“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”
Winston Churchill
The role of sustainable finance
In September 2017, as part of the 10 Years after the Crash events, we ran a Towards 9 Billion workshop on sustainable finance, to explore how the finance sector could build a sustainable future.
The session included input from experts in economics, finance, disclosure, taxation, infrastructure investment and sustainability innovation:
- Darryl Murphy – Head of Infrastructure Debt, Aviva Investors
- Michael Mainelli – Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Z/Yen and Founder of Long Finance
- Lois Guthrie – Executive Director of the CDSB (Carbon Disclosure Standards Board)
- Kate Raworth – Author of “Doughnut Economics – how to think like a 21st Century Economist” and Senior Visiting Research Associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute
- Joss Tantram – Partner Terrafiniti and founder of Towards 9 Billion
- Vincent Neate – Director, Relationship Capital Strategies.
Participants in the workshop included more than 30 professionals from finance and investment, management consultancy, environmental and social activism and academia.
The event employed a collaborative process designed by Together for the Common Good to support the development of Common Good Statements.
Themes
Participants collaborated to develop a series of 30-year vision statements and the required ‘first steps’ towards those visions for 5 key themes:
- Wealth and profit distribution (equity)
- Regulation & risk (the rules of the game)
- Education and capacity (what do we need to know and be able to do?)
- The role of companies (how might companies evolve financial sector purpose and activity?)
- Dealing with vested interests (balancing short term self-interest with long term common interest).
We’ve pulled these together into a brief workshop report. If you would like to recive a copy, please contact us directly.
Exploring sustainable futures
We’re thinking about running further collaborative events in this series on key topics in finance, sustainability and exploring a sustainable future.
Would you like to partner or contribute, and what do you think would be valuable for us to concentrate on?
Are there particular challenges in sustainability/finance that you would like some help in addressing?
We’d love to hear your thoughts, so please get in touch.
