Chairing Commodities Investment Summit – London April 2023

I’m going to break this distinction between weather and climate for all the economists out there and anyone else form whom this may need clarification. Imagine you are an owner of turtles and you have them living in a terrarium. You have a cover over the terrarium so they don’t escape because they are actually cleaver creatures. Mini-Houdinins. The terarium sits on a window sill that over looks the beautiful outdoors. Now on any given day you could have a beautiful sunny day or a rainy day. This is weather. 

However, the conditions of the terrarium are changing over time if you don’t look after it. There is increasing gases inside due to all the waste (in this instance turtle poop, in the Earth’s case greenhouse gases) This increases the humidity and heat of the whole terrarium. Now this is where I need some creative license with my analogy as it doesn’t apply too much to a terraroum in this exact example, even though the earth’s atmosphere is a kind of terarium. The overall warming doesn’t mean we are necessarily goinf to see increating hot days (weather) although it can,  rather, we will see melting of icecaps increasing sea levels, the warming of oceans which will make it too hot in the seas for many essesntial sea life to survive, which throws this ecosystem out of balance and we start seeing acidification of the oceans and dead zones. We will start seeing increased catastrophic climate events, such as cyclones, drought, flash floods, tsunami’s, blizzards, forest fires and increase salination of farmland and so on. We have seen over 8,000 catastrophic climate events between the year 2000 and 2020, affecting over 4 billion people and costing the global economy over $USD2.97 trillion in losses. This figure has continued to rise per annum since 2020. Due to imbalances in integrated ecosystems, we are seeing rapid losses of species, both flora and fauna and particularly our pollinating species, essential for our own survival. We are seeing 1 square meter of land lost to decertification per second. We are already on the verge of a soil extinction, having lost 75% of our soil’s biomass. This biomass loss means we also have a fresh water crisis, with increased salination of farmlands and so on and so on.

If this sounds depressing, it is because it is. However the good news is nature recovers FAST, we just need to change our relationship to nature as “Ecosystem services” as it is called in economics. It’s a bit arrogant – thinking nature exists solely to serve us. Nevertheless, names like this are not just semantics, it indicates our extractive paradigm of thinking to us. This is the paradigm that needs to change.

We are not separate to nature, we are part of nature. We are carbon based mammals. However, we are one of the only species that seems to have forgotten in how to work in harmony with nature. We have become growth focused, because in our economics abstractions that we are taught in our MBA’s perpetual growth is possible, however, this assumption ignores the natural balances necessary for the living system to stay in tact, whilst we continue to evolve. instead, we are obliterating it.