Tuesday, January 28th - 2024

Author: Sam Rubinstein

Your weekly guide to Sustainable Investment


Upcoming TBLI Events

January 30th, 13:00 CET

Dive into an empowering masterclass with Caroline Dennett, where she shares her journey of overcoming adversity and finding purpose. Drawing from her transformative experiences at Shell, Caroline explores the contrast between the dark side and the nightside, guiding participants to harness challenges as a source of strength and direction.

This interactive session features a roundtable and Mastermind elements, creating a space for deep reflection and meaningful dialogue. Illuminate your path forward—discover the power in your shadow.

Register now
 


TBLI Virtual Mixer Jan.



January 31st, 4 PM CET
 
 
  Join Us for an Extraordinary Networking Experience: TBLI Virtual Mixer! 
Imagine a networking event where you don’t have to sell anything – just be yourself. At the TBLI Mixer, we’ve reimagined how professionals can connect. This is where people who care deeply about sustainability, impact, and creating real change come together.

Meet non-extractive, authentic eccentrics – people from diverse industries who think beyond the ordinary and act for a better world. The conversation flows, the connections are meaningful, and every participant brings something unique to the table.

Click here to sign up and join

Raise Smarter with TBLI Capital Connect!


Ready to take your fundraising efforts to the next level? TBLI Capital Connect is your ultimate platform to connect with global investors actively seeking innovative ventures like yours. Whether you're scaling a startup or expanding your business, we help you secure the funding you need to grow.  

Why TBLI Capital Connect?
✅ Access to a curated network of high-net-worth investors and venture capitalists  
✅ Tailored matchmaking to align you with the right funding partners  
✅ Streamlined process to fast-track your fundraising goals  
✅  Different tiers of service, offering you the most suitable service according to your budget.

Don’t let funding stand in the way of your vision. Join TBLI Capital Connect and turn your ambitions into reality!

More details here


 


TBLI Radical Truth Podcast

 

Blending Effective Finance and Nature Solutions /w Christopher White

 

Christopher White ⁠joined Conservation International as a strategist in 2021, specializing in building solutions in complex and challenging environments. He has dedicated the past two years to studying the various fiscal and operational interventions employed to facilitate international conservation efforts.

He is currently working on developing a new approach to funding conservation work that generates economic and natural returns for both people and the planet.

Points to Cover:

1. Lessons Learned: Financing nature is no different than financing any other business. It is about understanding what combination works best for the unique situation.

2. The Opportunities: There are more opportunities for investors and investees than we realize once you start blending funding.

3. Africa Conservancy Facility: How it started, where it is, what could be the next and upcoming fundraising round.

Listen to the podcast
 

Are Women Donors the Key to Unlocking More Giving?

Silhouettes of women from different cultures

By Heather McLeod Grant & Jessica Robinson Love 

By now you’ve likely heard about the impending wealth transfer, and that close to $35 trillion will soon end up in the hands of women, complementing income they’ve earned from work. What will women choose to do with this windfall? How much will they invest, spend, share with their heirs, or give back to society? As advisors to donors and nonprofits, we know firsthand the impact this wealth can have, and we’re optimistic that much of it will be deployed through philanthropy or values-aligned investing to address our world’s most pressing problems. This isn’t just wishful thinking: data indicates that women are more generous than men.

Take the ultra-wealthy women who’ve recently made headlines for giving away their fortunes. Melinda Gates has been carving out her own giving path via Pivotal Ventures since divorcing Bill Gates and recently pledged $12 billion to women’s empowerment. MacKenzie Scott has garnered media attention for donating more than $19 billion to thousands of nonprofits in just a few years via Yield Giving. Laurene Powell Jobs has been quietly building out her philanthropic platform, Emerson Collective, for more than a decade. And it’s not just about the billionaires. These headlines portend a larger, more subtle trend that is just beginning to reshape philanthropy, and which has important implications for donors of all magnitudes, wealth managers, donor advisors, and the social sector writ large.

As longtime advisors to family and individual donors, we've noticed that our female clients tend to approach their giving differently from their spouses (in heterosexual couples), and have different needs from their male counterparts—whether they are the wealth creator, are married to a wealth creator, or have inherited wealth from their families. Curious to explore this trend, we teamed up with donor advisor Kimberly Dasher Tripp and Miki Akimoto of the National Center for Family Philanthropy (NCFP) to run a pilot program advising a small group of newly wealthy Bay Area women on their giving. We also scanned the academic research on women donors, attended relevant conferences such as Women Moving Millions, and interviewed a number of leaders in the women donors space.

Our conclusion? The future of philanthropy is female—and women are a critical leverage point to unlocking more, more impactful, and more equitable giving over the next decade.

Can Women Get Philanthropy Unstuck?

It has become common wisdom in the social sector that too much philanthropic capital is sitting on the sidelines, even as the world faces extraordinary social, political, and environmental challenges. The past two decades have seen unprecedented wealth creation coupled with rising income inequality, resulting in a new class of centi-millionaires and billionaires. The number of US billionaires is approaching 800, with almost 3,000 globally. There are now roughly 10,000 American centi-millionaires and nearly 3 million US households with net wealth between $10 million and $50 million. We are truly living in a new “gilded age.”

Simultaneously, the wealth management, impact investing, and philanthropic sectors are also undergoing a period of rapid expansion, disruption, and innovation. The last decade has seen an explosion in donor advising and education groups, giving circles, pooled or collaborative funds, impact investing networks, philanthropic prizes, and pledges. Yet despite all these offerings, most of the ultra-wealthy are still giving less than 1 percent of their assets, even as their investments continue to grow at 10 percent or more annually. In short, philanthropy has a math problem.

Many of these new donors have the best intentions—some have even signed the famous Giving Pledge—but they are getting stuck for a multitude of reasons. Many are young (in their 30s-50s) and are busy running companies, creating and managing their wealth, and raising families. There are also real psychological barriers to giving as recently uncovered in a report by our colleagues at NCFP and Arabella. Additionally, financial vehicles like donor-advised funds (DAFs) allow ultra-high-net-wealth individuals to receive an immediate tax break, without any carrots or sticks forcing them to shift the funds to nonprofits.

Compounding this, philanthropy has become more complicated: today’s donors aspire to be strategic, leverage multiple vehicles (DAFs, LLCs, foundations, C4s, PACs, etc.), use their full capital stack, create systems-level change, measure their impact, and embrace trust-based approaches. Further complicating matters is the highly fragmented social sector, with thousands of worthy organizations tackling deep-seated problems, from climate change to homelessness to protecting democracy. Donors look out at this complicated landscape and, with no real incentive to give, end up paralyzed.

But there are emerging solutions to this philanthropic gridlock, including focusing on women as important levers for change. We believe women are critical to unlocking philanthropic capital, not only because they’re beginning to exert more influence over family wealth and financial decision-making; they are also much more involved in their communities, are more inclined to give back than men, and are more likely to align their capital with their values.

Read full article 

Trump is just getting started. What are climate activists supposed to do?

Photo of protesters at a Trump rally holding a sign saying that Trump is a climate criminal

By:  Kate Yoder & Frida Garza - Grist.org

Organizers say they will remain peaceful, but nothing is off the table.

The movement to demand action on climate change took a new turn on October 14, 2022, the day that a pair of activists in London’s National Gallery tossed tomato soup at the glass in front of Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” painting. 

Most people didn’t like the spectacle, an attempt to grab public attention by vandalizing a celebrated work of art, but that was kind of the point. After decades of peaceful protests, climate activists hadn’t gotten anything close to what they wanted. Even as people around the world had begun to experience the sobering effects of climate change firsthand — sweating through heat waves and breathing in acrid smoke from wildfires — global carbon dioxide emissions were still increasing, and elected governments were still signing off on new oil and gas projects. Activists felt like they had to try something different: What could they do to shake things up and get people’s attention?

That question is only becoming more pressing as President Donald Trump begins his second term in office, declaring an “energy emergency” in his inaugural address on Monday to expand fossil fuel production. “This moment is so incredibly far from anywhere close to even where we want to be fighting on,” said Keanu Arpels-Josiah, a 19-year-old organizer with Fridays for Future NYC, a youth-led climate activist group, in the days after the November presidential election. 

When Trump entered the White House for the first time in 2017, climate activism was infused with a fresh wave of energy, building on the momentum of the broader “American Resistance” that rose up against his policies. A movement once tied to pipeline protests and university divestment started attracting widespread attention, with brand-new groups led by young people like the Sunrise Movement and Zero Hour staging marches and occupying Congressional offices. The Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg started skipping school on Fridays in 2018 to protest the lack of government action, inspiring teenagers around the world to participate in “school strikes.” Calling for a “Green New Deal” became a popular slogan among progressives.

But when President Joe Biden took office in 2021, some of that energy fizzled out, and the climate movement fractured. Big environmental organizations like the Sierra Club tried to influence federal policy — and succeeded for once, with Congress passing the largest investment in climate action in United States history in 2022 — while radical grassroots activists from Climate Defiance demanded more, heckling the White House climate adviser, Ali Zaidi, on multiple occasions.

“We were seeing this crazy, very, very fractured climate movement, which was in abeyance, where most Americans, while they said they cared about climate change, were not willing to march in the streets for it,” said Dana Fisher, a professor at American University who has studied climate activism for more than two decades. “That all is over.” 

With Trump back in the White House, she expects climate advocates will start working together again, alongside people representing other progressive causes, since they’ll have a common enemy. “Will the Resistance rise again? Yes,” Fisher said. “Will the Resistance look the same? Absolutely not.” 

The first sign that progressive activists would respond to the new Trump administration by banding together came two days before the presidential inauguration, when an estimated 50,000 people participated in the People’s March in Washington, D.C., on January 18, protesting for reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and racial justice, along with other causes. Of the 453 protesters that Fisher’s team surveyed at the event, 70 percent named climate change as one of their top motivations for participating. 

“All the different things we’re fighting for really are under attack,” Arpels-Josiah said. “I think we have no other option than to organize in a moment like this, right?” His organization, Fridays for Future NYC, is planning to hold a Youth Climate Justice Convergence on March 1 to discuss how to push for change in New York at the local and state level.

Read full article 

Water companies in England ‘use greenwashing playbook to hide environmental harm’

Thames Water sewage treatment works entrance
By:  -The Guardian

Researchers say companies have prolonged injustice and exaggerated cost of solving infrastructure problems

Water companies are adopting disinformation tactics similar to those used by the fossil fuel and tobacco industries with the widespread use of greenwashing to downplay the environmental harm they cause, a study says.

Environmental scientists analysed the communications of the nine main water and sewerage companies in England, and compared them with a framework of 28 greenwashing tactics employed, researchers say, by the tobacco, alcohol, fossil fuels and chemical industries.

The water companies have adopted 22 of these tactics to downplay environmental harm, misrepresent information, undermine scientific research, shift blame and delay action, the researchers say.

The lead author of the research, which was published on Monday in the journal Nature Water, Prof Alex Ford, of the University of Portsmouth’s school of the environment and life sciences and institute of marine sciences, said: “Water and sewage companies have prolonged environmental injustice by using a playbook of tactics other large polluters have relied upon in the past to mislead the public and influence government agencies or laws.”

The research suggests water companies have softened the language around raw sewage discharges by rebranding sewage treatment facilities as “water recycling centres”. They have also described sewage overflows as “heavily diluted rainwater” even when untreated sewage was present and posed a threat to public health.

The paper, titled Water Industry Strategies to Manufacture Doubt and Deflect Blame for Sewage Pollution in England, highlights what the researchers say is water companies misrepresenting their environmental performance while facing scrutiny for discharging untreated sewage for 12.7m hours into English waterways between 2019 and 2023.

The nine companies analysed in the study were Thames Water, Southern Water, South West Water, Wessex Water, United Utilities, Anglian Water, Northumbrian Water, Yorkshire Water and Severn Trent Water.

Some companies used what researchers said was emotive language around raw sewage discharges into rivers from overflows, presenting the public with a binary choice between flooding schools and hospitals with raw sewage, or allowing discharges through combined sewer overflows to reduce the pressure in the system and protect these institutions.

Public campaigns by water companies also pointed the finger of blame at customers for raw sewage overflows into rivers, claiming wet wipes were the primary cause, but downplaying problems with ageing infrastructure. Companies have exaggerated the cost of solving these problems, according to the paper, quoting figures as high as £660bn, to manage expectations around investment and reform.

The paper’s co-author, Prof Jamie Woodward, from the department of geography at the University of Manchester, has linked the discharge of sewage and untreated wastewater to widespread microplastic contamination of UK riverbeds.

“Public trust in these companies is at an all-time low – the public deserve much clearer communication from the water companies and full transparency on the scale and impact of sewage pollution,” he said. “Dumping sewage degrades precious ecosystems and poses a real and present danger to public health.”

Ford said the companies had adopted a playbook of denial, deflection and distraction, similar to other big polluting industries, to protect profits at the expense of the environment and public health.

The paper calls for stricter regulation of industry communications to combat greenwashing and misinformation. The authors also highlight the need for greater investment in sustainable solutions, such as restoring wetlands, alongside modernising sewerage systems.

The study comes at a time of increasing public and legal pressure on water companies. Last October, the government launched an independent water commission to strengthen regulation, increase investment and inform further reform of the water sector.

Ford said: “Water as a finite resource, and in a monopolised industry, could become more profitable when financial drivers are poorly regulated. These same financial drivers have resulted in a failing infrastructure which hasn’t increased capacity or been maintained to cope with population growth, climate change and our improved knowledge of chemical contaminants.”

A spokesperson for Water UK, the trade association for the water industry, said: “Contrary to the claims of this paper the English water sector is one of the most transparent in the world. Last year England became the first country in the world to make near-real time storm overflow data publicly available. In addition, data on company performance is regularly published by the sector’s regulators.

“However, we recognise more needs to be done to end sewage spills and have previously apologised for not doing enough. Companies are poised to invest the largest amount of money ever on the natural environment – including more than £11 billion to almost halve spills from storm overflows by 2030.”

Source

Human case of avian flu detected in England as virus spreads among birds

Chickens outdoors on grass, with a coop in the background

 By:  - The Guardian

Second human case of H5N1 bird flu caught on farm in West Midlands but risk to public remains very low, says UKHSA

A human case of highly pathogenic bird flu has been detected in England, authorities have said, as bird flu cases escalate across the country. It is only the second symptomatic human case of H5N1 bird flu recorded in the UK, after the first was detected in 2022, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said.

The individual contracted the infection on a farm in the West Midlands after contact with a large number of infected birds, with authorities describing it as a “very rare event”. Prof Susan Hopkins, chief medical adviser at the UKHSA, said: “The risk of avian flu to the general public remains very low, despite this confirmed case.”

Since 2021 there have been seven cases of bird flu in humans in England, all of whom had been in direct contact with infected birds. Two developed symptoms, while the rest were asymptomatic.

The individual was admitted to a high consequence infectious disease unit and is currently well. The case was detected after routine monitoring of people who had been in contact with infected birds.

There has been no evidence of human-to-human transmission of bird flu and health authorities are testing all of the people who have been in contact with the infected person.

Hopkins said: “We have robust systems in place to detect cases early and take necessary action, as we know that spillover infections from birds to humans may occur.”

Human bird flu infections are alarming health officials. Since the beginning last year, the US has recorded 67 confirmed human cases of bird flu, most of which were found in people working in poultry or dairy farms. Most were considered mild, with low risk to the general public. However, the US announced its first death from the virus, in Louisiana, this month. Since last September there have also been 10 cases reported in China and one in Vietnam.

Bird flu can pass from birds to people but it usually requires close contact, which is why the risk to humans is generally considered low. There have been no documented cases of human-to-human transmission of bird flu in Britain or elsewhere in Europe.

Christine Middlemiss, UK chief veterinary officer, said: “While avian influenza is highly contagious in birds, this is a very rare event and is very specific to the circumstances on this premises.

“We took swift action to limit the spread of the disease at the site in question, all infected birds are being humanely culled, and cleansing and disinfection of the premises will be undertaken all to strict biosecure standards.”

The case comes three days after all of England and Scotland was declared a bird flu-prevention zone, with strict hygiene orders in place for fowls. The government said escalating number of cases of avian influenza and continued heightened risk levels in wild birds were behind its decision. Some eastern counties in England are under stricter measures and all birds will need to be placed in enclosures.

“We are seeing a growing number of avian flu cases in birds on both commercial farms and in backyard flocks across the country,” said Middlemiss. “Implementing scrupulous biosecurity measures will help protect the health and welfare of your birds from the threat of avian influenza and other diseases.”

The government advises people not to touch sick or dead birds, and report any suspicious avian influenza cases. Andrew Gwynne, minister for public health and prevention, said: “The safety of the public is paramount and we are monitoring this situation closely.

“We recently added the H5 vaccine, which protects against avian influenza, to our stockpile as part of our preparedness plans,” he said.

Source

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