to start thinking about how life is connected with money. Why? Because unless we can find a better state of equilibrium between natural capital - that’s life on earth, and financial capital - that’s the money that makes the world go around, there’s a real danger that we’ll continue to finance ourselves into extinction.  After all, we all invest into health insurance and pensions for our own wellbeing. So why wouldn’t we consider environmentally minded companies which nurture the planet for our families and future generations? These are the issues which the financial sector has to ..read more

Sea levels have been going up and down for millions of years - but why are we so interested in it now? Because over the last 150 years, sea levels have started to rise faster than ever before. Why? The world’s getting warmer. The CO² that was locked up by nature in rock or other products is now being dug up and burnt, we’re burning the oil, we’re burning the coal, we’re burning the limestone to make cement. That CO² is going back into the atmosphere, it’s happening super fast, our atmosphere is super sensitive and sea levels are rising.  And this is one of the problems of climate change ..read more

The planet doesn’t need us. But as humans, we need the planet. We’ve been around only about 3 million years, and yet in such a short time, we’ve taken over the whole earth, and completely changed it. We’re harnessing everything to do with the earth and turning it for our own use. And that has consequences.  An example of that is COVID-19 which has suddenly broken out across the planet like Nature’s time bomb that will cost the world some $10 trillion dollars. Unless we change the movement of money, we’ll continue to finance ourselves into extinction. The finance industry has done a great ..read more

Economists estimate the economic fall out from the COVID-19 virus pandemic could approach $10 trillion dollars, or around one eighth of global GDP. A letter to the World Health Organisation this week, signed by almost 250 organisations, points to a solution. A massive crackdown on wildlife trade markets worldwide. It is time to call out this health crisis for what it is - a by-product of the US$ billion trade in environmental crime. When seeking the origins of this crisis, we need to look less into human health, but into the collective blindness among regulators and within the financial ..read more