Climate Economics
We work to address some of the most pressing environmental challenges of our time affecting communities across the globe – climate change and resource scarcity – by catalyzing private capital into innovative solutions to protect and preserve the environment and accelerate the transition to a more sustainable economy for the benefit of the public.
Advancing climate solutions requires money, we need to unlock and reallocate capital through family and private investments. The collective influence of investments by families can deeply influence to shift the capital market towards decarbonizing our economy and addressing climate impacts on a large scale. This would be in contrast for family foundations that often try and separate investing for financial return the causes that they care about. Until recently, it was standard operating to divide assets for philanthropy and investments, but now it is more common and understood that those two can be easily combined. Nearly two-fifths of family offices plan to allocate most of the portfolios sustainably within the next five years, according to UBS in a poll of 121 investors. We are nearing this tipping point when it comes to the adoption of sustainability by family offices, there is a heightened global awareness of the impact of climate change risks on long-term investment portfolios, which needs to be addresses in order to preserve that long-term wealth for future generations.
Economic and social inequality must be addressed in tandem with addressing climate change by transforming our current system by highly concentrating wealth to shift influence and develop further investment successes and models to attract more much need capital into climate and equity solutions. In addition to catalyzing capital to address the largest existential crisis of our time, lets also find the courage to address the climate crisis in an equitable way that addresses the underlining socioeconomic issues with a moral compass.
Evaluating the economic impact of climate change is difficult.
The natural science of it makes it a complex issue. Models that map carbon emissions to changes in global and local temperatures are readily available, but the mapping of many other physical impacts, such as sea level rise, extreme weather events, or nonlinearities in the climate system, is more complex. While our understanding of these effects is rapidly improving, as shown by the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, there are still no good off-the-shelf models that we can easily plug into our economic analysis.
Perhaps more importantly, how can we do a comprehensive evaluation if we ignore the fact that higher temperatures are bound to have very different economic effects in the world’s coldest and warmest areas. Recognizing this spatial heterogeneity is essential for an accurate assessment of not just the aggregate impact of climate change, but also the spatial inequality that it might generate.