As governments falter to invest in environmental radicalism, the Pollination Group aims to match capital to vital projects
Thursday’s election featured a full suite of parties, from left to right, who had studded their manifestos with climate-crisis responsive policies - see Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth’s assessment of them.
But as the disappointment of the latest COP talks in Madrid have shown - with Greta Thunberg’s admonitions being generally ignored - we need to stay curious and inquiring as to other, non-governmental pathways to environmental radicalism.
A few weeks ago, we ran a column based on Bill McKibben’s ideas that activism could accelerate corporate disinvestment in coal, oil and gas, and encourage reinvestment in renewable alternatives that could in fact deliver more reliable returns for their backers.
Now we hear about new companies springing up to help broker and enable those shifts. The Pollination Group is a “global climate advisory and investment firm”. According to this report, their aim is:
… To bring together experts who can break down barriers to the transition to a clean future, and redirect capital that has been committed but not to climate solutions.
“Climate change is the central issue of our generation, but we’ve got this funding problem,” says co-founder Martijn Wilder. “Families don’t know where to go [with their money], big investment funds can only write cheques of $1bn – what do you do with that? – and governments either don’t want to invest or it takes a lot of time, and are often restricted by legal barriers.”
Beyond infrastructure, they say they want to back investments that protect natural capital and water security. Wilder says creating markets for climate adaptation and resilience will require coming up with financial solutions that could, for example, protect a reef or a mangrove, support a new technology that improves soil fertility or better manage water use.
He says an increasing number of corporate players are talking about the climate emergency, but not moving quickly enough. Referring to the work of the task force on climate-related financial disclosures (TCFD), a global body that aims to highlight companies’ exposure to risks related to the climate crisis, Wilder says many companies are attempting what he describes as “TCFD light” – acknowledging the issue, not yet matching it with action. But he believes the movement is in the right direction and picking up pace.
“Any board anywhere in the world that thinks in 2019 that it should not be assessing climate risk will put its directors at significant exposure,” he says. “It is just no longer tenable for a board not to do that.”
Wilder’s co-founder, Tony O’Sullivan, a former Australian head of investment banking at Lazard, says there is evidence investors, businesses and governments are increasingly turning their mind to what net-zero emissions means, pointing to a warning by the governor of the Bank of England that major corporations have two years to agree to rules for reporting climate risks before global regulators make them compulsory. He says the solution has to be more than “just building another solar farm”.
“If you come out, as a lot of governments have done, with a deadline that says, ‘I’ve got 30 years to turn around an economy which has been based on fossil fuels for the last 200 years’, how do you transform an entire economy in that period?” O’Sullivan says from his base in London. “We really feel the advice we’re giving is going to transform governments and corporates.”
More here. And see this report from Bloomberg Law:
Wilder said the firm can help fill “a gap between those who are making policy and those who are investing.”
He said policymakers and those in government don’t always know much about how investments or the markets work and the investor side may not understand the policy aspects of fighting climate change.
Pollination will work with governments to develop laws and governance systems to combat climate change and comply with related standards. It will also work with capital streams to generate new ideas for new investments.
For example, if a government seeks to cut emissions by 2050, Pollination will advise it on how to do so, including on how to structure its economy and how to make laws and policies that encourage climate-related investment. It will also guide investors eyeing those new areas.
“A lot of people are very concerned about climate change, but are paralyzed on what to do, so we’ll offer services to help them through the transition period,” Wilder said.
The firm also plans to make large-scale investments of its own. It will look to raise $3 billion across its investment platforms and funds as well as an additional $1 billion of co-investments from its global limited partner investor base.
Pollination has said it plans to fund projects and technologies that build climate resilience and help with decarbonization. This includes looking at infrastructure improvements in sectors like energy and telecommunications.