Climate & Finance #3: Investors & The Power To Solve Climate Change (Special Edition)

Green Exchange

This is the third episode of our series about Climate & Finance. Missed the two first chapters? You may want to go there first: Here is episode 1 and here is episode 2.

"Special Editions” of Green Exchange are usually subscriber-only. We could open this series to all thanks to the support we received from WWF.

In this episode, we review what key actions we need to take in the coming years to stay under the two degrees of global warming of the climate system. With a focus on government & investors’ role, we dig into strategies for driving portfolio decarbonisation and green infrastructure development. This episode features Swedish Minister for Financial Markets & Consumer Affairs Per Bolund, Sean Kidney (CEO at Climate Bonds Initiative), Eric Usher (UNEP FI, Portfolio Decarbonisation Coalition) & Julian Poulter (Asset Owners Disclosure Project).

You’ll also hear Leonardo DiCaprio’s climate speech at the Oscars, get tips on a great movie and hear an inspiring story from Kate Hammer, our stellar storyteller.

Produced by Camille Duran, special thanks to our guests and to Han Nguyen, Magnus Emfel, Amelia Johannsen & Gabriela Lemos Borba.
Transcribed by Oanh Nguyen

COMPLEMENTARY RESOURCES

• The AODP Global Climate Index 2015 (PDF)
• Some context around the French Art. 173, a good example of mandatory climate disclosure by investors
• An investor platform for climate actions
• Identifying potential risks associated with the transition to a low carbon economy: MSCI Low-Carbon Indexes
• Engagement vs divestment (in Swedish): SNF, Sparande för en bättre miljö
• Sustainable Investment (in Swedish): Hållbara investeringar, FInansdepartementet
• The Asset Owners Disclosure Project website
• The UNEP Inquiry:The Financial System We Need (Policy Summary, PDF)
• The Montreal Carbon Pledge (PDF flyer to share with your investment manager or asset owner clients)
• The UN PRI 'Principles for Responsible Investments' (Website)
• The 2-Degree Investing Initiative working paper - Assessing the alignment of portfolios with climate goals (PDF)
• An innovative platform where you can vote your pension
• The full video debate from the the Caring For Climate Business Forum at COP21 - "Integrating Climate in the Investment Decision Chain"

Interested in subscribing to Green Exchange 'Plus'? Drop us a line here

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	WWF's mission is to stop the degradation of the planet's natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature.

Music Credits: License by Ins. Green White Space.
Photo by Lip Kee Yap/CC-BY SA

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

INTRODUCTION

00:01
Camille Duran (CD): Today I’d like to start with a story - the story of the humming bird. You know humming birds are those tiny birds that we see in American movies, they go from flower to flower with their wings flapping so fast that you can't see them. It sounds like this.

[Sound of a humming bird]

00:29 Anyway, I asked the best story teller I know to tell us this story as an intro to the show. Her name is Kate Hammer. She’s a commercial story teller, and this is "the story of the humming bird"

Kate Hammer: One day a terrible fire broke out in a forest - a huge woodlands was suddenly engulfed by a raging wildfire. Frightened, all the animals fled their homes and ran out of the forest. As they came to the edge of a stream they stopped to watch the fire and they were feeling very discouraged and powerless. They were all bemoaning the destruction of their homes. Every one of them thought there was nothing they could do about the fire, except for one little hummingbird.

This particular hummingbird decided it would do something. It swooped into the stream and picked up a few drops of water and went into the forest and put them on the fire. Then it went back to the stream and did it again, and it kept going back, again and again and again. All the other animals watched in disbelief; some tried to discourage the hummingbird with comments like, "Don't bother, it is too much, you are too little, your wings will burn, your beak is too tiny, it’s only a drop, you can't put out this fire."

And as the animals stood around disparaging the little bird’s efforts, the bird noticed how hopeless and forlorn they looked. Then one of the animals shouted out and challenged the hummingbird in a mocking voice, "What do you think you are doing?" And the hummingbird, without wasting time or losing a beat, looked back and said, "I am doing my share. What are you doing?"

SOLVING CLIMATE CHANGE - WE CAN ALL DO OUR SHARE

02:58
CD: This episode is about doing your share / doing what you can. As an investor, as a policy maker, as an asset owner or manager - who ever you are, there is something you can do. It could be as simple as passing along this series about Climate & Finance or other resources we feature on the episode page. There is a good number of organisations working very hard all year long on those issues - we can help them. Like an army of humming birds.

03:31 Alright, let’s get into the show. And you’d better stay until the end because we’re also talking about the Oscars and a movie you should watch.

Oh! If you’re joining us just now - You may want to rewind a little bit. In episode 1, we’ve talked about the problem and how capital affects climate change. In episode 2, we reviewed what institutional investment should look like - and how the system can help.

Now is time to discuss - how to get there.

04:13
CD: This is The Green Exchange - episode 3 of our series on Climate & Finance: Investors & the Power to Solve Climate Change.

Let’s start by reviewing how much money we need to solve climate change. There is a great chart in the Global Climate Index 2015 produced by the organisation AODP. It says: "Yes, it’s going to be expensive, um, 10 Trillion Dollars, but the capital is there”.

Well, sovereign Wealth funds (those are the State-owned investment funds): 10 trillion dollars.
Insurance companies: 28 trillion dollars of assets.
Pension funds: that’s 37 trillion dollars of assets worldwide.
Then you have foundations & endowments that add a little bit more.

So, 10 trillions dollars needed, and roughly 76 trillions of investments are out there today. Good news!
But here comes the painful fact: only 2% of those assets are going to low-carbon investments today.

Come on guys let’s get serious, what are we waiting for? A cricket invasion?

SUSTAINABILITY TRANSITION - ATTRACTING PRIVATE CAPITAL TO FINANCE A GREEN FUTURE

05:43
Sean Kidney, Co-Founder & CEO of the Climate Bonds Initiative, an investor-focused not-for-profit organization based in London.

CD: Hi Sean, how are you?

Sean Kidney (SK): Hi Camille, how is the headset audio quality?

CD: It’s good enough, most important is what you’re about to tell us, right?

SK: (Laughs) Indeed!

CD: So we were saying that we have the capital to solve climate change.

SK: We know that we have the capital. We have a world awash in capital at the moment. We’re paying negative interest rates in multiple countries because there's a lack of deal flow to give some yields for pension funds and insurance funds which are the ones that own most of the capital - or, manage, I should say, on our behalves - most of that capital. We also know that much of what has to be done, in fact by far the majority, can be characterized according to the National Energy Agency as infrastructure, energy, mobility, water, urban fabric.
These are things where we have plenty of models available to us to make them financially viable. In a way that they will successfully attract private capital.

CD: OK so we need to attract private capital - that’s the key here.

SK: In fact, to be frank, it's all we’ve been doing for one hundred fifty years in western societies to build infrastructure, city's urban fabric. These are things like guarantees, low price guarantees for toll ways. They might be twenty-year purchase agreements for energy which is what drove the growth with stable electricity market in the USA. They might be legislation.

We actually have a whole big toolkit or things that we've been successfully applying in the last hundred years in Europe, in the USA, in Japan for that matter, and in China more recently.

That's where opportunities lie. All we simply need to do is shift those toolkits to refocus them on “green”. In other words it's making choices about policy priority infrastructure required for countries, that’s essentially what it is about. And then using the same toolkits to drive down the cost of capital for those investments to make them more viable. When you're building a hundred pieces of infrastructure, the cost of capital is way, way, way the biggest expenditure item.

08:17
CD: OK I pause for a second. What Sean is explaining here is that we must attract the private capital to finance this transition towards a green future, and to do so we have at our disposal a range of tools that we’ve been using for over a century. And that with these tools, we can drive down the cost of capital which is generally the main barrier to long term infrastructure development.

You’re following?

[VOICE]: That’s important because we’ll only meet this challenge if the private sector helps lead the way.

CD: Do you recognise this sweet voice?

That’s Barack Obama of course. He was addressing the American people on clean energy investments early February.

Barack Obama: The private sector creates more jobs faster, lower the cost of clean energy faster, and help clean, renewable power outcompete dirty fuels in every state.

09:28
CD: Dirty fuels, what is he talking about here?

Yeah OK. That’s a politician’s speech to the people. But this is music to our ears. And we’ve seen it earlier, governments & policy makers play a vital role in enabling this transition. That’s our first chapter for today - what are most important actions public sector needs to take in the coming years so we can stay under the 2 degrees global warming of the climate system.

GREEN BONDS AND GREEN POLICY - WHAT THE PUBLIC SECTOR CAN DO

10:00
Let’s go all the way to the top at the national level - in Sweden this time.

[VOICE]: I guess you'd like to speak to the Minister.

CD: Yes, please.

[VOICE]: Perfect. I'll give the phone to him. Just a second.

CD: We’re going to play a few interesting pieces from my interview with Per Bolund. He is the Minister for Financial Markets and Consumer Affairs and also the Deputy Finance Minister of Sweden.
Sweden seems to be quite progressive on that front, let’s see what’s cooking.

10:29 PER BOLUND'S INTERVIEW

Per Bolund (PB): The first thing we did was to have introduced new targets for the finance policy sector, so in the budget we have stated that the finance sector should contribute to sustainable development not least on the climate issue.

And this of course will guide the authorities working in this area within Sweden and they will know how to focus also on the climate and sustainability aspects of the financial sector.

CD: So setting targets for the financial sector contribution to sustainable development?

PB: We also have a committee working at the moment to look into how we can improve information around climate aspects and sustainability aspects because we see that lots of investors and people saving for their retirement, for example, want to make an impact. They want to invest in a way that produces sustainable development. They don't have the information and knowledge they need in order to really put that through.

11:27
CD: Back to disclosure and transparency across the whole investment decision chain, we’ve talked about this - Government can play a role in enabling this transparency.

PB: It's easy for banks and financial institutions to just swamp you with information in such an amount that it is impossible to get access to, so you have to find indicators and measurements that you can actually access and understand.

CD: I also asked him about the way the government’s money is invested.

PB: A lot we can do there.
And of course the first thing that is important to us and we have to put our money where our mouth is, so if we are claiming to redirect Sweden into a sustainable society, we also have to invest our government's money in the same manner.

So we're working very hard with the pension funds that are public in Sweden and see that they are working with sustainable investments in decreasing their footprint. And we are working on a new agenda where we're trying to raise the bar so that they have to do even more. That led the development and a very positive way but I think that this still more to be done.
For example the AP funds together have done carbon footprint analysis and they also have a common framework on how to disclose it, so that's a very good start. Now they also have to move away from fossil-heavy investments and that's the next step.

Then we’re also working on, for example, using green bonds within the national accounting system and what Sweden could be a driver for issuing green bonds from the government side, either through governmental companies or from the government directly.

13:09
CD: GREEN BONDS! Let’s talk about this.
Remember the toolkit that Sean Kidney was talking about earlier?

SK: The green bond market is what called a discovery tool...

CD: Before getting into detail, for those of you who are not clear with our green bonds work… well actually let’s start with regular bonds. B-O-N-D… spelled like James Bond.

You can think of it as loans, but you serve as the bank. When you purchase a bond, you loan your money to a company, to a city, or to the government – and they promise to pay you back in full, with regular interest payments during the lifetime of the bond. Say a city wants to build a bridge, well they may sell bonds to raise money for that bridge. So as an investor, by buying those bonds, you are contributing to the financing of the bridge. One important feature is that many corporate and government bonds are traded, either publicly on exchanges, or 'over the counter' as we say.

Climate bonds now, or green bonds, they are issued in order to raise finance for climate change solutions - climate change mitigation or adaptation related projects or programs.
Back to the green bond market.

14:47
SK: The green bonds market is what's called the discovery tool. It makes it really easy for people to invest in a green bond without having to do too much due diligence if they want to invest. Luckily we have a lot of investors who want to invest some 43 trillion globally, who are interested in green investments and green bonds subject to lots of issues around risk and yield all those sorts of things. But if they can, on balance, switch from non-green to green, they will do it. And so the labelling just makes it quick and easy for them to do it.

CD: So Sean’s mission with the Climate Bond Initiative is to mobilise the 100 trillion dollars bond market for climate change solutions.

SK: We've also been getting governments excited about what they can do because this is clear evidence of investor demand, it is no longer abstract. Investors are buying the stuff and all these bonds are oversubscribed four times or thereabouts, so that makes it an interesting story to take to governments. I say this because in a rapid economic change scenario like the one we have to pursue to address climate change, you have to have governments who are willing to act in an aggressive fashion. And there's no way that the green bond market, with its private companies involved, is going to shift economy in its own right. ...But what it can do is help open up new avenues for governments to act when they're otherwise stuck between a rock and a hard place.

CD: Yeah that’s interesting - hooking to that preview discussion about who should do what between government setting the road-maps and investors shifting their focus.

SK: Well it's not so much that we need government to support the roadmap, we need government to get on the horses and start doing some infrastructure planning, specifically green infrastructure planning. There’s a sort of global shortage of deals. And most of the deals have been generated by governments because you know if you think about land appropriations, zoning, licenses...all of these things governments do. And then the process can build once there’s a frame in place.

CD: Yeah, OK.

SK: Back to that toolkit. So while there's a toolkit to our financial instruments you can use, like credit enhancements and guarantees, the first toolkit is actually planning. Because if we are building the railway. Someone's going to have sort of the land issues. Someone has to design the urban islands that will grow up around stations that you build the railway in. In fact someone has to figure out how to capture that land value increase to pay for the railway, because the railway is not frankly very viable. It’s a hundred-year asset that you have to be pay in twenty years. You can't make the sums work out of passenger revenues. You have to have other models like MTR does in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, where they build skyscrapers around the station, and they are a property developer that also happens to build their subway. So in each of these areas we have look at the financial viability, we have to look how you structure it to ensure we get a return. And, you know, that we're still managed broadly by the government and making sure that we have very, very ambitious in each of those sectors. I think that's a challenge for Europe at the moment.

CD: Interesting, so an important starting point for raising finance for climate solutions is public sector planning. That’s another thing we can take away here.

[INTERLUDE]

DECARBONISING INVESTOR PORTFOLIOS - DIVESTMENT AND FEDUCIARY DUTY

22:29
CD: OK let’s close the chapter about Government’s role for now. We may add a few comments moving forward, but I want to get to the core of discussion about how we get institutional investors to shift towards climate-science based strategies, starting from disclosure & transparency.

Eric Usher (EU): While measuring is definitely not the end of the story, when you measure, the real question is, "What do you do with that information? Do you actually start to take action? And the PDC is the second step.

CD: You remember Eric Usher from the UNEP Finance Initiative? We talked to him in episode two.
The PDC he is talking about here is an initiative that he is hosting.
PDC means Portfolio Decarbonisation Coalition, and their mission is to mobilize a critical mass of institutional investors and have them gradually decarbonise their portfolios. The first step is generating the information, by measuring and disclosing the carbon intensity of their portfolios. And then…

EU: ...The PDC is targeting the next step, which is what we term more as the leadership approach, so it's not status quo in the industry, it's really the investors who are taking the next step. And how they start to decarbonise is very open territory today. It's very early days, and you notice that we say 'decarbonise' and not specifically divestment.

CD: Yes, let's talk about divestment. Is that the kind of actions we are looking for?

EU: We're absolutely agnostic on the issue of divestment. It's great for those who are able to do it, but many in the mainstream investment community, for various structural and other reasons, it's a bit hard for them to fully divest today, and it depends from what. I think certainly one of the turning points in 2015 was that divesting from coal no longer seems unreasonable for the mainstream. I think we hope that’s a big step forward, and there were a lot of announcements around Paris in that direction.

Divestment from other parts of the fossil...or other parts of the economy, it's a bit more complicated and we realize that a lot more work to be done on different types of approaches.

CD: So this "action side" of decarbonization seems to captures a very broad set of activities, right?

EU: Precisely. It can consist of a full divestment from specific sectors, from other types of portfolio reconstruction, so you are juggling your portfolio in a way, for instance, of moving towards best-in-class within specific sectors. Or very importantly it can involve engagement. So rather than selling the stock and no longer having any influence over it, it means working with the company to try to have your leverage as an investor towards influencing a strategy which is more aligned with reducing emissions.

25:43
CD: That’s another key take away for us: decarbonizing your portfolio can consist of
· Full divestment from specific sectors - we don’t see this that often,
· Number 2, reconstructing your portfolio by moving towards best-in-class investments in specific sectors,
· And number three, engagement. In other words, how do you use your influence on the companies to help them shift their focus?

And again, you may be doing this because you are kumbaya, “Yeepee I am a tree hugger!” kind of investor, or maybe because it’s your duty?

26:46
Let’s learn a new word: Fiduciary duty. Well actually, let's also learn how to announce it.

[Practices pronunciation].

A fiduciary duty is a legal duty to act solely in another party's interests. Parties owing this duty are called fiduciaries.

Someone we didn’t manage to have on the phone is Nathan Fabian who is the director of policy and research at the well-known UN Principles of Responsible Investing (PRI). Since we couldn’t reach him in time, I am going to play a segment from a very interesting discussion that took place during the COP21, at the “Caring for Climate Business” Forum, in a panel where - by the way - there was 6 women and Nathan was the token man. It’s not often enough that we see that kind of mix.
This discussion is interesting because it talks about some of the legal aspects. I am sure they won’t mind if we listen to it all together.

Nathan Fabian (NF): There are two duties that are relevant for investors, that of loyalty and that of prudence. When we are being loyal, we’re acting in the interest of our beneficiaries. And, as that happens, that’s all of you; through your pension funds and your individual investments. When we are acting with prudence, we’re acting with due care, skill and diligence. And through our research program, we found that because ESG - or environmental, social and corporate governance - can be material, there is in fact an obligation to prudently incorporate them into investment practice.

28:25
CD: What that means is that you must demonstrate due care, skill and diligence in the way you consider climate change.

NF: No longer it's acceptable to get your information from popular newspapers. You might in fact get your information from expert, scientist's opinion from properly performed economic analysis and informed financial analysts. You must stress test your portfolios to consider climate risks. You must require 2 degree or less than 2 degree of warming business plan from the company you're investing in. And if you do not, you must ask how you will mitigate any risks that might arise from this company not making the transition to the economy with less than 2 degrees of warming.

CD: This is a landmark development in the understanding of fiduciary duties and a clear step forward from where we were 10 or 15 years ago.

David Pitt-Watson (DPW): So that all sounds fine, but I chair a small, by global standards, few hundred million pounds charity endowment...

CD: This is Mr. David Pitt-Watson, co-chair of UNEP FI. And he was moderating the panel.

DPW: We may be investing in 5000 companies - what’s my fiduciary duty?

NF: Your duty, if you use an external fund manager to invest for you, is to have a process for ensuring that they assess each of those five thousands companies.

DPW: And you would say that's what the law says?

NF: The law will say that you must demonstrate due diligence and prudence in your process. Now that means understanding if the companies you're investing have the high exposure either to the climate risk or to emissions. And so someone in your investment supply chain has to know the answer. It's not good enough for you to say, “We've got five thousand companies and that's too hard for us to know the answer”. That's the difference.

DPW: OK so I need to do that because if I don't...I destroy the planet? Or, I need to know that because if I destroy the planet, then my endowment is not going to be worth very much?

NF: The latter.

CD: And good transition here. I'm wondering: what is the level of awareness on this? Do investors realize that decarbonising is just proper risk management? Is there any material reasons to decarbonise your portfolio?

[Voice]: I dont know.

I asked Eric Usher

EU: Obviously, every investor has their own perspective. Certainly there are two sides. Is it a regulatory action which is going to impair your assets? Or, is it the actual climate risks that you might be running? And, as Mark Carney talked about, the transition risks, essentially, that certain industries will quite quickly become devalued as market sentiment turns against them.

31:27
CD: Then I asked Julian Poulter, from the Asset Owners Disclosure Project - we’ve talked to him in episode 2 as well. You remember, right?

Let’s make sure we’re focused here, all this is very important. We’re asking the question: Is there any material reasons to decarbonise your portfolio?

31:57
Julian Poulter (JP): The attributes of climate change as a financial risk are unique and here's the reason why, and this is very important to understand: When investors look at the long-term -things like geopolitical risks and social economic risks, socio-economic risks and so forth - there's a lot of vagueness and a lack of precision about how they can view such risks, because we're not sure how technology is precisely going to impact our lives and whether or not you know we will be driving around enjoyable cars in five years or twenty-five. Where medicine will be at, how old we will be living, and all of those things, and where the big security risks are.

But when it comes to climate change, with almost 100% certainty, we know that it's happening, we know that it's going to be high impact, but it's also going to be long term. And so we know with reasonable precision, even though not to a geographical accuracy, we know there's going to be more extreme weather and the types of the impact that’s going to happen. So we've got these long-term high-impact high-certainty risks that make it very difficult for the short-term financial system to manage and understand.

CD: Yes it’s again this tricky balancing act between long-term impact & short term results. And as always with change management it’s about the processes we’re going to be able to deploy.

JP: And that requires not just the change in the way we think about the use of stock markets and so forth but it was also a great cultural change and human challenge within the financial system. Over the years typically pension funds and other asset owners outsource all of their management of these sources of risks, including long-term risks, to fund managers who invest in stock markets. Now, because of the way the financial system has been built up, we know that stock markets are incapable of pricing the risk of climate change accurately within the time frame that we need.

CD: I repeat this important point from Julian here: “We know that stock markets are incapable of pricing the risks of climate change and within the time frame that we need”.

35:02
JP: I think the subprime crisis of 2008 proved once and for all that actually the people who trade the stock market are prepared to take more risks than the pension funds as long-term investors should be comfortable with.
And so the same is true now. The fund managers are still investing, strangely enough, in oil and gas even though we happen to be in an oil price and coal price commodity crash at the moment. But they're still maintaining the faith in some of these oil and gas companies way beyond where they should do for the type of long-term climate change represents. And that's forcing these longer-term investors like pension funds and other asset owners to say, “Well actually we’ve got to lose faith a little bit in the way that stock market manage these sorts of risks, and we're going to have to manage them in other ways.

CLIMATE FINANCE CRISIS - SHORTING & THE BUILD UP OF CARBON IN THE ECONOMY

CD: OK that’s a good segue to our movie section. I am sure you heard about the Oscars on Sunday night, and most importantly there is a movie this year that I think you should watch.

36:19
MOVIE AUDIO CLIP

CD: It’s called “The Big Short”. Great casting, which is why most people who do not care about finance still went to see it - Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Steve Carell, Christian Bale - looks great.

It’s about the housing market and the 2008 crisis of the sub-primes. It’s pretty nerdy but it’s very interesting and pretty well done, it’s a bit like a documentary.

So I’m at the movie theater - having a good time. And I look around me and most people look disappointed.

“Where is Brad Pitt? Oh...it’s him with the beard. Okay...he’s old!”
But I think most people are not so solid on how the US housing market works. They’ve heard of the sub-prime crisis, but if you don’t know what is a bond or a Triple-A, and you were focusing on the pop corn at the very moment they explained it, you’re basically screwed for the rest of the movie.

Anyway, the story in a few words: Four people in the world of high-finance predict the credit and housing bubble collapse of 2007-2008, and decide to take on the big banks for their greed and lack of foresight. Basically, those guys saw it coming.

38:38
Why are we talking about this movie?
Well - there is a disturbing parallel with climate finance. I had great discussion with Julian about this.

JP: I got into the climate change business in late 2006, which was perfect timing, and I made a study of the subprime crisis a hobby of mine. And I can tell you that it is a precise parallel: the build-up of carbon risk in the economy is in many ways of precise parallel to what "The Big Short" was trying to show. It's an excellent movie and indeed actually there are people out there like Michael Burry and Steve Eisman who were there back in 2007, who were already shorting in the high carbon economy.

CD: Shorting is basically a strategy used when you want to profit from the decrease of the price of a stock.

39:38
JP: It's just it hasn't yet happened at such a scale that’s made the sort of impact that we need, but in terms of the way that, for example, ratings agencies have failed to re-price high-carbon debt, in the same way they fail to price the risks of collateral debt obligations and credit-default swaps. And these are systemic failures, and if any of your listeners have got a few hours to read, go back to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission reports and you'll see a precise series of concerns that are being repeated over climate change.

CD: Well I hope that this is enough to take you to see the movie. Remember that our primary mission at The Green Exchange is to fish for international knowledge & inspiration so we can contextualize and advance our green agenda here in the region.

Thank you to WWF for making this series on Climate & Finance possible. It’s because of their support that this special edition is accessible to everyone, and not only to subscribers. You know it - The Green Exchange ‘Plus’ makes your life easier as a sustainability professional and will help you make the right decisions this year, so check how it works on our webpage www.greenexchange.se. We’re preparing a number of exciting new features.

Don’t forget to follow us on twitter @greenXoresund, Facebook at The Green Exchange.

CLIMATE AND FINANCE CONCLUSIONS

CD: Before we finish with the Oscars, a quick recap of the key take away for this episode:
· There is enough capital out there to finance the transition to a climate friendly society.
· A lot of this capital is private and in order to harness it, governments need to act as enablers of this transition, so this capital can be directed towards sustainable development. By setting targets, by driving ambitious planning, by clarifying how to carbon footprint, etc.
· Transparency of the portfolios is an important first step so we can access information, but asset owners need to take significant actions to decarbonise them, either by divesting from specific sectors, by reallocating assets or via engagement strategies.
· It’s your duty as an asset owner. There are recent interpretations of the law that could make this a driver as well.
· The carbon pricing issue, even if we are still waiting for a direct price on carbon, as an investor - don’t wait to shadow carbon price your assets so your company valuations are more accurate. You’ll be in a much better shape when the storm will come, and it will come.

So it’s not about waiting for the tools, or for the others to do something. We have all we need. It’s about looking at the evidence, looking at the benefits & being responsible, doing the right thing
It’s also about having the hummingbird mindset, as always.

We are going to start publishing bonus materials on social media with pieces of interviews we could not include in the talk show. So you’d better click that ‘Like’ button if you don’t want to miss out.

And I invite you to check our complementary resources section where you can find the Global Climate Index 2015 produced by AODP, resources around the Portfolio Decarbonisation Coalition as well. And we invite you all to share with us cases & stories because we are going to keep spreading the word about successful efforts via our Facebook and Twitter.

I would like to give a big thank you to all the people who supported the Climate & Finance series, you know who you are. It’s been a very interesting journey and it’s definitely not over, we’ll be following up and praising the efforts of all the humming birds out there.

One Humming Bird who is definitely doing his share is Mr. DiCaprio, a big advocate of sustainable development. And I wanted to end this episode with the speech he gave after finally winning the Oscar for best actor. It was quite moving and I'm sure you’ll agree with him.

Thanks for listening, we’ll see you soon for more green knowledge & inspiration, we have a lot to cover this year. Keep up the good work in the meantime.

[Clip of Leonardo DiCaprio’s thank you speech at the Oscars].

Leonardo DiCaprio: And lastly, I just want to say this, making The Revenant was about man's relationship to the natural world, the world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history. Our production had to move to the southern tip of this planet just to be able to find snow. Climate change is real, it is happening right now, it is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating.

We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters or the big corporations, but who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous peoples of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people who will be most affected by this, for our children's children, and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed. I thank you all for this amazing award tonight. Let us not take this planet for granted; I do not take tonight for granted.

END