Your weekly guide to Sustainable Investment
Upcoming featured TBLI Talk:
Barney Swan will share his solutions of Regenerating Nature in Australia.
Through a regenerative portfolio, Barney accelerates natural capital, science education, and ClimateTech opportunities. Founder of Australian charity ClimateForce, he currently leads off-grid Research and Development projects around biodiversity, innovation and agriculture solutions. The leading project Tropical Regen is within the world's oldest rainforest, Daintree. Barney has managed complex expedition programs in 8 countries, including the Arctic, Tanzania, South Atlantic and Patagonia. He is highly adaptive within corporate, institutional and remote environments thriving alongside diverse cultures.
In this TBLI Talk we'll discuss:
- Next generation of biodiversity and natural capital modelling
- Blended finance pathways for unlocking trillions
- Creating an off-grid blueprint for social resilience
TBLI Better World Prize voting deadline - October 31st
Vote for the TBLI Better World Prize & receive a free pass to any upcoming virtual TBLI event
send an email to robert@tbligroup.com with the event you wish to attend
TBLI Virtual Networking (Mixer)
Date & time: Oct 30th - 16:00 CET
We are going to be testing our new Virtual Networking system via zoom. You are all invited to attend for free.
Join the TBLI Virtual Networking (Mixer) and connect with impact investors, entrepreneurs, and sustainability thought leaders worldwide through our immersive virtual platform.
Engage in timed 1-on-1 speed networking sessions, where you'll be matched with new individuals for each chat round. Don't miss this opportunity to expand your professional network! Reserve your spot now for the event happening on October 30th at 16:00 CEST.
Wondering how it works? Check out the Video. See you there! - The TBLI Team
Helping Irresponsible Investors Profit with Sustainability & Impact | Robert Rubinstein, TBLI
Collective Responsibility is a strategic advisory firm founded by Richard Brubaker, one of Asia’s most recognized authorities on sustainability, innovation and responsible leadership.
TBLI's Robert Rubinstein joined Richard for a discussion to share about his work to help asset owners reallocate their portfolios towards sustainable investments.
Watch the talk
Developers and environmentalists reach agreement on clean energy deployment goals
Major solar developers, conservation groups, agricultural organizations, environmental and environmental justice groups, and tribal entities announced their agreement to advance large-scale U.S. solar development while championing land conservation and supporting local community interests.
The agreement is the result of a 20-month “Solar Uncommon Dialogue” convened by Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), and The Nature Conservancy (TNC). It is meant to mark a major turning point in resolving conflicts over developing major U.S. solar projects and related conservation and community concerns.
Over the next 10 years, U.S. solar energy output is expected to increase five-fold – the rapid increase in utility-scale solar means that the industry must address various issues, including agricultural land conversion, wildlife and habitat impacts, and community engagement, Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment said. The Solar Uncommon Dialogue agreement stresses that the development of large solar projects must be transparent, equitable, and efficient and acknowledges that this will require many trade-offs.
Signatories to the Solar Uncommon Dialogue agreement have committed to the “3Cs”: climate, conservation, and community.
- Climate emphasizes minimizing carbon emissions through clean energy sources, like solar energy and other tools, including natural climate solutions;
- Conservation seeks to minimize impacts on natural and working lands; and
- Community commits to equitable distribution of renewable energy project benefits.
The signatories are convening six working groups that will address key issues and opportunities including community engagement, siting-related risk assessment and decision-making, energy and agricultural technologies, tribal relations, and policy solutions.
These working groups will focus on advancing the 3Cs via public participation practices, solar siting mechanisms, regulation, financial incentives, information tools, and other means. The goal is to create best practices that solar companies, local governments, and other stakeholders can use to effectively site solar projects.
“Major U.S. solar projects are critical to fighting climate change but are increasingly opposed across the nation due to significant community and land conservation concerns,” said Stanford energy scholar Dan Reicher, who launched and leads the solar Uncommon Dialogue. “It’s exciting how motivated the parties are to avoid these conflicts and develop high-impact solutions — a triple play for climate, conservation, and community” added Reicher, who was U.S. Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
The solar agreement grew out of a Stanford-organized “Uncommon Dialogue,” a convening of cross- sector experts and stakeholders designed to find common ground and build consensus around specific environmental challenges. A previous Uncommon Dialogue agreement on hydropower and river conservation led to $2.3 billion in federal funding for the implementation of its working groups’ recommendations, Stanford said.
The solar dialogue and agreement have spawned another new Uncommon Dialogue to address challenges facing U.S. electricity transmission development for solar, wind and other new clean energy projects.
Climate change has toppled some civilizations but not others. Why?
The link between environmental disasters and societal collapse, explained.
The Roman Empire fell more than 1,500 years ago, but its grip on the popular imagination is still strong, as evidenced by a recent trend on TikTok. Women started filming the men in their lives to document their answers to a simple question: How often do you think about the Roman Empire?
“I guess, technically, like every day,” one boyfriend said, as his girlfriend wheezed out an astonished “What?” He wasn’t the only one, as an avalanche of Twitter posts, Instagram Reels, and news articles made clear. While driving on a highway, some men couldn’t help but think about the extensive network of roads the Romans built, some of which are still in use today. They pondered the system of aqueducts, built with concrete that could harden underwater.
There are a lot of reasons why people are fascinated by the rise and fall of ancient empires, gender dynamics aside. Part of what’s driving that interest is the question: How could something so big and so advanced fail? And, more pressingly: Could something similar happen to us? Between rampaging wildfires, a rise in political violence, and the public’s trust in government at record lows, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched that America could go up in smoke.
Theories of breakdown driven by climate change have proliferated in recent years, encouraged by the likes of Jared Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The Roman Empire, for example, unraveled during a spasm of volcanic explosions, which led to a period of cooling that precipitated the first pandemic of bubonic plague. The decline of the ancient Maya in Central America has been linked with a major drought. Angkor Wat’s downfall, in modern-day Cambodia, has been pinned on a period of wild swings between drought and monsoon floods. So if minor forms of climate change spelled the collapse of these great societies, how are we supposed to survive the much more radical shifts of today?
Focusing too closely on catastrophe can result in a skewed view of the past — it overlooks societies that navigated an environmental disaster and made it through intact. A review of the literature in 2021 found 77 percent of studies that analyzed the interplay between climate change and societies emphasized catastrophe, while only 10 percent focused on resilience. Historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists have recently tried to fill in that gap. The latest entry is a study that analyzes 150 crises from different time periods and regions, going off a comprehensive dataset that covers more than 5,000 years of human history, back to the Neolithic period. Environmental forces often play a critical role in the fall of societies, the study found, but they can’t do it alone.
Researchers with the Complexity Science Hub, an organization based in Vienna, Austria, that uses mathematical models to understand the dynamics of complex systems, found plenty of examples of societies that made it through famines, cold snaps, and other forms of environmental stress. Several Mesoamerican cities, including the Zapotec settlements of Mitla and Yagul in modern-day Oaxaca, “not only survived but thrived within the same drought conditions” that contributed to the fall of the Maya civilization in the 8th century. And the Maya, before that point, had weathered five earlier droughts and continued to grow.
‘No normal seasons any more’: seed farmers struggle amid the climate crisis
Once upon a not-so-distant time, the growing season for the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Green Things Farm Collective followed a steadfast trajectory.
“We reliably had rainy springs and early summers, then hot and dry in late July and August, with the rains picking up again in September,” said Stacy Mates, Green Things’ seed company manager. “For a crop like lettuce seed, it was perfect.”
Within this decade, Mates has noticed that the previously familiar cycle “has changed dramatically. What we’ve gotten the last three years is drought in June and then torrential rains in July and August,” causing complete lettuce seed crop failures two years running. This year, after golf ball-sized hail, numerous severe thunderstorms and 75mph winds, a first crop of seed never matured. Mates treated a second crop with kid gloves, trellising the plants and covering them with shade cloth in hopes they’d survive another deluge. By late September, Mates had managed a solid harvest, with enough seed to sell.
Farmers are already fighting many battles in a growing season: beating back powdery mildew on cucumbers, hornworms devouring tomato leaves and strawberries plagued by verticillium rot. But for the farmers who grow the seeds that wind up in our seed packets and undergird our horticultural adventures, production has become ever more difficult.
So difficult, in fact, that Green Things recently decided it would call it quits on growing for seeds. Mates can’t say for certain just how much climate change is to blame for production challenges, only that its role is undeniable.
“We are not having normal seasons any more”, said Lane Selman, an agricultural researcher at Oregon State University and founder of a seed-producer community called the Culinary Breeding Network. As the northern hemisphere shakes off its hottest summer on record, intensifying weather events threaten the variety we take for granted when we page through winter-delivered seed catalogues, dreaming of a bountiful spring.
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The EU just kicked off its biggest climate experiment yet
The world’s largest single market has launched a bold plan to tax carbon at its borders. The rest of the world is paying close attention.
With little fanfare, the European Union has launched a huge climate experiment. On October 1, the EU kicked off the initial phase of a Europe-wide tax on carbon in imported goods. This marks the first time a carbon border tax has been tried at this scale anywhere in the world. Europe’s experiment could have ripple effects across the entire globe, pushing high-emitting industries to clean up their production and incentivizing other countries to launch their own carbon taxes. It may well end up being the most important climate policy you have never heard of.
“This is an excellent example of wild ambition on the regulatory front,” says Emily Lydgate, a professor of environmental law at the University of Sussex. Nothing approaching the scale or ambition of the EU’s carbon border tax exists anywhere in the world, although California has a very limited version of its own carbon tax on energy imports. “It’s very novel to roll this out in such a big market. The perturbations throughout the system are pretty huge.”
So how does it work? The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is essentially an import tax on carbon-intensive products, such as cement, steel, fertilizer, and electricity. Since 2005, the EU has levied a carbon price on highly polluting industries within its own borders, requiring manufacturers to buy credits to cover the carbon they emit or risk heavy fines. Businesses receive a certain number of free allowances, but to emit more carbon they must pay around €80 ($75) per metric ton for the privilege—one of the highest carbon charges anywhere in the world.
You might sense the problem with this system. China, for instance, doesn’t levy a carbon tax on steel, which means it can undercut the EU steel industry. And EU companies looking for a good deal will likely turn to countries with the cheapest steel prices. The CBAM is an attempt to level this playing field. Under the new regime, an importer of Chinese steel will have to purchase carbon credits that correspond to the same rate as steel produced in the European Union. That is the crux of the CBAM—making sure that the carbon in high-emission products is priced at the same rate, no matter where those products are produced.
“The EU is trying to export its price on carbon to the rest of the world,” says Marcus Ferdinand, chief analytics officer at carbon consultancy Veyt. For now, the CBAM is still in a soft-launch stage. From October 2023 to December 2025, importers of goods covered by the CBAM will need to declare emissions in those products, but they won’t have to buy any carbon allowances. From 2026, however, importers will have to buy CBAM certificates to cover these “embedded” emissions.
Even this transition stage is a pretty big deal, says Lydgate. The new rules will initially apply to imports of cement, iron, steel, aluminum, fertilizers, electricity, and hydrogen. This means that all of these importers and manufacturers will have to start quantifying their emissions to make sure they don’t fall foul of the CBAM. “Just by being the first mover on this, the EU is catalyzing this huge upskilling of firms around the world in having to do something which they haven’t really had to do on a mandatory basis,” says Lydgate. Other high-emission goods, such as crude petroleum, synthetic rubber, and other metals, may be added in later versions of the CBAM.
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