How the financial markets could switch from environmental destroyers to saviours of the world

Following on from their must-read Living Planet report, Our Planet: Too Big To Fail is a new documentary from WWF that's definitely worth 40 minutes of your time.

Looking at climate change and biodiversity loss thru the lens of the financial markets, it explains how the social and economic impact of these environmental factors will dwarf by some magnitude what we saw in the 2008 crash and are currently experiencing due to Covid19.

It also sets out how our current growth-at-all-costs economic model, and the financial systems underpinning this, are contributing to their own collapse by viewing the natural world as an infinite resource to be (literally) strip-mined.

But rather than simply being a blunt attack on capitalism, the film ends with a powerful call to action: a compelling case for how the financial markets can switch from being the bulk of the problem to part of the solution.

Driven by a new generation of investors with a different world view and an eye on the future, it just needs financiers to recognise that enviro-negative short-termism is a dead-end of ultimately unprofitable destruction, and that future returns will be found in sustainable, regenerative investments that work with not against the planet.

The only problem: the window for making this switch is closing fast.