As part of our Routes to Transformation project with GlobeScan and ERM, I am trying to identify the main accelerators of—and brakes upon—market transformation. When we wonder why sustainability-focused transformations move so slowly, or stall, the usual answers include vested interests, short political cycles, misaligned capital, and the sheer, mind-boggling size of the challenges.

All true, but very far from the whole story.

Even with settled science, falling technology costs, available capital and widespread public support, progress still generally lags what is needed. What these explanations miss is that the work often moves forward through clashes. Not so much the public debates we see in the media or at conferences, but disagreements where both sides think they are arguing about evidence, timing or strategy when they are really working from very different ideas about what reality is and about what change means.

These clashes tend to be of two main types. First, they occur within the sustainability field itself, which often presents itself as a single movement but is made up of many distinct tribes, cultures and dialects sharing only elements of a common vocabulary. Second, they occur between this field, in all its fragmentation, and a wider world either indifferent or actively opposed to its priorities.

Both conspire to slow progress, yet the first type tends not to appear in many people’s theories of change. It should.

Why culture is the invisible variable

Culture counts, in so many ways. It’s an extraordinary fact that if humans had been a typical mammal and had relied on genetics alone to drive their geographical spread to today’s planetary reach, it would have taken 88 million years, and we would have split into some 2,200 distinct species over that time. Cultural evolution sped up the process to a few hundred thousand years.

But our cultures and languages did diversify. We adapted to local conditions, so Kalahari hunter-gatherers would not last long in Greenland, and vice versa for the Inuit. This cultural diversity is also visible in the sustainability movement, with many different dimensions.

One implication is that those driving what they imagine to be a widely supported “sustainability transition” may find themselves wrong-footed by counterchallenges from within the movement. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review explained that this sort of cultural blindness can be a key reason why so many mainstream corporate transformation initiatives fail. The authors speak of the “false alignment trap.”

Every serious effort to transform a company, institution, or economy is really an attempt to change behaviors by changing structures—new rules, targets, budgets, incentives and reporting lines. We focus on structure because it is clear and measurable: it can be mapped out, budgeted, mandated and audited.

But culture ultimately determines whether any of this works when it reaches real people living in what they see as the real world. And culture is hard to see because, by definition, it is made up of the things a group no longer debates—its influence growing as it becomes less visible.

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The way people do things around here

When something is fully cultural, it feels like reality, the way things are done around here. What people do when no one is looking over their shoulder, as some put it.

Edgar Schein described culture in three layers: visible artefacts, stated values, and the basic assumptions that go unspoken because no one thinks to mention them. Most transformation programs work on the first two and fail at the third. Later, people blame “cultural resistance” for slow progress, a term that admits the problem but does not explain it.

Three consequences follow.

• Culture is both the most powerful and the least measured factor. Donella Meadows ranked interventions by depth and placed paradigm—the mindset that shapes a system’s goals—above rules, goals and structure. Paradigm can be another word for culture.

• Also, cultural dynamics explain why evidence often fails to change minds. Dan Kahan's research on cultural cognition shows that higher scientific literacy can increase polarization on climate, because people use reasoning to defend their group’s position. Facts arriving from a culture you distrust feel like an intrusion, not information.

• By no means finally, culture can help structural change stick or fall apart. The past three years have shown how quickly climate policy unwinds when the underlying culture never moved—mandates repealed, agencies cut, commitments dropped, faster than they were created. Without cultural change, structural change risks being temporary at best.

This is a key reason why cultural factors are so often overlooked. Not that people think them unimportant, but that they rarely show up with our conventional tools or metrics. What cannot be measured, in effect, does not get resourced, let alone managed.

Sustainability is not a single culture

The sector often thinks of itself as a single movement or community, and that habit hides something important. Sustainability is not one culture but a contested space in which several sub-cultures interact.

The shared vocabulary often masks that reality. Terms like system change, just transition, net zero, materiality and resilience are used routinely, which makes the field look unified. But these meanings are often not shared. When our 2026 survey respondents say the language is “broken,” I think they are close to the problem—and yet not quite right. The language is not broken—it is overloaded, with at least thirteen different arguments using the same words.

To see the strands, stop asking what people believe and ask what they take to be the basic unit of change: the thing that must shift for anything else to happen. By that measure, the field sorts into at least thirteen tribes, or sub-cultures, each with its own key texts, funders, heroes and typical pitfalls, set out here roughly in order of how deeply each asks the existing order to change:

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Two of these tribes need a bit more explanation, because both are routinely filed under something else.

Post-Growth covers things like degrowth, steady-state economics, aspects of the doughnut economy, sufficiency and wellbeing. The sector often tucks it inside Justice, but you could build a perfectly just economy, commonly owned and regeneratively farmed, and this tribe would still object if it exceeded biophysical limits.

Importantly, it is also the only one of the thirteen that routinely questions the field’s founding premise. The Brundtland Commission’s achievement was the fusion of environment and development, and the Post-Growth movement argues that for rich economies the fusion was a category error.

But perhaps Faith is the larger omission—given it has billions of adherents, a canon far older than sustainability’s, real institutions and extraordinary mobilizing power. Its near-total absence from most secular maps of the field perhaps tells you more about the mapmakers than the territory.

Law, we should note, is deliberately not listed here, though it certainly has its tribal aspects, wigs and all. Litigation may have transformed the landscape—as with ClientEarth, Urgenda, KlimaSeniorinnen, and rights-of-nature statutes—but again it is a set of instruments that several of our thirteen cultures reach for, not a sustainability culture in its own right.

And perhaps the same goes for the planetary boundaries framework: it provides shared arithmetic that all thirteen tribes use to argue with, rather than constituting a fourteenth argument.

Why—if ignored—13 can be an unlucky number

To be clear, the thirteen tribes are not a research finding; this is simply where I stopped counting. But for anyone who does not think like a robot, the number is worth a little superstition.

In the Grimm version of Sleeping Beauty, there were thirteen Wise Women in the kingdom, but the king owned only twelve golden plates. One Wise Woman was not invited—not out of malice, but for want of tableware. She came anyway and cursed the child. That is the downside of taxonomies. We set out the places we have, somebody is left out, and the one left out turns up and undoes the plan.

Ultimately, though, thirteen is unlucky only if you were raised in a particular culture. In Mesoamerica, by contrast, it is sacred. There are thirteen levels to the heavens. But two things follow from all this that tend to matter more than the taxonomy itself.

First, most arguments in the field are misunderstood. They look like disagreements, again, about evidence, timing or strategy, but are really about what counts as a legitimate unit of change—a prior question more data cannot settle. Which is why convenings tend to disappoint: we bring the cultures together, fail to agree, and conclude we need better facilitation when maybe we really need better translation.

Second, nobody is quite where they think they fit in. I've certainly always had that problem. Practitioners routinely hold citizenship in two or three of these cultures without noticing—running a disclosure function all week while believing, privately, that nothing short of changing who owns what will change the system. That is not hypocrisy but the ordinary condition of anyone a decade or more into this work, and it is the raw material for everything that follows.

Why cultural mobility remains a key skill

The ability to move honestly and effectively between different tribal cultures is now necessary because no single tribe or culture, whatever it may claim, has a complete theory of change. Worse, their weaknesses both undermine the coherence of the collective agenda, insofar as there is one, and can slow the pace and scale of wider adoption.

Transformation on the scale that the 2037 Brundtland+50 time horizon requires is not something any single sustainability tribe or culture can achieve on its own. It needs several—or all—of these cultures to align and work together, and it needs people who can carry ideas across them. Pollinators. Waggle Dancers, perhaps.

When cultures meet, the usual reaction is to try to merge them and to seek a consensus everyone can accept. The sustainability sector tried that back in the late 1980s and produced a consensus now being challenged—a vocabulary broad enough to include everyone and weak enough to commit no one.

The evidence suggests that merging often leads to confusion, whereas translation is more likely to lead to progress. The real skill is making an idea from one culture clear and convincing in another without losing its meaning along the way.

Cultural mobility is not a new skill so much as one not yet properly named. For years, my job title was Chief Pollinator, with the aim of creating new forms of hybrid vigor across tribes and cultures, whether they were pro- or anti-sustainability. The tempered radicals and social intrapreneurs I have long interacted with—and written about—live in two cultures simultaneously, trying to carry the goals of one into the language of another.

What has been missing is the recognition that there is a general—and potentially generalizable—skill here, with strong elements of a method. So, it is not simply a personality trait, although it can be that, too. My conclusion is that it can be—and must now be—selected, trained for, recruited and empowered.

We need growing numbers of cross-pollinators able to move between the different sustainability tribes and cultures, however many of them there may be by your count. Critically, they must also be adept at moving between the increasingly scrambled and fractious worlds of sustainability, unsustainability, and anti-sustainability.

How to defragment a movement

And here’s where the going gets tougher. The research findings are both hopeful and challenging. Groups team up when they feel threatened. That works far better than a shared vision—but when the threat fades, the alliance often falls apart.

What holds people together is less shared values than agreement on the problem: how bad it is, what caused it, and what to do. That is why groups who disagree about almost everything else can sometimes work side by side for years.

One thing very rarely happens, however: one group changing another group’s mind. Research on how policy coalitions behave finds that new facts usually harden people’s views rather than shift them. Big change tends to wait for a shock—a crisis, an election, a disaster.

What crosses between groups is not agreement. It is shared things. Researchers call them boundary objects: a number, a target, a picture. Loose enough for each group to use in its own way. Solid enough that everyone knows it is the same thing.

Star and Griesemer called this “cooperation without consensus,” and it has been tested in climate adaptation networks. The 1.5°C target, net zero, the doughnut and the planetary boundaries all work like this. Everyone uses them. Everyone means something slightly different. If we are lucky, the coordination happens anyway.

Two more findings are worth mentioning here. People will join a bigger effort if they can stay themselves while doing it. Merging everyone into one movement usually backfires, especially for smaller groups, who tend to feel swallowed. And whether a group joins at all depends less on how good the meeting is than on whether someone they already trust is in the room.

A practical rule follows. Groups that disagree deeply can still team up on one issue, for a while. Lasting alliances need much more in common. So, there is a choice to make: a wide alliance that stays shallow, or a narrow one that goes deep. Only rarely can we achieve both.

And that’s a proposition I intend to test over the coming 18-24 months with a project on the future of economics. After 50 years of focusing on business, this Rewilding Markets series has tracked my attempts to open out my focus to markets, upstream of business. Now I am extending the focus again to the role of economics—and to ongoing attempts to transform the master discipline of capitalism. More on that shortly.

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Often, there is a pile of flattened cardboard in the recycling blue box by our front door. There is probably one by yours, too. It is the residue of things we ordered, but it is the one thing in the transaction that nobody ever really wanted: not the retailer, who pays for it grudgingly, not the courier, and certainly not us, who now own it, must break it down, and must remember which morning the recycling lorries come—and how much cardboard they will take.

I have been thinking about that pile since coming across the work of the artist Hesham Malik, whose ongoing project Life of a Box does something disarmingly simple. It intercepts cardboard boxes and shipping containers on their way to disposal and refuses to let them disappear.

Environmental mandates from over a hundred cultural institutions, universities and NGOs are physically worked into the surfaces. Malik’s first show opened at the Museum of Papermaking in Duszniki-Zdrój, Poland—a building that has been making paper since the sixteenth century, now hosting work spotlighting the afterlife of the stuff.

Amazon seemed pleased. “Hesham Malik’s beautiful exhibition reimagines recyclable packaging as art,” said Thais Blumer, Head of Sustainable Packaging, Amazon Europe. “At Amazon, the ‘life of a box’ has truly transformed over the past few years—evolving beyond traditional six-sided corrugated boxes into paper bags and slim cardboard envelopes. Today, as a result of our packaging reduction efforts, more than half of our European shipments now come in reduced, recyclable delivery packaging, or in the case of 1 billion shipments since 2019, no added packaging at all.”

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Cardboard boxes gain an afterlife

As Malik’s own website puts it:

Life of a Box is an expansive, multi-sector intervention initiated by artist Hesham Malik that investigates the trans-continental movement of materials and their psychological and social resonance. Operating under the patronage of the Ministry of the Environment of the Czech Republic, the project utilizes the humble shipping container—the industrial cardboard box—as a site of radical transformation, moving it from the periphery of global logistics to the center of cultural discourse.

Malik intercepts the “vessels” of our global economy, subjecting them to an aesthetic “rebirth” informed by the specific values of the contributing partners. By synthesizing materials and sustainability mandates from high-context entities—ranging from the Nobel Prize Museum to the National Museum of the History of Ukraine—Malik challenges the ontology of the artifact. Each box is no longer waste; it is a repository of institutional memory and a testament to global environmental stewardship.

And just in case anyone is fretting about greenhouse gas emssions from shipping around all those saved boxes, Malik explained to me:

Once an institution agrees to participate, rather than having them ship a physical box across borders—which would increase the carbon footprint—I save an abandoned cardboard box locally on their behalf. Once transformed into an artwork and displayed in a museum, the piece’s description highlights that specific institution’s sustainability vision, commitments, and future goals.

However you look at it, this is art that could make some of us look differently at the thing we were about to slice up and flatten. And it’s not a bad description of what I think markets must now learn how to do. But first, let’s unpack a boxy cliché that has been doing the rounds for at least half a century.

A cliché that isn’t entirely true

Here’s the phrase that everyone still reaches for when it comes to innovation. “Think outside the box” comes from the nine-dot puzzle—nine dots in a square, connect them with four straight lines without lifting the pen—which arrived in management consultancy in the 1970s as a parable about self-imposed constraint. You fail, the story goes, because you assume the lines must stay inside the square. Free your mind, escape the box, innovate.

The awkward finding is that this does not appear to be totally true. When researchers explicitly told subjects that the solution required going outside the square, the improvement was so small it was statistically insignificant. The puzzle is simply hard. So perhaps the most quoted metaphor in the innovation industry rests on an experimental result that does not replicate the way we might expect.

I find that liberating rather than deflating, because it clears space for the opposite proposition—one that has been implicit in everything I have written here about rewilding markets. Creativity does not come from escaping the box. It comes from where and how we choose to draw the box.

Consider the most consequential piece of business innovation of the twentieth century. It was not a technology. It was a box. Marc Levinson’s The Box tells the story of how a standardized steel container reorganised the world economy—and the genius was not in transcending the container but in agreeing on it: fixed dimensions, fixed corner castings, no exceptions. Globalization ran on a constraint that somebody had the nerve to impose.

A law against shipping air

And here is why I think that the cardboard box is worth an essay rather than just a footnote. Almost every externality we argue about is invisible and distant. Carbon is a gas. Microplastic is a particle. Soil loss happens on someone else’s land, over a timescale longer than a fiscal year. The abstraction is precisely what lets markets ignore them, most of the time.

The box is an exception. It is an unpriced by-product of a transaction, hand-delivered to the person who did not create it, often with a smile printed on the side. The cost is real—your time, your storage, your municipal collection budget—but until very recently it appeared in nobody’s accounts. Industry estimates put e-commerce packaging waste at about 4.8 times what a physical shop generates per order, with typical parcels running 40–60% empty.

The highly inconvenient truth is that industry has been shipping air and pointing to the resulting mountain as a consumer behavior problem.

Then, on 12 August 2026—and largely unremarked outside the packaging trade press—the empty-space provisions of the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (or PPWR) became applicable. E-commerce parcels sold into the EU may now contain no more than 40% empty space, with air cushions, bubble wrap and foam counting towards the void rather than excusing it. The threshold tightens later, penalties run to six figures per violation in some member states, and the rule applies to anyone selling into the bloc regardless of where they pack.

Quite literally, a law against shipping air.

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Innovation loves constraint

In the UK, the same logic arrives through price rather than dimension. Packaging extended producer responsibility now charges producers around £196 a tonne for paper and card and £461 a tonne for fibre-based composites, with fees modulated by recyclability—cheap if the material genuinely comes back, expensive if it does not.

Neither measure asks anyone to think outside the box. Both aim to redraw it. And redrawing it does what three decades of exhortation did not: it makes packaging engineers into inventors, because the constraint is now surfacing as an intense market pressure.

This is a striking example of what I mean by rewilding markets. A market ecosystem is not creative because it is unconstrained. It is inventive precisely because it is disciplined in many different ways—fixed energy budgets, closed nutrient cycles, increasing costs for landfill. Rewilding a market is not about removing boundaries. It involves imposing smarter ones.

Innovation, as they say, loves constraint.

RePack: a cautionary tale

Before this becomes too one-sided, however, let’s consider a counter-story. On 1 July 2026, RePack closed its reusable packaging service for fashion e-commerce after more than a decade. This was a genuine case of out-of-the-box thinking: a package that goes back, gets refurbished, and goes out again, cutting packaging emissions by up to 80%. It worked, but it died anyway.

Read their own post-mortem, and you get a near-perfect anatomy of an unrewilded market. A full reuse loop costs roughly ten times a single-use bag because the single-use bag doesn't carry the costs of its own disposal.

Offered as a checkbox at someone else’s checkout, uptake ranged from 33% to under 1%. You can’t scale a system, RePack observed, when the decision to use it is embedded in another company’s user interface. And the EU’s PPWR’s proposed reuse targets for e-commerce, which would have changed the arithmetic overnight, ended up excluding bags and boxes after intense industry lobbying—that is, excluding roughly 99.9% of the category.

The real issue for RePack was that they were trying to run a circular service on top of a linear system. This is an issue I spotlighted last week in a post on the work of Rana Hajirasouli’s The Surpluss.

Provocation or tokenism?

One more thing. Part of Malik’s box work was made from Amazon packaging, exhibited with Amazon’s own head of sustainable packaging quoted alongside the artist, noting how much material the company has designed out. The claim is likely true. And yet: this is art that makes an externality visible, but which was co-presented by the externality’s largest single producer.

Thought-provoking, to put it mildly. No, I don’t think that this invalidates the work; in fact, it justifies it. But it is worth naming the pattern, because it is the one to watch during any transition: the innovation that gets adopted precisely to the extent that it does not disturb the system it was meant to change.

Our test, in the end, should be simple. Are we seeing a powerful and potentially market-moving provocation or some sort of tokenism? It is no longer just a matter of whether we can think outside the box, but of whether we think about the need for and design of boxes at every level of our market strategies.

For anyone wanting to see the transformed box artworks in the flesh, or at least cardboard, they are currently on display at the Museum of Ecclesiastical Art in Pilsen (part of the Museum of West Bohemia).

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John Elkington: Rana, I was delighted to meet you at the 2025 Rothschild 3Space event, and was hugely taken by your ongoing work with The Surpluss. I was also struck by your thinking on what you call resource intelligence to achieve resource security. But more of that in a moment…

First, where do you see the overlaps between what we’re both doing?

Rana Hajirasouli: I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Rewilding Markets, and in the process, something struck me. I’ve been working with a parallel metaphor independently, in my LinkedIn blog. It begins with the Archimedes Palimpsest: the idea that industrial systems are like overwritten manuscripts. The original operational knowledge is still there, faintly, underneath, but institutions have lost the ability to read it. Your Pacific wayfinding piece arrived at something very close from a completely different direction.

What stopped me was the bit about Lehua Kamalu. That whole wayfinding tradition nearly disappeared, and it had nothing to do with the knowledge being out of date. It worked. It still works. The problem was that it lived in people, and when those people went, it went with them.

John: And how does this link back to your ongoing work?

Rana: The problem I work on is the industrial version of exactly that. Across the industrial economy, institutions are quietly losing the ability to remember what they hold, and I don’t mean in any simple record-keeping sense, but in the deeper sense of that felt, inhabited knowledge of what a system actually contains, how it behaves under stress, and what it is genuinely capable of.

That kind of knowledge was never really stored anywhere. It was lived, carried in the heads and hands of people who had worked the same plant or port or process for decades, and when those people leave, as they now are in great waves, it does not archive itself behind them. It simply thins out and disappears, and the institution is left holding a description of itself that no longer corresponds to anything real.

John: Some people, presumably, would now see AI as the answer to that conundrum…

Rana: True. And what makes all of this so urgent, it seems to me, is that we are now deploying AI into precisely that gap, and at remarkable speed, on the comfortable assumption that these systems will somehow restore the sensing capacity that institutions have lost.

But the AI being introduced into industrial settings is not inheriting operational knowledge at all. It is inheriting whatever records happen to remain, records that have themselves drifted ever further from the physical reality they were once meant to describe.

So rather than resurrecting our institutions, I suspect that in many cases we are simply accelerating their amnesia and doing so far more efficiently than before.

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John: So where might we look for answers?

Rana: I find myself turning, as I so often do, to nature for a better model. In a forest, the mycelial network is how the whole system comes to know itself, quietly circulating nutrients, distress signals and information about what is available and where, long before any individual tree could be said to act on any of it.

Industrial institutions once possessed something remarkably similar in their tacit, relational, deeply human knowledge, and like the mycelium when the soil around it is disturbed, that knowledge does not decline in any slow or graceful way. It vanishes, and the system loses its capacity to sense itself at all.

That, to my mind, is the real rewilding challenge at the institutional level, and I increasingly think it is the conversation that must happen before the market conversation can even properly begin.

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John: You’re doing a PhD at Cambridge. How’s that going—and is there a formal academic discipline into which all this fits?

Rana: Wonderfully non-linear. I recently fell down a rabbit hole involving planarian worms: cut one in half and it can regenerate an entire body, even a new brain. Some contested research suggests it may retain learned memory, which is either extraordinary biology or the perfect defence-industrial question: if an industrial system is severed, can it remember how to rebuild itself at the speed a crisis demands?

Formally, it sits between manufacturing, industrial systems/resilience and economic security, but I suspect “capacity intelligence” will become a field in its own right. Governments can count factories, suppliers and machines and still not know whether they could repair a grid, replenish munitions, manufacture critical medicines or even natural capital under pressure. That gap, between what appears to exist and what can actually be mobilized, is what I’m studying.

And where do you see the links between our different areas, John?

John: The links? Everywhere. What strikes me is that we seem to have walked into the same clearing from opposite sides of the forest. I came at this from the outside in—from markets, from incentives, from the machinery of capitalism and how we might redesign them. You have come at it from the inside out—from what institutions know and are unconsciously forgetting.

Strikingly, we have both ended up reaching for the same vocabulary, including mycelium, nutrient cycles, palimpsests, and wayfinding. I suspect this is no coincidence. Maybe it’s what happens when you stop treating the economy as a machine to be optimized and start seeing it as a living system that must sense, remember and adapt—or die.

And what’s your best hope for The Surpluss as we move toward and into the 2030s?

Rana: My hunch is that, by the 2030s, companies will be far less self-contained. AI agents will coordinate work across shifting networks of suppliers, contractors and machines. Organizations will own less of what they depend on. And competitive advantage will shift from possession to provability.

Trust will therefore have to travel across the entire network rather than stop at the company boundary. My hope is that The Surpluss becomes the independent evidence layer that tells those systems what is real, available and trustworthy before they act.

John: Oh dear, that has set a thought stream running! Throughout my working life, I have seen businesses and other organizations gain new understanding, insights, connections and skills, only to then see them erode when new leadership downgraded their perceived value—or key people exited.

I see your approach becoming essential in safeguarding critical organizational infrastructure, both technological and, to a degree, cultural. And I particularly like the idea of industrial palimpsests, with layers of industrial activity superimposed on each other. Entire economies are now like that—and as we bend them toward goals like decarbonization, we will need to devote increasing effort to understanding the flaws and vulnerabilities of the foundations on which we’re building and rebuilding.

Love Canal was a spectacular American version of wilful amnesia—with housing and a school built on top of an abandoned chemical dump. Or, more recently, we had Flint, where a new water source with different chemistry stripped the protective scale off old lead pipes. The new layer was fine, the old layer was fine, but the interface was catastrophic. Then there was the case of power transmission lines built for a wetter climate becoming ignition sources—sparking the Camp Fire disaster that drove California’s PG&E into bankruptcy.

As for the UK, a case I was intimately involved in concerned asbestos and pollution claims surfacing in the 1990s, claims that nearly destroyed Lloyd’s of London. We see dumped munitions in the Baltic and North Sea sitting exactly where offshore wind farms and interconnectors want to run cables. And then there are the nitrate “time bombs” moving through chalk aquifers, with a 30–to–50 year lag.

These are all market failures driven by time lags. The impact arrives well past any horizon that the original actors optimized for. So how do we keep liabilities attached to an asset across generations and through ownership changes, when every incentive is to strip them off before they mature? Think about the mental health care problems triggered by social media platforms that are then acquired.

I believe that you are onto something really important here, Rana. So, yes, we must ask ourselves how organizations can best ward off amnesia or even dementia, but we also need to know how markets can do likewise?

Please do keep us posted, both through your LinkedIn blog and in other ways.

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Some of the best conversations, I find, start with a confession.

And a few weeks ago, not long after I had spoken at a pioneering business-and-nature conference in Norway—the one held in an Oslo church with real grass carpeting the floor—an email arrived from someone I had met there. Ingrid Lomelde, head of sustainability at Hafslund, the 130-year-old, Oslo-owned renewables giant, wrote to say she had been reading my book Tickling Sharks while travelling in Vietnam. All the while “battling with a little conundrum” of her own.

To her Norwegian friends and circles, she confessed, the conundrum would seem odd, or simply not relevant. Might she, if she came to London, buy me a cup of tea and talk it through?

I was intrigued. And the conundrum turned out to be one of the most consequential questions in business today, even if it is rarely put so plainly: how do you recruit, induct, enable and—hardest of all—retain the radical spirits needed to drive the necessary scale and pace of change in business?

By radicals I mean the people the literature has variously christened tempered radicals, positive deviants and social intrapreneurs: the bright, committed young people who walk into a corporation wanting to bend it toward something better, but who then discover just how much the corporation wants to bend them back.

The age-old proverb says you cannot put new wine into old bottles—the ongoing fermentation bursts the bottles, or skins, and the wine is lost. Ingrid’s conundrum, and mine, is whether that proverb must always be true. If we are serious about rewilding markets, we will need an awful lot of new wine, and most of our corporate and institutional bottles are very old indeed.

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The Oslo five

Once Ingrid and I started teasing this issue apart, we found ourselves sketching a rough field guide to what happens to those idealistic new entrants.

Some stayed a year or two and then left to “open yoga studios.” There were the ones who burned out, damaging their health, physical or mental, on the altar of their own commitment. The ones who worked stolidly toward a pension, deferring their idealism to a volunteering retirement. The ones who curdled into cynicism and hunkered down to serve out their sentence. And the ones who concluded the whole system was irredeemable and left to build their own solutions-oriented enterprises.

Five folk-types, scribbled on the back of our metaphorical napkin. The obvious next question—has anyone studied this properly?—sent me, as these questions increasingly do, into an extended conversation with Claude, Anthropic’s AI. I have come to treat these exchanges less as look-ups than as interactions with a virtual thinking partner. I sent the whole transcript to Ingrid.

What came back reframed my five amateur sketches as recognisable citizens of a surprisingly crowded scholarly world.

Hippies on the third floor

The oldest and most encompassing lens turns out to be Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), later extended by Caryl Rusbult and Dan Farrell into a four-way model with Neglect added—EVLN, for short.

Almost every one of our Oslo five involves one of these four responses to dissatisfaction. The yoga-studio founders and the build-my-own-enterprise rebels are both Exit, differing only in whether they exit toward an alternative life or a rival solution. The pension-servers are Loyalty. The cynics hunkering down are textbook Neglect. And the ones who stay and push are Voice.

That single insight did something rather marvellous. It told us our napkin taxonomy was not just an anecdote but a local dialect of a canonical framework—and it also flagged a type of change agent that our folk-list had under-weighted.

The people who neither leave nor go sour, but negotiate a lifelong tension inside the organisation, are precisely Debra Meyerson and Maureen Scully’s tempered radicals (dating back to 1995): those who want to succeed in an institution while staying true to values at odds with its dominant culture, living with permanent ambivalence, forever choosing between the small win and the open confrontation.

The sustainability field has its own, more specific overlays. Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg’s wonderfully titled “Hippies on the Third Floor” (2012) gives corporate environmental managers three working identities: the green change agent, the passionate internal transformer; the rational manager, who reframes everything as the business case and quietly downplays the green motive; and the committed activist, who will sacrifice their career or walk out when their values are breached.

A 2023 study by Fontana, Frandsen and Morsing then added the dimension that should give every one of us pause—time. Tracking practitioners across their careers, it documents a drift from activistic purpose (”make a difference”) through win-win compromise to corporate purpose—idealism, in other words, being slowly metabolized.

And a 2025 paper, “Champion, Activist or Intrapreneur?”, offered exactly the named typology the field had been missing, sorting change agents along axes of intention, seniority and whether they hold a formal sustainability role.

At which point I pressed send on an email to Ingrid.

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A first turn of the screw

Her reply, when it came, contained the move that turned a literature review into something alive. She did not start with the natural human thing, asking which type she was. Instead, she asked whether the types might all live within us, surfacing to varying degrees depending on the circumstances we find ourselves in.

She recognized herself, she said, simultaneously in the change agent, the rational manager and the committed activist brackets—and admitted she rather hoped the time-dimension model was wrong, because she had no wish to watch her own sense of purpose being metabolized on schedule.

She spoke of her “swarming head,” a phrase that I have not been able to get out of my own mind since. Perhaps the useful unit of analysis is not the person-as-type but the mind as a small swarm of possible responses—exit, voice, loyalty, neglect; hippie, rational manager, activist—with the environment deciding which of them takes the controls on any given day.

If that is borderline right, then retaining radicals is less about hiring the right personalities and more about engineering the conditions under which the radical response, rather than the cynical or the departing ones, surfaces routinely.

Retention is not a fixed property of the hire; it is an emergent property of whether the organization keeps its radicals inside the circle of trust or slowly, often unthinkingly, pushes them to its edge.

What the group does to the swarm

Ingrid then did something I should have expected from a systems thinker. She took the whole picture into her own conversation with Claude and added one more variable: the group. What happens, she asked, if you drop these individual response types into the classic negotiation game — the one where two teams can each grab a bigger slice by defecting, or grow the whole pie by cooperating, with rounds of talks in between?

The research here fits well, but comes with a warning. The headline finding is called the interindividual–intergroup discontinuity effect: groups negotiating with other groups behave far more competitively than individuals negotiating with individuals. It has held up under meta-analysis and across cultures.

Two things are usually blamed: fear of the other group, and greed that your own group makes acceptable. And here is the cruellest detail for anyone running a corporate change programme — accountability makes it worse. Having to answer to your own team switches on a loyalty norm that pushes you to play harder against everyone else. Which is exactly what happens every time a task force reports back to its home department.

The bridge concept, Claude suggested to Ingrid, is parochial altruism (Choi and Bowles, 2007). The same loyalty that holds a group together also permits hostility toward outsiders. So loyalty is not one thing but two: how much you value your own people, and, separately, how much you want them to beat everyone else.

That second half turns cooperators into defectors. Hirschman’s exit has an almost literal equivalent in the game theorists’ loner strategy, where you can take a guaranteed opt-out payoff instead of playing. And just as Hirschman argued, an easy exit quietly removes the pressure that would otherwise force people to make Voice work.

Ingrid ended her message with the thought experiment that has bothered me ever since: what if most of the natural cooperators eventually leave to become yoga teachers?

In the cold logic of the game, the answer is that defecting only ever paid because there were cooperators to exploit. Take them away, and you are left with defectors grinding against each other in a zero-trust equilibrium — every interaction falling back to contracts, monitoring and short-termism, because nobody can credibly signal goodwill any more.

The winners then discover that their winning move only worked while someone else was still playing to win together. And the yoga studios, she noted drily, would be the last pocket of real cooperation left in the economy.

An Oslo-London synthesis

Put the three layers together and something that deserves to be more than an anecdote comes into view. First, take Hirschman’s EVLN as the skeleton—the four irreducible ways a committed person can respond to a values-gap. Then hang the sustainability-specific identities on it as the flesh: the change agent and the tempered radical as forms of voice; the rational manager as a survival strategy that can slide either into loyal accommodation or quiet neglect; and the committed activist as voice with one foot already in exit.

Then add the dimension neither Hirschman nor the sustainability scholars fully modelled—whether, in any given moment, the person feels themselves to be in an in-group or an out-group within their own organization.

That third axis decides which response prevails. The very same individual—Ingrid’s point about the swarm made structural—will play Voice when she feels part of a trusted in-group and play Exit or Defection when she feels cast as the out-group, the lone sustainability nag on a leadership team optimizing for something else.

Again, retention is not a fixed property of the hire; it is an emergent property of whether the organization can keep its radicals inside the circle of trust or slowly, often unthinkingly, pushes them to its edge. Metabolize a person’s sense of belonging, and you metabolize their purpose soon after.

Retention is not a fixed property of the hire; it is an emergent property of whether the organisation keeps its radicals inside the circle of trust or slowly, often unthinkingly, pushes them to its edge.

New wine, and how not to spill it

Which brings us back to those proverbial bottles. The conventional wisdom that new wine bursts old skins is really a claim about brittleness—that established organizations cannot flex enough to hold radical commitment without one or the other being destroyed.

Our Oslo-London synthesis suggests where the flex must happen, and it is not where most retention programmes look.

First, stop building accountability structures that reward tribal defection and then wondering why your change agents go feral or leave. If reporting back to the mothership activates the in-group norm that licenses hostility, then the design task is to widen the in-group until the “other team” is no longer a rival department but part of the answer to a shared problem.

Second, take Voice seriously as infrastructure, not sentiment: the pre-play communication that lets cooperators find each other is one of the most robust levers we have for keeping cooperation alive, and most organizations starve it, whether or not they intend to do so.

Third, treat the metabolizing of purpose as an occupational hazard to be actively resisted, not an inevitability to be mourned—because a firm that lets its idealists drift from “make a difference” to “win-win” to whatever the quarter needs has quietly converted its new wine into vinegar while calling it maturity.

At least one other thread is worth pulling here, because it runs through this whole story. Ingrid and I built none of this alone, and neither did we build it only with each other. We each thought it through in dialogue with an AI, swapped the transcripts across the North Sea, and let the machine’s swarm of references argue with our human swarm of intuitions.

That, too, is new wine—a way of thinking together, at a distance, with a third party in the conversation which has read more of the literature than either of us ever will. It is worth saying plainly, both because the ideas above are genuinely co-authored and because the method is part of the point: rewilding markets will be done by hybrids of human judgement and machine breadth, tempered radicals and their tireless research assistants alike.

Ultimately, a rewilded market will be one that can hold its radicals rather than expelling or digesting them—because the natural cooperators, the ones who still believe the pie can grow, are the very people who keep the whole system’s transaction costs low enough to function. Lose them and trust collapses into monitoring, and the market reverts to the grinding, defect-against-everyone equilibrium we are supposedly trying to escape.

New wine, it seems, is not the problem. The old corporate and institutional bottles will simply have to learn how to cope with the new physics, chemistry, biology, sociology and, critically, politics. In the same way that we now discover that retroviruses spurred ancient fish species onto the path to higher intelligence, so every corporate incumbent today needs an urgent, sustained and well managed infusion of insurgent DNA to succeed in tomorrow’s markets.

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In writing our 2037 Green Paper for launch in October, I have been toying with the future of language. It surfaced as an issue in early results from our 2026 Routes to Transformation survey with GlobeScan and ERM, just completed. And every definition of the S-word, sustainability, reveals two things: what seemed most scarce at the time and who was shaping the conversation.

In 1987, Gro Harlem Brundtland and her commissioners laid the foundations of the modern conversation, focusing on both time and ethics. Our Common Future defined sustainable development as meeting present needs without limiting future generations. At its core, it was a moral claim about debt: the idea that the unborn have rights, and that we are quietly borrowing from them.

By 1994, when I introduced the triple bottom line, business leaders were shaping the discussion. The focus became integrating people, planet, and profit within company decisions, encouraging managers to balance all three. This approach made a real difference, giving sustainability a place in boardrooms where it was rarely considered before.

However, as I noted when I called for a ‘product recall‘ of the concept in 2018, the triple-win approach also risked turning into a balancing act—a way for some to justify trading some environmental harm for more profit and then considering the books balanced.

By 2026, terms like circularity, decarbonization, the triple bottom line’s many offshoots, and just transitions show that operators, regulators, and auditors are now shaping the conversation. This is the language of taxonomies, disclosure rules, scope 3 inventories, and assurance statements. It is more rigorous than before, but also more fragile. It is easier to manipulate, easier to become frustrated with, and easier to reverse when political priorities change.

So, instead of simply extending the 2026 checklist, maybe the better question for 2037 is: what will seem most scarce in a decade, and who will be shaping the conversation then?

From sustaining to regenerating

The biggest limitation of the word ‘sustainability’ is in its meaning. To sustain means to hold steady, do less harm, slow the damage, and maintain what we have. That was a worthy goal when we thought the planet was just under pressure. But it is not enough for a world where natural systems are already badly damaged, soils are thinning, and biodiversity is collapsing.

A real reboot in 2037 will focus on regeneration, not just maintenance. It will mean rebuilding natural and social resources instead of just slowing their loss. The goal will be to create a net-positive impact, not just reach net-zero. And in multiple dimensions.

This is more than just changing the words we use. It addresses the main problem in Brundtland’s 1987 idea: you cannot truly help future generations by simply maintaining a depleted world. You can only help by leaving them with more than you received. Regeneration is what real fairness between generations looks like when you do the science.

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From carbon monomania to whole systems

Decarbonization is important, clearly, but it has taken over the conversation. For about ten years, ‘sustainability’ and ‘net zero’ almost meant the same thing, and anything that could not be measured in tons of CO2—like rivers, wetlands, pollinators, or communities—had trouble getting attention and finding funding.

By 2037, a more balanced approach will treat carbon as just one part of the picture and bring other planetary boundaries back into focus, like biodiversity, freshwater, nutrient cycles, and the health of the biosphere. The main question will shift from ‘how much carbon?’ to ‘how much life?’

This is the most important change for anyone thinking about markets, and it will likely decide whether 2037 brings real progress or steps backward.

Today, sustainability is still largely separate from the market. It is an extra layer of reporting added after value is created, describing harms that prices do not reflect. In a way, every disclosure rule admits failure, because we measure these outside effects only when we have not included them in the system.

Sustainability will have truly succeeded when its impact is fully included in prices. This will happen when true-cost and impact-weighted accounting become standard financial tools, not just experiments. When the cost of harming a watershed or workforce is reflected in capital costs, taxes, and balance sheets, externalities will be built into the system instead of just reported after the fact.

This is what it means to rewild a market: connecting prices to real consequences, so that the feedback that shapes every part of a business finally includes the effects on the natural world.

Here is the paradox: when something truly becomes mainstream, it no longer needs a special name. Think of total quality management, or TQM, which was widely discussed until it became standard practice and faded from view. Or ‘e-business,’ a huge topic for about a decade, until all business became digital and the term largely disappeared.

Now, ‘sustainability’ may be on the same path—not because it failed, but because it succeeded so well that it became part of what we mean by ‘business’ and ‘market.’ Becoming mainstream and becoming invisible are really the same thing. The best outcome for the word is for it to become unnecessary.

From up-curves to down-curves

There is one more change to consider, however, and it is often stressed in transition studies but overlooked in discussions about disruption. A transition is not just about building something new; it is also about breaking down, phasing out, and carefully dismantling what came before. Markets are very good at speeding up the new, but almost comically bad at letting go of the old thoughtfully.

A mature version of sustainability in 2037 would be better balanced. It would focus just as much on respectfully winding down existing systems—through managed decline, exnovation, or what some call ‘hospicing’ a dying order—as it would on speeding up clean alternatives.

This is where just transition becomes central, not just an afterthought to decarbonization. The decline of old systems is where jobs are lost, legitimacy is tested, and backlash can grow.

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A darker future: capture

It would be unrealistic to stop there, though, because ‘going mainstream’ can also have a darker side—which is just as likely to occur as the more hopeful ones. Mainstream can also mean being captured. It can mean sustainability is reduced to a compliance routine, a label on letterheads and in job titles, while the real meaning is lost.

The same forces that could help include externalities in the system can also take over the tools that measure them, turning disclosure into a performance and ‘transition’ into a way for the old system to continue with a greener image. When a movement becomes mainstream, it also becomes a target for co-opting.

So, in our increasingly complex world, 2037 seems to offer two possible futures, and current trends do not yet help us decide between them in terms of greatest likelihood. In one, the word disappears because it has succeeded, becoming so much a part of markets and law that we no longer need to mention it. In the other, the word survives because it has failed, kept as a comforting label over an unchanged system.

If I had to compress all of this into one sentence each for yesterday, today and tomorrow, it would be: in 1987 sustainability meant not stealing from the future; by 2026 it means carefully measuring how much we steal; and by 2037, if the agenda is rebooted rather than captured, it will mean running markets that quietly pay the future back—at which point, having finally done its job, the word may no longer be needed at all.

That outcome, as an aside, still seems wildly unlikely to me. A hundred years from now, I think people will still talk about sustainability much as they talk about civility, liberty, and democracy today. But we’ll see.

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There is a weird form of vertigo you feel when standing seven metres below the pavements of the City of London. Not the vertigo of height, which I have suffered all my life, but its inverse: the ground opening downward through time, floor after floor, each one representing a century or two, until you find yourself in the third century AD while the twenty-first roars overhead, not just muffled but unheard.

Last week I went looking for precisely that experience, taking Gaia with me—our eldest daughter, who carries the name of the living Earth, and who walked with me through the streets of London and thence down through the dead layers of our home city.

As we progressed, a Paul Simon song sounded in my brain, exactly forty years old. Graceland. In it, “the Mississippi Delta was shining like a national guitar.” The song explained: “I’m going to Graceland, Graceland/Memphis, Tennessee.” And then: “My traveling companion is nine years old/He is the child of my first marriage/But I’ve reason to believe/We both will be received/In Graceland.”

Simon spoke of pilgrims with their families—and now here we were, pilgrims through time, peeling back layers of Earth, looking for evidence of where our world came from. Searching for a long-lost deity, just as Simon was in pursuit of an early god of rock’n’roll, Elvis Presley.

We were looking for Mithras. And just as Elvis had his roots, so did Mithras, based on the Persian deity Mithra, god of the sun, justice, contract and war. Now, descending in pursuit of an all-male cult that attracted Roman soldiers, government officials, merchants and freed slaves, the long-ago city planner in me reflected that all great settlements rise like this, layer upon layer, each age building on the flattened remains of the last.

As they rise, they unthinkingly bury the evidence of our part—all that labour, love, waste, and violence stomped down into the foundations of the next generation of buildings, roads and open spaces. London has done it as energetically as any city on Earth, which is why it is such a good place to look for what time has buried. I recalled the bomb found just feet from our London kitchen, dating back to the Blitz, the WWII one.

Entering the London Mithraeum, or rediscovered temple of Mithras, we probed the foundations of the local HQ of a company whose whole business revolves around the market—where the Bull is celebrated, the Bear feared. And the Beaver, of which more later, is generally ignored.

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Worshipped above, slaughtered below

Seven metres beneath the building’s foundations, restored to roughly where it stood around AD 240, lies this local Roman temple to Mithras, the bull-slaying god. The cult’s defining image, carved on every altar, shows Mithras driving a knife into a sacred bull—which would then, it was said, turn into the Moon.

So, you muse, the bull is worshipped above—and slaughtered below. And a financial nervous system that moves prices around the planet at the speed of light thrums directly over a windowless cave where soldiers and merchants once made their way through seven secret grades of initiation, sharing their ritual meals in the dark.

The temple first emerged into our world in 1954, when archaeologist W.F. Grimes was picking through a WWII bomb site on the buried course of the Walbrook, another lost river that still runs somewhere beneath the pavements. On the dig’s last day, a marble head of the god surfaced, and the story, you might say, detonated.

Tens of thousands of Londoners soon queued in the rubble to see it—a pilgrimage to a religion unpractised for sixteen hundred years. Then, in an act that now looks like vandalism, the ruins were lifted, trucked a hundred meters away, and reassembled in 1962 on a concrete podium—imagine flat-pack furniture built without the instructions.

This is the other half of the pattern: if cities bury the past, it is often new buildings that keep dragging it back up. When Bloomberg bought the site in 2010, as a condition for the new building, they had to put the temple right. It has now been returned close to where it began, seven metres down, and staged as an “experience”—low haze, chanted voices, cones of light rising and falling to sketch walls no longer there.

Beautifully done, but unmistakably a staging, the original smells edited out. The reality the Romans knew was the dank odor of damp, bodies, smoke and blood, plus the reek of a sacrificed bull. What we got was a stage-managed atmosphere, curated for tourists and Londoners between meetings.

A Roman IOU

And here’s a detail that snagged my memory. When they dug into the site, the archaeologists also pulled more than four hundred Roman writing tablets from the wet mud of the Walbrook—the oldest handwritten documents ever found in Britain.

Among them is the earliest dated financial document in the country: a note from 8 January, AD 57, one Roman promising to repay another a sum of money—an IOU.

The oldest written reference to London by name—Londinio—was also found in that same hoard.

So directly beneath the headquarters of a company that sells the world its financial data, someone had buried, and the mud had preserved, the first surviving London debt.

When Benjamin Franklin observed that the constants of life were death and taxes, he should perhaps have added credit and debt to his list.

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Executed for sport

Next, on a whim, we walked north to the Guildhall. For the best part of a millennium, this has been a seat of civic authority. The medieval great hall, still standing after the Great Fire gutted it in 1666 and the Blitz burned it again in 1940, is the ceremonial heart of the City of London Corporation, a curious self-governing enclave whose autonomy, wealth and unbroken traditions predate Parliament itself.

This has always been the place where the City weighs its trade. As far back as 1640, the rules of the London hat trade required that any faulty or deceptive beaver hats be seized and carried directly to the Guildhall, to be judged by a jury. And directly beneath this monument to commerce and power we plumbed the depths again, this time into the ruins of London’s Roman amphitheatre.

It was built around AD 70, not long after Boudica had burned the young town flat. Some seven thousand people (at a time when the city’s entire population was between 20,000 and 30,000) could pack the banks around the amphitheater’s oval shape to watch gladiators, wild animals, and alleged criminals killed for sport.

The structure was lost so completely that historians spent a century arguing about whether London ever had an amphitheater, until it turned up by accident in 1988—when they were digging the foundations for a new gallery.

When you descend into the dim, cool room and turn onto a walkway above the actual stone thresholds and timber drains, worn black with age, green fibre-optic light throws the silhouettes of a phantom crowd onto the walls around you. The space marks a lost reality rather than reconjuring it.

Our nano-pilgrimage

Up in Guildhall Yard, back in the daylight, a curved line of dark stone is set into the paving to trace the original arena wall—drawn deliberately on the surface, so that the thousands crossing the square each day walk the rim of a killing ground, most of them completely unaware.

Still, I love it that our home city has reached this accommodation with deep time—with shining glass and steel towers soaring directly over the ruinous echoes of other ages, neither quite cancelling the other. Our nano-pilgrimage—down through the levels and the epochs and then back up into the daylight—felt like something that should be part of any modern education, for each and every age group.

Which is why I keep coming back to the framing of rewilding markets—and to the market role of the beaver. Both as a symbol and an environmental engineer. If the bull and the bear are the big beasts symbolizing the market’s rise and fall, the beaver should be our emblem of a third possibility: the regenerative economy. The keystone animal that does not merely take from a system but rebuilds it, bringing whole landscapes back into life.

The beaver, whose pelt those Guildhall juries once weighed, was hunted out of Britain’s rivers. And the global trade in its fur pushed the species to the edge of extinction across two continents—a buried cost if ever there was one. Now it is being let back, dam by dam, in probably the most powerful act of rewilding we know.

As you walk today’s city, you see occasional evidence that London’s wealth was built partly on two trades in the bodies of the living. From 1672 the Royal African Company, chartered and directed from within the City, shipped hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic—some branded with its initials—making London England’s first great slaving port, before Bristol and Liverpool.

Golden beaver spinning in wind

The beaver trade ran on the same logic, with the Hudson’s Bay Company draining North America of its beavers for Europe’s hats. Yet only one is openly monumentalized: a golden beaver still turns as a weathervane above the company’s old Beaver House in Bishopsgate.

Our markets, too, involve magnificent surface architecture built on buried costs—the carbon, the extraction, the human grief paved over so the experience up top stays cool and frictionless. But buried things, as the Mithraeum and the amphitheater remind us, do not go away. They wait in the wet ground until the diggers come.

Tomorrow’s rewilded markets must be honest enough to keep all relevant costs in full view, both visible and priced. Like the beaver, they must give more than they take. Standing in the dark with Gaia, feeling the weight of all that accumulated time, I was reminded yet again about the historic debts—calculated in currencies like slaves, beaver, trees, whale oil, carbon and forever chemicals—that we remain sublimely unaware of. All the IOUs we chose not to read, understand and honor.

At least to date.

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One comment on my friend Dr Rich Stockdale’s work has stayed with me, and it did not come from him. Robert Griffiths, general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain, looked at the model behind Oxygen Conservation, the “unashamedly capitalist” rewilding business that Stockdale co-founded, and said it “sounds a little like Count Dracula running the blood transfusion service.”

A deadly stab, you might conclude, but it does get to the heart of the issue. Indeed, Stockdale has now written a book that aims to answer the challenge directly. Called Rewilding Wealth, it is subtitled From Extractive Capitalism to Regenerative Returns. In it, Stockdale argues that, if managed well, the so-called vampires might be the only ones with the resources to keep the blood bank operational and full.

Last year, I sat down with Stockdale in the heart of London’s Docklands to film a podcast. We discussed how we were both trying to “rewild” markets so that they pay proper attention to the human, social, and environmental externalities they overlook. His book revolves around exactly the issues we discussed that day. So, I take his approach and business model very seriously indeed, but also conclude that, while they offer real promise, they may also create very real risks.

The promise

Let’s start with his core idea, because it is way more interesting than the communist caricature. His central argument is that nature has been treated by our economies as free, and that anything free gets used up, extracted to exhaustion.

A hillside that stores carbon, filters water, holds back floods and shelters wildlife delivers all that value to all of us, but captures none of it for whoever owns the hill. So, many rational owners drain the peat, graze it hard, and book the returns while they can. The environment loses out because, on the balance sheet, it had no way to win.

Stockdale, in contrast, wants to put that missing value back into the balance sheet. If restored peatland, native woodland, rivers, and other watercourses can generate credits—like carbon, biodiversity, nutrient, or flood mitigation credits—that people are willing to buy, then restoration becomes an investment, not just charity. And he concludes that “Natural capital, on this view, isn’t a new asset class so much as an old one finally being priced correctly.” Importantly, he does not idealize the credits themselves. One of his strongest points is that “carbon markets are not the destination—they’re the financing mechanism.” The real goal is not the market itself, in short, but the ecosystems that the market helps to regenerate and sustain.

And this is more than a theory. Oxygen Conservation, founded in 2021, has built one of the largest natural-capital portfolios in the UK, worth “north of £400 million,” spread across 50,000 acres and 12 estates.

On the Leighon Estate in Devon, for example, Oxygen Conservation sold about a million pounds of carbon credits at £125 a tonne, estimated to be 4.6 times the average European price. The idea is that a credit backed by a truly healthy ecosystem is worth more than one backed only by paperwork and promises.

That extra value sums up the whole approach: when buyers can see quality, they pay more, and that higher price then supports even better results. And the timing is also striking. While ESG investing has become less popular—with the term itself now seen as a negative in some circles—money has been moving into natural capital, which reached $83 billion in assets in 2024.

Stockdale’s own explanation is intriguing: carbon is abstract and easy to criticize, he says, but land is something most people can understand. His practical solution to greenwashing is to focus on infrastructure rather than marketing. He believes trust in these markets will come from government-backed standards, transparent registries, and independent checks—the basic systems that let buyers judge quality for themselves instead of having to rely on sales materials.

His boldest suggestion is that Britain’s real export in this space will not be the credits themselves, but the systems underpinning them: the standards, financial products, and regulations that could help high-quality nature markets evolve and grow worldwide.

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The risks

This is where we need to pause, however, because the objections are not just the usual anti-capitalist reactions that the “Dracula” quote might suggest. If you look past the rhetoric, there seem to be at least three areas of concern.

The first is about who ends up owning the land. Josh Doble of Community Land Scotland has warned that this model risks treating land “as another investable commodity,” deepening a pattern in which “absentee investor landowners own large parts of rural Britain.” This is not a small point in a Scottish or Welsh upland context where land reform and community ownership are hotly contested political questions.

Rewilding financed from elsewhere may restore the ecology of a glen while doing nothing for—or actively working against—the people who live in it. A thriving bog with no local stake in it can be both an ecological success and a democratic problem.

The second concern is about debt and timing. Nature rarely recovers on a bank’s timeline. Peat can take decades to restore, and oak woodlands take generations to mature. But Oxygen told me that the only debt they have is a £20 million funding package from Triodos—and the term of the loan is 25 years.

The third area of concern is perhaps the most important, and it’s one I keep coming back to. To make nature something you can invest in, you must make it measurable—countable, certifiable, and priced. But measurement always leaves some things out. So, for example, a carbon credit measures carbon but does not capture the unique mix of a hedgerow, the cultural meaning of a hillside, or the slow changes of a place over time.

When I raised this issue with Stockdale’s team, they noted that they have estate managers and rangers across every estate, living on or near the estate itself. They also noted that “We host community websites, newsletters, we join council meetings, events and host open days, walks and talks, volunteer events, the list goes on.” They also have a partnership with Campwild to welcome people onto their estates for wild camping. “We facilitate and host over 3000 estate visitors a year, and house 60 tenants across our portfolio.”

Where I land

My overall response to Rewilding Wealth is to cheer on what Oxygen Conservation is doing, while not entirely dismissing the Dracula comparison. Stockdale is doing something his critics are not: putting real money into real restoration at a large scale, while the alternative—waiting for the government to take over—seems unlikely to happen any time soon. Almost 50,000 acres are being restored that otherwise would not be.

Rewilding Wealth should be read not as the final answer to how we regenerate our world, but as a fascinating, personal account of an ambitious effort that deserves our close, ongoing attention. It is one of the most important efforts in Britain to change markets, not just criticize them. If all goes well enough, this so-called vampire might just end up running the blood bank both responsibly and, crucially for his investors, profitably.

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Q&A

At which point I thought I would ask the man himself where he sees all of this headed:

Rich, it’s a great book. Well done. But I know how much effort it can be to write a book. How, in God’s name, did you manage it without taking your eye off the ball of building the portfolio?

Writing is part of my thinking process, not a break from it. I write when I travel, which is a lot, and the writing is how I work out what I believe. It also gives me something to hand the team, our partners and our critics: here’s the thinking, tell me where it’s wrong and how I can improve it. In fact, I’d go further than that. Shaping the collective thinking and then communicating it is the job. If a CEO can’t write down what the company believes, that’s a major problem.

Last year, more than two-thirds of FTSE 100 companies were forced to make changes to their previously reported figures for climate and sustainability metrics, according to the Financial Times. Is measuring and valuing biodiversity and natural capital going to be harder or easier than measuring things like carbon?

It’s harder in theory, but easier in practice—and getting easier fast. Yes, biodiversity is genuinely more complex than carbon. Nature involves thousands of species, relationships and processes that resist being flattened into a single number, and it’s local in a way carbon never is.

But we aren’t measuring it with clipboards. Oxygen Intelligence, our own platform, reads every square meter we own through satellite, drone and LiDAR data, remote sensing and traditional ecological survey. It’s effectively an AI-led world model of our landscapes, and it exists for one reason: to know what is happening on the ground across 50,000 acres and twelve estates, at a resolution that was impossible five years ago.

That’s not a reporting exercise – it’s the proof point. We’ve achieved record prices for carbon and biodiversity net gain, because we could evidence every part of the process.

So yes, it’s a challenge. But it’s also easier than it has ever been in our lifetime, and the gap between what you can measure and what you can prove is closing quickly. That’s the subject of my third book, Natural Intelligence, due out in December 2026!

Do you see the risks the same way any critics might?

I’m sure we see far more risks than our critics do. We just don’t see them for the same reason. If you’re looking for reasons a model shouldn’t work, you’ll find them, and they’ll conveniently confirm the world you already believed in.

We look for risk because we have capital at stake and land under management. We take a heavily data-informed approach to identifying, managing and valuing risk. Understood risk is priced risk, and priced risk is an advantage.

You talk about your approach being simple to explain, but punishingly hard to put into practice. And you also talk about “learning out loud,” something I think I do, too. How does that work for you?

Wonderfully well, and I reserve the right to change my mind about that tomorrow!

Learning out loud means publishing the thinking before it’s finished, which is uncomfortable and useful in roughly equal measure. You get corrected faster. You find out which of your ideas only work inside your head. And you attract the people who want to argue with you properly, which is worth considerably more than the people who agree.

The cost is that you’re on record. I challenge how I think and how I work constantly, so some of what I’ve written will look wrong in the weeks, months and years that follow. But I’d rather be publicly wrong and corrected than quietly wrong in private.

And then you argue that ambiguity is an asset. What do you mean by that?

The world is complicated, and dealing with it honestly means living with contradictions and compromises rather than pretending they don’t exist. Most people reach for simplicity and clarity where none is available. It feels decisive. Usually, it’s just a smaller version of the problem.

If you can hold the ambiguity instead, you’re working with a wider and better-informed set of information than the person who has already collapsed it into an easier answer.

You have the hugely ambitious target of creating the world’s first conservation-focused “unicorn” company, of having £1 billion in assets by 2030. Still possible? And what is the long-term exit plan here—or are you still working on that?

We get asked about an IPO constantly, and I understand why. We have more than 50,000 acres across twelve estates, close to fifty of the most talented people working across investment and conservation, and a proprietary data platform underneath it all. Becoming the world’s first natural capital asset manager to list is a logical destination, especially with the excitement created by companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.

But this isn’t our focus right now. We’re committed to scaling Oxygen Conservation further. We plan to add significant additional land to the portfolio in 2027, both in the UK and across Europe. Get that right, and the future takes care of itself.

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In the second half of 2026, I will be leading a project to extend the time horizon for sustainability initiatives beyond 2030 to 2037 (the 50th anniversary of the Brundtland Commission report) and then, as a real stretch, to 2087. The early results from our Routes to Transformation survey with GlobeScan and ERM are utterly fascinating. But it would be great to boost the numbers further. In 2025, we hit 800, so if you haven’t already taken part, please do use the QR code above to get started. Thank you in advance!

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Heat domes have made 2026 a year of pressure cooker cities. The problem has been aggravated by the fact that a city’s roofs and roads are dark by default. That single design choice bakes billions of dollars of heat, illness and energy cost into urban systems every summer—costs nobody is billed for, and everybody pays. The Smart Surfaces Coalition’s wager is that if you can measure those costs, you can build a market to avoid them.

Extreme heat is now the deadliest form of weather, and cities feel it the worst: dark asphalt and dark roofs absorb sunlight and re-radiate it, pushing dense neighbourhoods several degrees hotter than the leafy suburbs next door—the urban heat island effect.

None of this should come as a surprise. Forty years ago I reviewed a sci-fi novel, Nature’s End, which opened with a “blocking high” suffocating Denver. Today, predicted or not, the economic bill is enormous, growing and, tellingly, mostly invisible.

Heat already drains something like US$100 billion a year from the US economy in lost worker productivity alone, a figure the Atlantic Council projects will roughly double to US$200 billion by 2030 and reach US$500 billion by 2050. And that is the conservative slice: it excludes the toll heat takes on health systems, infrastructure, tourism, and the electricity grid.

This is a classic market failure. The heat a black roof throws off is an externality—the owner enjoys the cheap roof, while the costs (a hotter block, hospital heat-stroke admissions, a strained grid, a flooded street) land on the public. Markets are blind to costs no one is charged for.

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Who is trying to cool cities?

Among the pioneers in the space is the Smart Surfaces Coalition, founded in 2019. This is a nonprofit of 40-plus partner organisations pushing cities to adopt what it calls “smart surfaces”: reflective (“cool”) roofs and pavements, urban trees, green roofs, permeable paving, solar PV, and green stormwater infrastructure—deployed together, as a system, rather than one demonstration project at a time.

Its central offering is not a product but a spreadsheet: an open benefit-cost analysis tool that lets a city model the temperature, health, stormwater, energy and carbon effects of transforming its surfaces, and put dollar figures on each.

Its founder, Greg Kats, is unusually well-placed to drive this agenda ^[1]. He ran financing for energy efficiency and renewables at the US Department of Energy, was a managing director at the multi-billion-dollar clean-energy investor Good Energies, helped build the LEED green-building standard, and now also runs the advisory and investment firm Capital-E. In other words, he has spent a career turning environmental performance into something finance can underwrite.

As Kats told me, “One issue is we know costs—capex, opex—well, but the benefits are largely not quantified and so are ignored. We are systematically quantifying these with leading partners and that is tipping the scale for decision makers. A second issue is risk. Anything new feels risky. We show that the Smart Surfaces approach is lower risk—in part by having a cohort of cities go through this together. And we coordinate and train around100 additional cities through our Peer Learning Network, plus another 60 cities or so through our Cool Roadways Partnership, focused on roads and pavements.

Sizing the market—three pools, not one

Ask “how big is the market for cooling cities?” and the honest answer is that there are three quite different markets here and conflating them is where most analyses go wrong.

First, the sellable hardware—the products a contractor can invoice. Cool-roof coatings are roughly a US$6 billion global market today, projected to reach US$9 billion by 2030; the broader cool-roof market (membranes, tiles, coatings) runs around US$15–20 billion. Green roofs are smaller but growing fast—perhaps US$5–7 billion by 2030 at 15%-plus annual growth—and permeable pavement is already well past US$10 billion. Add urban forestry and solar, and you have a large, unglamorous, compounding infrastructure market. Nothing exotic—just steady demand.

Second, the brute-force alternative these products displace. The default answer to a hot city is to buy more air-conditioning—a market that is vastly larger and growing far faster. The International Energy Agency expects the global stock of ACs to rise from about 1.6 billion units to 5.6 billion by 2050—roughly ten new units sold every second for three decades—with cooling energy demand set to more than triple. Smart surfaces are demand destruction for that market: every degree shaved off a neighbourhood is cooling equipment that never has to be bought or run. It also explains why smart surfaces are under-marketed—no incumbent gets rich from a city that needs less cooling.

Third, and decisively, the pool of avoided costs. This is where the real money is, and it is mostly public rather than private. When the Coalition modelled citywide adoption across 10 major US metros (home to 34 million people), it found roughly US$26.6 billion in public-health benefits, US$10 billion in electricity savings and US$34.8 billion in infrastructure savings—about US$71 billion in total—alongside 79 million tonnes of avoided CO₂e, 275 billion gallons of managed stormwater, and peak summer temperatures cut by 5°F or more. Atlanta’s policy alone would cool its hottest neighbourhoods by up to 6.3°F and yield some US$760 million in net benefit. Returns of 4:1 or better are typical.

One caveat, though. The hardware figures are third-party forecasts with wide ranges, and the Coalition’s benefit numbers are modelled projections, not audited outcomes. They are best read in terms of direction and order of magnitude. But even when heavily discounted, the asymmetry is the story: a modest hardware spend unlocks a value pool at least an order of magnitude larger.

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A market-design problem

The real reason cool roofs are not already universal is not that the technology is unproven; it is that the benefits are diffuse and public while the costs are concentrated and private. When a landlord pays to re-coat a roof, the cooler air, the avoided hospital visits and the unflooded street accrue to the neighbourhood, the health system and the city.

That split-incentive gap is precisely the kind of missing market we must now pay more attention to. Seen that way, the Coalition’s real product combines measurement and valuation with policy plumbing. It offers a credible way to quantify the public value, and then spotlight the codes, procurement rules and financing structures that let a city capture it.

Still, is this even a market?

Most of the value that smart surfaces create is avoided public cost, not captured private revenue. A coatings firm can sell paint, but no one today can easily sell the cooling itself—the fewer deaths, the lighter grid, the drier basement. So, is “the market for cooler cities” a market at all, or a public-goods coordination problem wearing a market’s clothes?

The answer determines the whole strategy. If it is fundamentally public, the levers include better regulation and larger budgets. On the technical side, we need things like reflectivity minimums in building codes, cool-surface requirements in public procurement, tree-canopy mandates.

If some of the value can be financialized, then the frontier is instrument design—heat-resilience bonds, stormwater-fee credits, health-system co-payments, insurance-linked structures that pay out on avoided heat losses, even utility programmes that fund cool roofs the way they fund efficiency because it defers grid spend.

Cooling cities

Urban heat is not evenly distributed. Across US cities, the hottest neighbourhoods map with unsettling precision onto historically “redlined,” lower-income and minority communities—less canopy, more asphalt, older housing, higher energy burdens.

That makes smart surfaces one of the rare climate interventions whose benefits fall most heavily where need is greatest, and it changes the political economy: this is adaptation that doubles as public-health and environmental-justice policy. It also complicates the market framing, because the residents who would benefit most are the least able to pay the upfront cost—another argument that the financing, not the physics, is the hard part.

So, to dig a little deeper, I asked Greg Kats six questions:

JE: You flag tens of billions of dollars in public benefits, yet adoption is still slow. When you sit across from a mayor or a CFO, what is the single objection that stops the check—and what have you learned to say back?

GK: The most common objection is that although such decision-makers believe there are broad benefits of smart surfaces, including health, lower energy bills, and lower insurance risks, they don’t have credible benefit-cost data for their city. So, they don’t include these benefits in the policy decisions. Our response is to provide highly detailed, documented, city-specific cost-benefit analysis—and then help model and shape city policy changes.

Is “the market for cooler cities” genuinely a market, or a public-goods problem? Where, concretely, do you think private capital can earn a return on avoided heat?

Private capital returns in this market are challenging because benefits are largely in the public arena—health, outdoor workers, tourism revenue, lower electricity bills. The cost-benefit ratios for CO₂ reduction and CO₂e offsets through strategies such as cool roofs are compelling. The cost is under $5/ton, so a fraction of the California CARB price or the European Trading Scheme price.

If you could pass one policy tomorrow that would move the needle the most—a national reflectivity standard in building codes, a cool-surface procurement rule, or a tree-canopy mandate—which would it be?

Mandating more reflective low-sloped and steep-sloped roofs is the largest low-hanging fruit. Average roof reflectivity for low-sloped roofs today in European and North American cities is about 0.2—bouncing back only 20% of sunlight. And we can more than triple that at zero or extremely low marginal cost to 0.7, reflecting 70% of sunlight back up into space.

Much of this exits the atmosphere—literally cooling the planet. At scale, this is one of the highest, most cost-effective, and rapid ways to slow global warming. For example, the June 2025 Atlanta cool roof bill (one of dozens of citywide measures we co-developed with our partner cities) will, by itself, cool Atlanta by 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit, cut electricity bills by $310 million, and cut CO₂e by 3.6 million tons.

Surprisingly, foundations focused on mitigating climate change have largely ignored this opportunity—even though it is highly effective and cost-effective, with substantial, quantifiable health and equity co-benefits.

What would a financeable “cooling benefit” look like—a heat-resilience bond, a stormwater credit, a utility programme? How close is anyone to issuing one?

With the City of Dallas, SSC helped shape a climate bond resolution that ties the city’s most recent $1.25 billion bond to the goals of its climate action plan, including the implementation of smart surfaces. All cities facing heat and flooding issues should do the same. It would increase resilience, mitigate the impacts of climate change, and save cities a lot of money. Rating agencies should also be looking to drive the same strategies.

There is a 3-part series in Risk & Insurance (a major industry publication) that documents how Smart Surfaces improve city credit risk—and protect cities’ access to low-cost financing via the municipal bond markets.

How can the long-standing structural inequalities be redressed rapidly and at scale?

If you look at low-income and minority areas in cities, specific policies drove and reinforced racial inequality, and you can see that these areas are today hotter, darker, more impervious and less healthy.

Until these structural inequalities are redressed, US cities will remain blighted by the physical scars and markers of racism—communities where millions of families must raise children in environments that are physically hostile in summer, with worse pollution and health outcomes, higher electricity bills and diminished experience of the outdoors.

In many major cities where we work, smart surfaces deliver cooling and reduce the risk of flooding—with the greatest improvements in lower-income areas.

Ten years out, say in 2037, the 50th anniversary of the Brundtland Commission report, what would real success look like—a line in every building code, a new asset class, or simply a world where no one builds a black roof without a reason?

Our Coalition’s stated objective is to make Smart Surfaces the urban design norm before 2040. Dark impervious surfaces are the urban design norm today. In the US, we are maybe one-third of the way to a tipping point at which Smart Surfaces, rather than dark impervious surfaces, are the lowest-risk default choice in urban design.

Twenty more big cities and counties have approached us asking for help. If that work is funded, and the policies that we co-develop with cities are implemented, we would have impacted 40% of the U.S. urban populations, a likely tipping point where smart surfaces then inevitably become the urban design norm.

The dark roofing industry opposes the shift to more reflective surfaces. They employ lobbyists and disinformation, so our coalition must educate and overcome this lobbying to get bills through city councils. The Guardian did a great piece on this.

Europe, where there is a great deal of innovation and—as of this summer—greatly expanded interest in citywide cooling, could be on the same schedule. India, where we have also been working, could by 2037 have an irreversible national movement for citywide adoption of Smart surfaces and cooling.

To be clear, 2037 will not be a date when all surfaces are smart—reflective, porous, or green—but the date at which smart surfaces become the default design norm for all cities and suburban areas—where the full transition is both well underway and, hopefully, irreversible.

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^[1] Disclaimer: I have known Greg Kats for almost 40 years and serve on the SSC advisory board.

I’ll admit it. After more than three decades toiling in the vineyards of the triple bottom line, it takes almost nothing for me to spot a TBL angle to a good story. This morning was no exception.

Michael Blencowe, our favourite Moth Man, was carefully lifting more than seventy species of moth from a light trap that had kept them alive and seemingly content overnight, tucked away in stacks of egg trays.

Scanning his long, handwritten checklist, I spotted mention of at least one Clay Triple Lines moth—Cyclophora linearia—a small woodland insect with clay-coloured wings crossed by darker lines.

Then he held one up to the light, mentioned in passing that moths are better pollinators than honeybees, and my mind took off. Really? I wondered.

So, when we got back from our second visit to Westerlands, an estate-in-regeneration in the South Downs National Park, I asked my friend Claude whether this could possibly be right.

A largely invisible contribution

Claude paused a moment—with a deep whirring in a data farm somewhere—and then replied:

Blencowe is on firm ground. First, the science, so you can use it without getting caught out. The “more efficient than bees” line comes from his own corner of the world: a 2023 University of Sussex study on bramble found that moths deposited pollen faster per visit than day-flying insects.

The honest nuance is that bees still do the heavy lifting on volume—far more visits, most of them by day. So, the finding isn’t really “moths beat bees.” It’s that moths are a hugely under-counted night shift, working in complement to the day shift.

An earlier UCL study (Walton and colleagues, 2020) had already shown that moths carry pollen from a surprising range of plants—far more important than anyone had reckoned. So: efficient, complementary, and almost entirely invisible.

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A flypast of Hawk-moths, please

When Antonia Jamison, owner of Westerlands, first got in touch to explain what they were doing there, I said that, among other things, I’d love to see a flypast of Hawk-moths. She promptly invited us in the Spring to watch Michael work his magic—then, again, this second time, in high summer, when moths are more abundant.

As we carefully passed the various moths around, I found myself wondering: how might they look through a triple bottom line lens? Through three lenses, each trained on the economic, social and environmental value being created? Or a compound lens combining all three at once?

Moths are usually filed, confidently, under the environmental line—biodiversity, indicator species, insects with a bit of charisma, though for most people less than butterflies. And the more moths there are, the more bats there are likely to be. The previous evening we listened intently to bat detectors as pipistrelles whizzed all around our heads in the stable yard, hoovering up insects.

But Michael’s point about pollination pulls moths bodily across into the economic line, because pollination is a productive input—to agriculture, and to the wild plant systems everything else rests on. And it sits on the social line too, feeding people and holding together the fabric of the countryside.

So, the roughly one-third decline in Britain’s larger moths over fifty years isn’t a loss recorded in any single ledger. It’s the same loss showing up, uncounted, in all three at once—the erosion of a productive foundation we never thought to price. Another “externality” that was never truly external.

The honeybee comparison, meanwhile, is a perfect little TBL parable. The honeybee is the managed, domesticated, monetised, visible pollinator—it has a keeper, a hive-rental market, an insurance category, an invoice. The moth is its opposite: wild, unmanaged, unpriced, working the night shift for nothing, and doing comparably efficient work.

Guess which one our accounts, our subsidies and our headlines have lavished attention on? We valued the pollinator with a price tag and ignored the one without a market. And there’s a sting in the tail: at high densities, managed honeybees can crowd out and suppress wild pollinators.

The verdict, then, is almost the inverse of how we usually read the TBL calculus. We reach for it expecting trade-offs—win here, lose there, net it off. Moths tell us a very different story. Because the three lines were never truly separable, restoring moths isn’t a balancing act. It’s a triple win.

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The value of a moth

The value of a moth—or of moths—is perhaps most obvious in the jobs provided: guides, estate staff, the people running the hospitality. But the more interesting value is in education and wellbeing. Our moth breakfast this morning was a learning opportunity, plugging into the regional citizen-science networks.

But there’s a social cost line here, too. Michael identified several oak processionary moths in the trap, a genuine hazard to woodlands and to estate workers and visitors alike. Their presence must be notified to the government. But, on balance, the social return on wild moths is real, immediate—and mostly uncaptured by any market.

The economic bottom line, meanwhile, is still struggling to be born. Moth tourism, and its like, so often run on a gift economy: free breakfasts, unpaid county recorders, volunteered expertise. Nature’s predicament in miniature.

Still, possible routes to a real economic return are becoming clearer. Knepp, for one, has written the playbook for the regenerative-estate “revenue stack”—safaris, glamping, premium wildlife experiences, sitting alongside income from biodiversity net gain and carbon management.

And perhaps this is the dividing line between the repair economy and the regenerative one. Monetise moths crudely, and you get a commodity to be optimised and, eventually, liquidated. Alternatively, build the economic line so that it funds the habitat that produces the moths, and you get regeneration.

It’s amazing where a single moth can sometimes take you.

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This is the story of a quiet piece of financial plumbing that is trying to do what a decade of pledges could not: make it more profitable for a Brazilian soy farmer to keep native vegetation standing than to bulldoze it. The piece is a bit more technical than most in the Rewilding Markets series. In headlines, however, the spotlighted approach works by re-pricing capital, not by shaming producers—which potentially makes it one of the clearest live experiments in rewilding a market.

The problem the RCF was built to solve

The Cerrado is Brazil’s great tropical savanna—roughly a fifth of the country, one of the most biodiverse grassland-and-woodland systems on Earth, with a vast underground carbon store held in its deep-rooted vegetation. It is also the frontier of the global soy boom: soy farmland in the biome expanded from around 13 million hectares in 2000 to about 44 million by 2023.

Unlike the neighbouring Amazon, the Cerrado enjoys weak legal protection. Under Brazil’s Forest Code, a landowner here can legally clear up to 80% of a property, and by most estimates roughly 85% of Cerrado clearance is entirely lawful.

That is the crux: you cannot fix a lawful problem by tightening enforcement alone. In 2017, more than 60 Brazilian civil-society groups signed the Cerrado Manifesto demanding action; 23 global companies—Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Unilever, Nestlé, McDonald’s, Walmart and others—signed a Statement of Support (up to 57 by 2024). But a pledge not to buy deforestation-linked soy does nothing for the farmer working land he is legally entitled to clear. Someone must make keeping the trees the better deal.

Enter the Responsible Commodities Facility.

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What the RCF is

The Responsible Commodities Facility (RCF) is a farmer-financing mechanism that helps bridge the difference between unsustainable and more sustainable approaches. It offers soy producers in the Cerrado below-market-rate loans for their annual production costs—seed, fertilizer, inputs—in exchange for a commitment to zero conversion of native vegetation and to protect standing habitat beyond what the law requires. The cheaper credit is the carrot; the environmental commitment is the string attached.

It is run by Sustainable Investment Management (SIM), a UK-registered manager, and grew out of BVRio, a Brazilian NGO that designs market mechanisms for environmental problems. Both were co-founded by Pedro Moura Costa, a carbon-markets pioneer. His brother Mauricio Moura Costa directs the RCF in Brazil.

The intellectual bet is simple and central: the cheapest lever in land use is not the land; it is the cost of capital attached to it.

“The amount of cleared land already available for soy in the Cerrado is roughly three times what the industry needs. The problem was never a shortage of land—it was the absence of an incentive to use the land we’ve already cleared.” —Pedro Moura Costa, SIM

A short history: a fund that had to die once first

The idea predates the current fund. With US$150,000 of seed funding from the Good Energies Foundation and a cluster of Forest Positive Coalition companies, SIM developed the RCF through 2018–19 and was ready to launch a US$300 million debt fund—complete with a London Stock Exchange announcement—at the end of 2019. Then Covid arrived, and the launch became unviable. The fund was shelved.

It was resurrected in 2021 by a subgroup of the Statement-of-Support companies seeking instruments capable of delivering on their commitments. Rather than relaunch at scale, they started with a proof of concept: the Cerrado Programme, announced in August 2022. Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose bought US$11 million of four-year green bonds to capitalize a small debt fund, which then lent to 36 farms across nine large farming groups.

It was deliberately modest—a demonstration that the plumbing worked and the impact could be verified. Everything since has involved testing and scaling that template.

The investment model: turning a promise into a bond

The financial engineering is the genuinely novel part, so it is worth walking through slowly. Brazilian farmers routinely raise working capital by issuing Rural Product Certificates (CPRs)—receivables backed by their future harvest. The RCF bundles these and, via the securitization company Opea, converts them into Agribusiness Receivables Certificates (CRAs)—tradable, fixed-income instruments broadly comparable to asset-backed securities.

Because the underlying loans carry binding environmental conditions, the CRAs are structured and verified as green bonds, issued in Brazil and registered on the Vienna Bourse and Brazil’s B3 exchange. Around this sit a set of specialist roles: Traive runs credit analysis and monitoring of participating farms; Pinheiro Neto structures the transaction legally; ERM-NINT provides independent environmental verification and a Second Party Opinion; and satellite monitoring (via providers such as EarthDaily Agro) checks compliance every crop cycle against the Cadastro Ambiental Rural (CAR) land registry.

The scaling solution involves “blended finance.” The fund is tranched: a subordinated layer, taken by corporates and development finance institutions, absorbs first losses and lowers the cost of capital for a senior layer aimed at mainstream institutional investors. That de-risking is what let the 2025/26 senior tranche to earn a sound credit rating from S&P on the Brazilian scale—a rating that, as Moura Costa notes, lets the facility “scale well beyond what impact-investor capital alone could support.”

Perhaps we see some form of Trojan Horse here? The environmental outcome is being smuggled inside an instrument conservative money can buy.

But why debt, not equity? Moura Costa is clear on the point. Currently fashionable “nature-based” equity funds end up owning land, he says—awkward or impossible where foreign land ownership is restricted (Brazil) or where land belongs to communities and Indigenous peoples (much of Southeast Asia and Africa). Debt touches many existing landowners without dispossessing any of them.

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The NGO backbone

What keeps the RCF from being greenwash is that its rules were not written by the financiers. The eligibility criteria were developed with WWF Brasil, The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, IPAM, Proforest and UN Environment. Those bodies formed the early Environmental Committee and now sit on an Environmental Advisory Board, reviewing operations, farm selection and impact claims.

The facility is also a member of IFACC (Innovative Finance for the Amazon, Cerrado and Chaco), the UNEP/TNC/Tropical Forest Alliance initiative, and operates in accordance with its criteria. This dense NGO scaffolding is critical: it is the difference between a marketing label and an outcome an institutional investor’s risk committee can underwrite.

To join, a farm must show no conversion of native vegetation since 1 January 2020; full Forest Code compliance; clear land rights; no overlap with protected areas, Indigenous or traditional territories; and no labour, agrochemical or embargo violations. Preference goes to land converted from abandoned pasture to soy after 2008—recycling already-degraded ground rather than opening up new areas.

The key metric is Excess Native Vegetation (ENV): habitat a farmer holds over and above the legal minimum and could therefore legally clear. By paying farmers to keep this ENV vegetation intact, the RCF prices the very thing the Forest Code leaves unpriced—the legal right to destroy. In the 2025/26 season, roughly 29,000 of the 90,000-or-so hectares conserved were genuinely additional, legally clearable vegetation. That additionality underpins the whole moral and accounting case for the model.

Investors and progress

Growth in demand has been steep. The 2022 pilot’s three supermarkets were joined in 2023 by Santander, Rabobank and the AGRI3 Fund (US$47m); the 2025/26 round added IDB Invest and the Mobilising Finance for Forests programme (run by the Dutch development bank FMO, funded by the UK and Dutch governments), reaching US$60m.

In February 2026, McDonald’s joined as a corporate participant, and in March 2026, the Green Climate Fund committed US$85 million—secured through 2038, expected to be leveraged roughly fourfold, and intended to carry the facility toward half a billion dollars by 2028. In the process, it is intended to avoid over 25 MtCO2e of emissions.

There is at least one caveat worth keeping in mind, however. Most of the headline figures are forward-looking or avoided emissions estimates rather than audited results, and “conserved” hectares include land that was never realistically going to be cleared. The independent verification and the ENV concept are designed precisely to keep those claims honest—but a rewilded market still needs its outcomes clearly linked back to reality, not just to declared intentions.

Links with the rest of the field

The obvious comparator is the Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS), founded in Zürich in 2006 as a multi-stakeholder body of 160-plus producers, traders, financiers and NGOs. RTRS writes a certification standard and issues certified physical soy and tradable credits.

The two are complementary rather than rivals, because they act at different points in the chain: RTRS changes what a buyer can claim about a bean; the RCF changes what a loan costs a farmer. Certification verifies practice and lets buyers pay a premium after the fact; the RCF alters the economics before planting, at the moment of the clearing decision.

It matters, too, that certification has been criticized—by Greenpeace (”Destruction: Certified”) and by Earthsight’s 2024 Cerrado investigation—partly because producers can certify some farms while clearing others. The RCF’s farm-level monitoring, CAR checks, and ENV accounting are, in effect, an answer to that cherry-picking critique, and they borrow the Accountability Framework’s definitions to stay disciplined about what “no conversion” means.

The RCF explicitly complements the UK Soy Manifesto, the Consumer Goods Forum’s Forest Positive Coalition, and the Cerrado Manifesto, and is part of IFACC. In June 2026, SIM became a founding signatory of the Rotterdam Statement of Support for the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), the Brazil-led standing-forest payment fund launched around COP30. That alignment is telling: like the RCF, the TFFF pays for forests to remain standing—both are wagers on protection finance rather than restoration.

Beyond soy: rice, methane and other commodities

SIM frames the RCF as a template, not a single fund. The intention is a series of commodity programmes, each capitalised through green bonds. The one Moura Costa names most often is low-methane rice: conventionally flooded paddy is among the largest single sources of agricultural methane—on the order of a tenth of the global total—and continuous flooding can be reduced through techniques such as alternate wetting and drying.

A finance facility that lowered the cost of capital for farmers adopting low-methane practices would extend the model from land to practice—and the March 2026 GCF backing was explicitly framed as an opening to adapt the mechanism “for different geographies and commodities.” Cattle, palm and other conversion-linked commodities are the obvious further candidates.

This is where the RCF gets structurally interesting for a rewilding-markets thesis. The soy work is a protection play—keep the habitat you have. Low-methane rice would be a mitigation play—farm the same land differently. The instrument (performance-linked green debt) is the same; what it rewards is not.

The next question: protection, or regeneration?

So, does the RCF only protect and conserve, or does it embrace regeneration? On the evidence, the honest answer is that the RCF is today overwhelmingly a protection-and-avoided-conversion model—a “keep it standing” machine—and only gestures toward regeneration at the edges.

Look at what it pays for and measures: deforestation- and conversion-free soy produced, hectares of native vegetation conserved, carbon stocks maintained, emissions avoided. Every headline metric is an avoided loss, not a created gain. Its land-use logic is land-sparing: push soy onto already-cleared, degraded pasture to spare intact habitat.

That is valuable and, in a biome losing ground every season, arguably the highest-leverage thing to do first. But it is conservation, not restoration, not regeneration.

Genuine regeneration—replanting cleared Cerrado, funding agroforestry, cover cropping, soil-carbon building, or actively rewilding degraded reserves—is not what the RCF currently finances. The nearest it comes is passive: paying farmers to hold Excess Native Vegetation lets some of that land regenerate on its own, and steering production onto old pasture can, over time, take pressure off recovering areas. The low-methane rice ambition points further toward practice change. But there is no line item today for putting nature back.

So why does this matter for rewilding markets? The RCF is best understood as rewilding the capital market more than the land. Its achievement is to make a mainstream financial instrument—a rated, tradable green bond—sensitive to an ecological variable it normally ignores: the standing value of native vegetation a farmer is legally free to destroy.

The big question is whether the same architecture can be expanded from avoided harm to active repair. Could a CRA one day be priced off hectares restored as readily as hectares retained? Nothing in the mechanics forbids it; the demand signal—buyers wanting “no deforestation” far more than “restoration”—is what holds it at protection.

The RCF will not, by itself, save the Cerrado. But as a demonstration that you can wrap an ecological outcome inside an instrument conservative money is happy to buy—and thereby change a farmer’s decision at the exact moment it is made—it is one of the more convincing examples going of a market being taught to feel what it touches.

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Having given up Economics after one year at university, back in 1968, it still surprises me when I am asked to speak in public about…Economics. But earlier this month I was in Lisbon to keynote the Building Sustainability Together conference organised by Católica (University) as part of Lisbon Sustainability Week.

The invitation came via Filipa Pires de Almeida, executive director of Católica’s Center for Responsible Business and Leadership. Ands after opening the event, I did a fireside chat with professor Filipe Santos, dean of the Católica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics. In the process, new connections began to form in my brain between the “dismal science” and the aching-for-regeneration real world.

The next day, for example, Elaine and I spent a fascinating morning in Lisbon’s Maritime Museum, following in the tracks of a famed navigator who rarely went to sea. I had long been fascinated by Henry the Navigator, who earned his epithet (from the English, as it happens) not at the tiller but as a patron—a prince who turned exploration into a systematic project, gathering pilots, astronomers and chart makers and pointing them down the unknown coast of Africa.

Leaking was treason

What Henry understood, better than almost anyone else at the time, was that maps bring power. If you know where the currents run, where the reefs and shoals lie, where the storms cluster, you potentially hold an asset more valuable than any cargo.

And Portugal understood this so well that it made map secrecy a matter of state. Charts and rutters, or handbooks of sailing directions, were tightly guarded under what historians call the política do sigilo—the policy of silence.

The master maps were royal property: to leak them was treasonable. As a result, for a few extraordinary decades, a small kingdom on the western edge of Europe held a near-monopoly on the knowledge of how to reach the wider world.

Monopolies of physical things like maps, though, are hard to maintain. Henry’s lock was eventually picked by the Dutch. Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, a young Netherlander in Portuguese Goa, secretly copied once-secret charts and sailing directions to the Indies and published them in 1596.

Within a few years the same routes were being sailed by the Dutch and English East India companies. Still, we should be clear about what that great remaking of seal-lanes involved: those charts also served conquest, resource extraction and the booming slave trade alongside mainstream commerce.

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Economic navigators

Increasingly, I have come to see economists, for better or worse, as navigators—cartographers of commercial seas and oceans. Their work can lead to extraction or to regeneration, of course, but if we picture an economy as a body of water with its own currents, tides and sudden squalls, then the economist’s task is to chart it. To say where value can be found, how the risks concentrate and when the market weather might turn. To help the rest of us navigate.

Some economists chart demand, some trade, some the deep currents of growth. Emeritus professor Robert F. Engle, with whom I had the pleasure of sharing the platform in Lisbon, and later having dinner with, charts market storms. He won the 2003 Nobel for a family of models he began building in 1982. Risk, he demonstrated, is not a constant background hum, as economics had long assumed. It clusters. Calm breeds calm; turbulence breeds turbulence.

Economies are embedded in our societies, which have their own rhythms and, indeed, convulsions. Viewed through the lens of deeper time, WWI set the scene for WWII, a disruption that many might now see as a Black Swan event, but which was foreseen by Winston Churchill. Engle’s own family history reflects the torments of the era.

We had a fascinating conversation with his wife, Marianne Eger, whose mother—Edith, or “Edie”—survived the Holocaust and was later known as “the ballerina who danced for Josef Mengele.” Few stories underscore quite so dramatically the ability of the human spirit, or at least of some extraordinary people, to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds.

Still, even if Engle drew the chart of where the squalls gather, it was Hyman Minsky—whose work I mentioned in my Lisbon keynote—who explained why the storms keep returning. Minsky—an economist treated as a heretic in his lifetime and only truly canonized after the crash of 2008—argued that stability is itself destabilizing.

His financial instability hypothesis concluded that a long calm does not reassure a market so much as corrupt it: the longer the good weather holds, the more confidently investors take on debt and risk, drifting from prudent financing toward the speculative and finally the reckless, until over-rigged vessels capsize in what we now call “Minsky moments.”

Minsky and Engle complement each other. Minsky supplies the narrative—tranquillity breeding the very recklessness that ends it—while Engle supplies the instrument, the mathematics that can track the clustering weather Minsky described. There is even a warning folded into the pairing: a volatility model, like a market, can be lulled by a long calm and under-price the coming squall at the very moment when the danger is greatest.

Now we are living through another slow-moving Minsky moment—with decades of cheap, fossil-fuelled calm quietly building the systemic risks that a super-heated planet will one day reprice, in what seems like an instant.

We have watched exactly this happen, not long ago. In the years before 2008 the banks navigated using a risk-chart called Value at Risk, and a neat little equation—the Gaussian copula—that priced mortgage risk as though the calm would hold forever. The chart said the sea was flat almost until the moment it capsized the fleet; one writer later dubbed that formula the one that killed Wall Street.

But here is the detail that, on reflection, I find most moving. Henry hoarded his charts, whereas Engle gives his away. V-Lab, the economics lab he built at New York University, publishes its estimates of market volatility and systemic fragility openly, for anyone to access and use.

This modern navigator has inverted the política do sigilo: the risk-map is now a public good. That is a quietly radical act, and exactly the direction a sustainable economy needs to travel—away from proprietary silence, toward shared instruments for a common future.

Error compounds with distance

The most basic likeness between navigators and economists is that both work from a representation rather than the thing itself. A chart is not the ocean, and a model is not the economy. Both are deliberate simplifications, and both are useful precisely because they leave things out. The navigator and the economist alike must live with the knowledge that the map is not the territory.

Then there’s the matter of reading position from indirect signs. Navigators rarely see their destination. They infer where they are from stars, soundings, currents and speed. The economist does the same with indicators—inflation, yield curves, unemployment—none of which is the economy, all of which are bearings taken on something you cannot look at directly. Both practise some form of dead reckoning: projecting forward from the last known fix via heading and speed.

The unnerving property they share is that error can compound with distance. The further you sail from your last certain position, the more your estimate can drift—which is exactly why economic forecasts, like a ship’s reckoning, are trustworthy over the next mile and likely fictional over the next thousand.

As I learned in the most interesting project I did at school, navigators for centuries could find latitude easily—via the sun or pole star—but not longitude, which needed an accuracy no instrument could give until John Harrison came up with his chronometer, the subject of my long-ago project.

Thousands drowned not because they were reckless but because one whole dimension of their position was unmeasurable. Their captains sailed confidently in the dimension they could read straight onto the rocks in the one they couldn’t.

As I have argued via the triple bottom line, economics has its own longitude problem—the ecological and social costs that are quite deliberately kept off the books as “externalities.” You can fix your position beautifully in the priced dimension and yet drift, uncharted, toward catastrophe in ones that no standard instrument yet reads.

A second distortion involves map projections. Mercator’s projection, the one that let sailors plot a straight course, did so by monstrously inflating the wealthy north and shrinking the global south. Greenland expanded to the apparent size of Africa, which is some fourteen times larger. Now GDP, we might conclude, is a Mercator projection of value. It enlarges whatever is priced and shrinks to invisibility whatever is not—the unpaid, the natural, the borne-by-others.

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Three market moods

Every sailor knows the sea has moods, and so does every market. And there are, to my mind, three moods that really matter. First, there is optimism and growth—the Bull, charging ahead with the wind behind him. Second, there is pessimism and retreat—the Bear, hauling in the sails as storms loom on the horizon. And Engle’s great gift is to have proved that these first two moods are not folklore but real, trackable weather systems.

But then there is a third mood that the old charts barely register: ambition and regeneration—symbolized by the Beaver, nature’s own engineer, the creature that does not merely ride the water but rebuilds the watershed, buffering flood and drought alike and creating resilience where there was none.

This is the market mood I am most interested in charting, because it is the one our economy now needs most—and yet understands least. If we can measure the Bull and the Bear, the urgent question now is how we can learn to see, incentivize and finance the Beaver. I see economist Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics as an early mapping of that territory.

In like manner, those long-ago Portuguese navigators knew that coming home from the African coast, a caravel could not simply beat back up the shoreline against the prevailing wind. It had to do something that must have felt like madness—sailing away from Portugal, far out into the open Atlantic in a great arc, to catch the westerlies that would then carry it home.

They called it the volta do mar, the turn of the sea. The counter-intuitive truth was that the direct route was the fatal one, and you reached your destination only by first appearing to abandon it. What better image for our required regenerative turn?

The efficient path—squeeze the quarter, book the sure return, hug the coast—is often the one that strands you and your assets. The Beaver’s slow dams, the patient capital, the apparent detour through resilience rather than raw efficiency: these are the volta do mar of tomorrow’s economy, the long way round that turns out to be the only way home.

Meanwhile, almost every navigational tool, ancient or modern, rests on a quiet assumption: that the sea, the ocean, keeps its shape. That the reefs and shoals stay where they were drawn. By contrast, the sustainability crisis breaks that assumption. It is, as an economist might put it, a slow, correlated, non-stationary, tail-dominated risk—and “non-stationary” is the word that should keep us awake. Climate change shifts the shoals, redrawing the coastline as we are sailing along it.

Consider Cape Bojador, the bulge of the Saharan coast that medieval sailors would not pass. Beyond it, everyone knew, lay boiling seas, monsters and perdition—until Gil Eanes rounded it in 1434, sailing calmly back, and the terror began to evaporate. We should think of Bojador whenever we hear that we cannot decarbonize and prosper at the same time, that the waters beyond the growth-as-usual and sustainability-as-usual worlds are unsurvivable.

The map’s not the voyage

One of my favorite modern economists is Marianna Mazzucato. And her thinking on the Mission Economy comes to mind here. Those great voyages required the Portuguese Crown, involving sustained sponsorship, pooled capital, chartered companies, harbours, provisioning, the patience of a state that could think in decades. No captain, however brilliant, and no chart, however accurate, could open a sea route on private willpower alone.

The same is true of the sustainability transition, and I say this as someone who has spent fifty years urging individual companies to do more. There is a hard ceiling constraining what even the most enlightened business will do—and more to the point, can do—in the absence of strong, sustained policy and market support.

You can hand a company the finest risk-chart ever drawn, showing every climate storm and stranded-asset shoal with perfect clarity, and yet it will still not willingly set sail in the indicated direction. Even the best corporate navigators cannot conjure the wind.

What moves a fleet—or in this case an economy—is the wider context, or environment. Commercially, that means carbon prices that shape powerfully markets over time, standards that hold through political storms, subsidies aimed at regeneration rather than extraction, and capital that is patient enough to wait for the Beaver’s slow dams to fill.

I should be careful with the word Crown, however, in case it sounds as if the state alone can carry us. The ocean is the oldest commons we have, and it was Elinor Ostrom—the first woman to win the economics Nobel—who showed that a commons need be surrendered neither to the market nor to the sovereign to be governed well. Fishing communities, irrigators, whole villages have for centuries navigated shared waters through shared, self-made rules, neither privatized nor nationalized.

So perhaps “Crown-scale” is the wrong phrase and “commons-scale” a better one: not merely a state that can think in decades, but polycentric institutions—cities, coalitions, standards bodies, citizens—charting the waters together.

There are grounds for hope, meanwhile. We have never had better charts. Engle and his kind have mapped the moods of the market—the optimism, the pessimism, and increasingly the storms—with a precision Portugal’s Prince Henry could scarcely have dreamed of. And, to their great credit, Engle and his team are giving those charts away.

Ultimately, a chart is an invitation, not a voyage. The question for the coming 10-15 years is whether we can summon that commons-scale ambition and set sail in new directions, along the way making capitalism and our economies not simply less degenerative, but more regenerative.

Tomorrow’s volta do mar

When I shared an early draft of this post with the Católica event’s organizers, an interesting response came from Filipa Pires de Almeida, who had first invited me to the Católica event:

The analogy between economists and the great navigators is powerful, and perfectly captures the kind of leadership we will need for the next stage of the sustainability transition: leaders who can chart new territories, navigate uncertainty and help society find a regenerative course, rather than simply optimize the (failing) one we are already on.

Her Católica colleague, adjunct professor António Baldaque da Silva, who has served as a managing director at BlackRock and is now executive director of Católica’s Center for Sustainable Finance—and also happens to be a serious sailor— noted:

Navigators are by nature at the mercy of the sea. So they are by nature patient—they work with the natural world, respecting its rhythms. We know the destination but cannot control when we will get there. Some of us think we can outgrow nature, making everything predictable, operating at our own rhythm. But we do this at our peril, both as individuals and societies…

It struck me that these are the sort of economists who make sense to me and should increasingly shape our future.

Meanwhile, Portugal celebrates those who led its voyages of discovery with Lisbon’s Padrão dos Descobrimentos, or the Monument to the Portuguese Discoveries. So, we might ask, whose names will appear on future monuments to the leaders in Economics and other disciplines who taught the world to take on tomorrow’s equivalents of the volta do mar?

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To my great chagrin, I couldn’t go to this year’s rechalking of the 3,000-year-old Uffington Horse. My dream of finally becoming an Uffington Horseman must wait at least another year. The reason: the very real risk that Europe’s heat dome could melt my travelling companion, Elaine.

Still, that hasn’t stopped me thinking through what the Horse can tell us about both deep time thinking and practices. And let’s also consider the implications for the ongoing reboot of the sustainability agenda.

Meanwhile, global heating is certainly making itself felt. Temperature records have been broken in Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom—a dozen countries. France recorded its hottest day ever as 40 people drowned across the country, and the Paris emergency services recorded 109 deaths in a single Friday, against seven normally reported at that time of year.

Not only was this Europe’s worst ever heatwave, but those temperatures would have been “virtually impossible” just a few decades ago. In the process, the climate crisis kept us from one the rituals that potentially could model how we might learn to live with it.

The practices of continuity are themselves climate-vulnerable—and a 40-degree July is a preview of maintenance chains under stress everywhere. Maintenance is a key element of time literacy, as I argued in an earlier post in this series—spotlighting the work of Stewart Brand. As I put it then:

Brand’s […] central argument is both profound and uncomfortably familiar. We tend to think of maintenance as tedious preventive work — brushing our teeth, changing the oil — and treat it as optional until crisis forces our hand.

“Defer now, regret later,” Brand writes. “Neglect kills.”

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Going green is a problem

Which brings us to some lessons the Uffington Horse might teach us about the future of both the sustainability movement and agenda.

The first thing to note about the Horse is that it really shouldn’t still be visible. Chalk figures cut into turf are among the least durable monuments we humans make. Left alone, the Horse would green over and vanish within a couple of decades—radically faster than a pyramid erodes or a stone circle topples.

So, its 3,000-year survival is not just a feat of engineering but of social engineering. It has involved an unbroken (or nearly unbroken) chain of people choosing, every few years, to weed it and pound in fresh chalk. The Horse is not just an artefact that has lasted but a practice that has lasted, with an artefact as its visible residue.

We could see it as the landscape’s version of the Ship of Theseus—given that vanishingly small quantities of the original chalk remain, yet no one doubts it’s the same Horse. Partly that is because its identity lies in the continuity of care not just in the continuity of the material.

That inverts the usual grammar of deep time thinking. Most long-termist design—the pyramids, nuclear waste markers, even the Long Now Foundation’s 10,000-year clock—tries to make the future passive: build something so robust it survives our descendants’ neglect or forgetting used.

By contrast, the Horse makes the future active. It assumes nothing survives neglect and instead transmits an obligation. The closest analogue is perhaps the Ise Shrine in Japan, ceremonially rebuilt every twenty years—with preservation achieved through perpetual renewal. What is being conserved there is the knowledge, the craft, and the community of practice needed to build and rebuild.

Then think of the way the rechalking obligation was transmitted. Historically the scouring wasn’t compliance, wasn’t forced. Instead, it was a festival—called the “Pastime,” with fairs, cheese-rolling, wrestling, documented in Thomas Hughes’s Victorian account. People maintained the Horse because maintaining it was a pleasure and a source of identity, not a duty imposed on them from outside.

When that festive culture lapsed in the nineteenth century, the Horse degraded badly and had to be rescued. The responsibility then migrated to new institutional carriers, eventually the National Trust. So, the mechanism of persistence here turns out to have three parts: ritual rhythm, local joy, and institutional handover when older carriers fail.

The wrestling and the Scouring

Part of the deeper story can be found in The Scouring of the White Horse, a novel by Thomas Hughes. A couple of years earlier he had written Tom Brown’s Schooldays. The later book is a lightly fictionalized account of the scouring festival of September 1857, which Hughes himself had attended.

In the novel, a London clerk goes down to Berkshire for a holiday, falls in with a farming family, and witnesses the Pastime—the great fair held on the hill when the Horse was cleaned. It involved wrestling, backsword play (a brutal cudgel game where you won by drawing an inch of blood from your opponent’s scalp), cheese-rolling down the Manger (a dramatic dry valley with steep rippled sides left by the retreating permafrost during the last Ice Age), climbing the greased pole, sacks races, and this being England, a great deal of drinking.

Hughes preserved the wonderful dialect verse attributed to Job Cork, an 18th-century Uffington shepherd, about the periodic “scouring” of the figure:

The ould White Horse wants zettin to rights,
And the Squire hev promised good cheer,
Zo we’ll gee un a scrape to kip un in zhape,
And a’ll last for many a year.

Intriguingly, his book had an explicit agenda. Hughes was a Christian Socialist, anxious that railway-age England was severing people—especially clerks like his narrator—from the customs and communal obligations of the countryside. The Scouring is his argument that popular festivity and shared stewardship of the past are the things that hold a people together.

As it turned out, with his account of the 1857 Pastime Hughes had captured one of the last old-style festivals. The tradition guttered within a couple of decades, and the Horse’s care eventually passed to antiquarian societies and then, ultimately, the National Trust and English Heritage. Whatever his intent, Hughes’ 1859 book has become our best eyewitness account of the festive machinery that kept a Bronze Age figure alive into the modern world.

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The Horse and sustainability’s future

The Uffington chain of transmission is genuinely fragile—it only needs to break for thirty years, once. Which brings us back to sustainability. The accelerating shift in the agenda involves a move from treating natural capital as substitutable (weak version)—where you can degrade a wetland and offset it with manufactured wealth—to treating critical natural systems as non-negotiable stocks that must be maintained (strong version).

The Horse also suggests several things that the sustainability agenda mostly lacks:

· First, sustainability is (or should be seen as) a verb, not an achieved state. There is no “solved”—no technology or treaty that lets us stop scouring. Rewilded land, restored peatland, carbon removal, sea defences: all are Horse-like, requiring perpetual stewardship, and any framework that promises a set-and-forget endpoint is soft sustainability in disguise.

· Second, we’ve culturally over-obsessed with innovation and under-obsessed with maintenance. Hard sustainability is fundamentally a maintenance culture, and maintenance cultures survive on ritual, status, and festivity, not on dashboards and disclosure regimes. Nobody scoured the Horse because of an ESG report. And if you want to dig in deeper to the theme of what the Horse has to tell us about the value of maintenance, take a look at this insightful Long Now piece by Ahmed Kabil.

· Third, the obligation worked because it was local, legible, and bounded—a nearby village could see the Horse fading and understand that it was happening on their watch. Much sustainability policy fails at this point: planetary, abstract, nobody’s.

Which brings us back to the recent heat dome. If the weak-to-strong spectrum relates to the internal dynamics of the sustainability agenda, the soft-to-hard spectrum links to the nature of wider market realities. And heat domes are very much part of that. Still, the Horse still exists despite everything time has thrown at it. It has survived plague, civil war, enclosure, and even being deliberately buried during WWII so the Luftwaffe couldn’t navigate by it.

If the rebooting sustainability agenda were to learn the right lessons from the Uffington saga, it might spend less time trying to design permanent solutions and more time designing beloved, repeatable obligations, in social and cultural engineering. And then it would measure progress less in terms of targets hit than whether the next generation shows up with its own buckets of chalk.

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Note: For more information on Long Now London, whose members take part in the Uffington rechalking, see here.

It should have been an acutely embarrassing moment. But at the time I was sure I was right, even if it later proved that I was wrong—and, it turned out, my use of AI, specifically Claude, was to blame. Not in terms of accuracy, but of style.

On stage at the Copernicus Science Centre in Warsaw, two realities collided: what I thought to be true and what was. And the experience spurred me to think about the role of memory—and about the role of technology in storing and accessing our individual and collective memories.

Looking back, I was primed to pursue this line of thought because I had just returned from a visit to the Warsaw Uprising Mound, an extraordinary experiment in deep time and regeneration, of which more in a moment. And among several books I was reading on the trip was Chapterhouse Dune, a 1985 novel by Frank Herbert, the sci-fi author who I had met back in 1983—a story told in my 2024 book, Tickling Sharks.

A feature in the landscape

In any event, after keynoting the ESG Ideas Fair in Warsaw, I was delighted to do a three-way fireside chat session later in the day with Irena Pichola, president of the management board of the Responsible Business Forum, Poland’s largest sustainability-focused NGO, and both chair of the Chapter Zero Poland Steering Committee and CEO of Artha Consulting Network, and professor Boleslaw Rok, one of the forum’s founders back in 2000.

Boleslaw, who I had met once before, a long time ago, is a major feature in the landscape. His roles at Kozminski University, one of Central and Eastern Europe’s leading business schools, include head of sustainability transition, professor of corporate sustainability management—as well as director of the positive entrepreneurship research lab and director of the “SDGs in the Company’s Strategy” executive programme.

Given all of which, it was a delight to rediscover that he has a wonderful sense of humor. Which helped defuse the memory loss glitch. Boleslaw had quoted the opening line of my May 18^th Substack post on the transition from soft to hard sustainability, which ran:

“On 28 February 2026, the soft sustainability era ended without most people noticing. It had been ailing for a while—anyone with eyes could see the symptoms—but it took a war to confirm the rupture.”

I had pushed back that I was sure I hadn’t written the line and, in fact, I was right. Claude had written it under my prompting—so I was using language that wasn’t mine. Lesson learned, though I plan to continue using AI to inform and sub-edit my work. And when I asked Claude to comment on the incident, it suggested:

The machine and you had made it together, which is to say the machine had largely made it and you had nodded—and you do not remember what you did not directly make. Psychologists call it the generation effect: we retain what we generate far better than what we are handed. The very convenience that produced the sentence is the exact reason it never lodged in your memory. The tool had not backed up your memory. Instead, it had quietly replaced the act that would have formed one.

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Minsky and the fading of memory

Uncomfortable, as learning often can be, but this moment set me thinking about how the use of AI will impact our memory of the work that we all think that we have done. And, more fundamentally, it had me pondering the implications of the worldwide boom in data storage and data farms for our collective memory.

Someone whose work I came to relatively recently is the economist Hyman Minsky, who died exactly thirty years ago, in 1996. He didn’t treat “memory” as a standalone subject, but the fading of memory sits at the core of his most influential idea, the Financial Instability Hypothesis. His central claim—often compressed into the phrase “stability is destabilizing”—is that long stretches of economic calm quietly manufacture the next crisis, precisely because they erode people’s recollection of how badly things can go wrong.

And it strikes me that this is as true of politics and of the building climate and biodiversity emergencies as it is of markets. Interestingly, Minsky himself leaned away from purely psychological or “behavioral” explanations. He preferred to ground instability in the objective arithmetic of balance sheets and cash-flow commitments rather than in something as soft as collective forgetting. So, the clean “memory of the last crash fades, therefore people get reckless” narrative is partly a popularization of his work.

The thinker who made the memory angle most explicit was Charles Kindleberger, a leading architect of the post-WWII Marshall Plan, who in Manias, Panics, and Crashes drew heavily on Minsky and emphasized how the passing of a generation—the literal dying-off of people who remembered the previous bubble—helps set up the next one for failure.

Storage is not memory

As I thought all of this through with the aid of books, Google and Claude, I learned that storage is not memory. The cuneiform tablet and printing revolutions expanded storage—the externalized, durable record—but a civilization’s actual memory is something much narrower, more alive, more in the moment. Let me quote Claude at some length here, in edited form:

The Egyptologist Jan Assmann drew a useful line between “storage memory,” the total inert archive of everything retained, and “functional memory,” the small, actively interpreted canon a culture carries forward as meaningful. Living memory is curation—the past organized around significance. The striking feature of the present boom is that it inflates storage almost without limit while doing nothing for function, and possibly even degrading it.

Notice how the data boom inverts the old relationship between remembering and forgetting. For the scribe and the printer, recording was expensive, so selection happened at the moment of inscription; forgetting was the default and remembering took effort. We have reversed this.

Storage is now cheaper than the decision of what to delete, so retention is the default and forgetting has become the deliberate act. That inversion is the genuinely new thing, more than mere speed or volume—and the everything-record we accumulate is paradoxically fragile.

Clay tablets are legible after four thousand years; a hard drive may not survive twenty without active migration. We risk an archive at once total and precarious, abundant and unreadable: a digital dark age.

The anxiety is ancient, however, which is worth remembering as a check on alarmism. In the Phaedrus, Plato warns that writing produces forgetfulness, giving us “the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.” Renaissance scholars drowning in printed books made the same complaint. Each externalization provokes the fear of atrophy, and each time the faculties shift rather than decay.

Maybe the real problem is not the quantity of memory at all. Instead, it seems to be the very processes of remembering and forgetting—which is where Frank Herbert turns out to have been so insightful.

Other Memory

“Other Memory,” as Herbert painted it in his Dune series of novels, is not data. It is the complete, first-person, lived experience of every ancestor, available to a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother as an inner, online counsel of living presences. And the first thing Herbert insists on is that you cannot simply receive it. It is earned through the ordeal of the “spice agony,” a transformation that builds a self that can hold the multitude.

So, access to total memory requires a corresponding development of the one who accesses it. Our data boom hands us the archive without the ordeal—the storage without the integrative capacity. And Herbert named what happens when memory arrives in a self too unformed to govern it: Abomination. A key character is Alia, who gains Other Memory before she has an ego of her own. So she does not wield the ancestral voices but is colonized by them.

A culture with total recall but no mature selfhood does not command its archive. It is ruled by it—governed not by present judgment but by whichever voices in the record are loudest and most insistent.

Then the Dune series’ ultimate move: prescience, the natural extension of total memory into total foresight, turns out to be a trap. Paul and Leto become imprisoned by the futures they can see, and Leto’s entire millennial project—the Golden Path, the Scattering—aims at breeding a humanity that can become unpredictable, restoring the open and unforeseen future.

Herbert’s final judgment is that a living civilization depends on its capacity for the genuinely new, which means its capacity to not be wholly determined by the recorded past.

The Warsaw Uprising Mound

Still, we need to anchor our thinking about the future with a well-grounded understanding of the past, which brings me back to my serendipitous visit to the Warsaw Uprising Mound. I went in the company of Justyna Biernacka and her husband Piotr Biernacki, co-founders of Warsaw-based “sustainability pathfinders” Materiality, and their friend professor Katarzyna Sadowy from the Warsaw School of Economics.

Justyna had got in touch originally because of my earlier posts here on the concept of deep time. She suggested that the Warsaw Uprising Mound provides a working model of how deep time can be brought into the present—and invited me to visit it. I grasped the opportunity with both hands.

Off we went to the south of the city, where the Warsaw Uprising Mound is built from the rubble of the destroyed city—millions of cubic metres of it. The broken remains of a capital that was roughly eighty-five percent flattened by the end of the war.

Warsaw’s rubble can be seen as sedimentary layers of successive catastrophes: the ghetto razed after the rising of 1943, the city razed after the rising of 1944. The architect who first campaigned for the mound, Stanisław Gruszczyński, argued that the debris should not be treated as waste but as relics—that millions of hands had touched these bricks, that thousands of lives had been lived between them. Sadly, he died before the Mound evolved into its current form.

For decades it was not a monument. Maps into the 1990s labelled it Góra Śmieci—the “mountain of trash.” The rubble was there, providing total storage for the ruins of the catastrophes—and yet it meant little to most people. It became a monument only when people chose to read it as one: to name it, climb it, line its stairs with crosses, and remember.

The Mound is the act of remembering that turned rubble into relic and collectively held memory. And perhaps that, finally, is what divides shallow time from deep time. Social media, by contrast, is the heap that never becomes the mound.

Deep time, well used, works differently. It compresses an enormous quantity of the past into a small, dense, climbable form that you can stand on top of and see from. What makes the regeneration project so fitting here is that it refused to import new materials to dignify the hill.

The whole project ran on circular principles: all the excavated material stayed on site, and the rubble was sorted and reused—large fragments put on display, smaller ones packed into gabion cages, and the loose remainder processed into a “rubble-concrete” for the retaining walls. They even named this anthropogenic stone Warsaw’s urbanite.

The Mound also incorporated what nature had already done during the decades of neglect. Rather than clearing the wild forest that had grown over the dump, the architects kept the mature trees and threaded a treetop walkway among them, complementing the scrub with drought-resistant native planting that needs no irrigation. The rubble-concrete walls were inoculated with a moss-and-yoghurt mixture so that they will slowly green over.

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Who are tomorrow’s integrators?

Now, maybe, AI gives us—and for the first time—something akin to Frank Herbert’s Other Memory: the possibility of almost total recall. That is genuinely a gift, but both the real-world Mound and the fictional Bene Gesserit order pose the same single question: Who is doing the necessary integrating?

That is the challenge for us all in the coming decades. The necessary balance between shallow and deep time will not be achieved by remembering less, nor by handing the remembering over wholesale to expert systems, data farms and the like. Instead, we must allow the machines to hold our version of the rubble while we are freed to do the climbing—and to report back on what we see.

***

And now, finally, a brief photo essay on our Mound adventure:

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I don’t often give a presentation while standing on living grass—though I once did four sessions for Tetra Pak on a grass flooring inside a tented structure, with over a hundred slightly baffled executives taking eventually off their shoes and socks and reconnecting, briefly, with a form of nature.

But never before have I stood on real grass inside a church when engaging an audience. The occasion was the first how-business-can-bring-nature-on-board conference hosted by Hafslund, a renewable-energy and infrastructure group headquartered at Skøyen in Oslo.

Wholly owned by the City of Oslo, Hafslund traces its history back around 130 years to its first water turbine in Sarpsborg. Today it runs some 83 hydropower plants producing around 21 TWh a year, alongside wind, solar, battery storage, and some 700 km of district-heating pipes under Oslo. It also holds 50 percent of Eidsiva Energi, and through that a stake in Elvia, Norway’s largest grid company.

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Naturkonferansen—2026 Nature Conference

The event I mentioned above was billed as Norway’s first cross-disciplinary conference putting nature on the agenda for Norwegian business. It was held on 10 June 2026 at Sofienberg kirke (Sofienberg Church) in Oslo, co-organized with the contractor Veidekke, the bank Nordea, and the Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature (Naturvernforbundet), all chaired by the broadcaster Bård Tufte Johansen.

The organizers posed questions like: what does it cost to disregard nature; what financial risks arise when nature is deprioritized; and what can boards and management be held responsible for. The organizers noted that there’s currently no shared arena where business, government, and civil society discuss the nature crisis together.

Hafslund is candid about its own position. Building and operating hydropower, district heating, and carbon capture delivers climate benefits but also burdens nature, and the group’s stated aim is to achieve good climate measures with as low an impact on nature as practically possible.

I made three points in my own presentation. First that nature is the “Next Big Thing” in the global sustainability agenda, or at least one of them. Second, this trend will be powerfully shaped by the ongoing shift from “soft” to “hard” forms of sustainability. And, third, one of the biggest challenges now facing us involves what I called “rewilding finance.”

Later, I was part of a panel chaired by Marianne Bruvoll, senior sustainability business analyst at Nordea’s markets, corporates and institutions unit, together with her colleague, Jan Wärnbäck, senior environment specialist at Nordea, and Eivind Fliflet, head of environmental initiatives, corporate governance, at Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM).

NBIM, as well-informed readers will already know, is the manager of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund—the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. Indeed, when talking about the need to rewild finance, I referenced the fund, noting that it is now valued at $2 trillion and holds 1.5 percent of the world’s listed shares.

As a so-called “universal owner,” it is particularly sensitive to potential systemic risks. And it has been challenging its portfolio companies to integrate biodiversity, land, water, and ocean impacts into their core strategies.

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Dam disaster

Intriguingly, I learned that Hafslund Celsio’s waste-incineration plant at Klemetsrud currently accounts for around 20 percent of Oslo’s total fossil CO₂ emissions, pending a full-scale carbon-capture facility due in 2029. But my main interest was in its hydropower activities—and, in particular, a hydroelectric dam whose recent history underscores the sector’s own exposure to climate risk.

When storm Hans swept into Norway in August 2023, it had already been dumping rain across the country for days. The Braskereidfoss hydroelectric plant—a 40-megawatt, run-of-river station on the Glomma, Norway’s longest and most voluminous river, in Våler municipality about 150 km northeast of Oslo — sat directly in the path of all that water.

Operated by Hafslund Kraft, it was an unglamorous but well-engineered piece of kit: originally built as a single 22-MW unit in 1978, then expanded in 2016 with a new 18-MW bulb turbine that used the river’s nine-metre drop more efficiently. Significantly, however, the dam harnessed a water catchment the size of Switzerland. So, Storm Hans had a lot of leverage.

As it happens, the Braskereidfoss dam was designed to survive exactly this sort of challenge. Hatches in the plant were meant to open automatically if too much water built up behind the dam—a self-protecting system, the kind of fail-safe that’s supposed to make a flood a non-event. But on the morning of 9 August 2023, that safety net gave way.

The plant’s two units tripped offline at 6:30 a.m., and the automatic hatches—which should have opened to relieve the pressure—failed for reasons that were unknown even to the company’s own board chair, Alexandra Bech Gjørv. So, the water did what water does: for hours it gathered behind the dam with nowhere to go.

As the water levels rose, the options narrowed alarmingly. Authorities seriously considered blowing up part of the dam—a controlled blast to open a hatch and let the water out before it could choose its own exit. They talked it through with a bomb squad from the armed forces and then abandoned the idea. As one police official put it, the damage from an explosion would be so great that it would serve no purpose.

The river settled the matter itself. The plant flooded, a parking lot beside it went under, and then water began pouring through a gap in the concrete. It ripped apart the two-lane road and the fences running across the top of the dam. Around 4:30 in the afternoon, parts of the dam started to collapse—there’s a video of the bridge structure going down. The plant itself was submerged and knocked out of operation.

The genuinely important part, however, is what didn’t happen. Roughly 1,000 people lived in the communities along that stretch of river, and every one of them had been evacuated before the dam began to fail. Police judged that even a complete burst posed no danger to residents. In the end, the water found its way through the fill dam beside the power plant, and the operator reported the diversion was “going well.” An €88-million-class disaster across Norway as a whole, but at Braskereidfoss, no one downstream was hurt.

Some lessons learned

One message I took away from the site visit and the event was that every human activity now faces disruption by the evolving climate emergency, even the renewables sector. And that emergency is now tightly linked to the biodiversity emergency. More diverse ecosystems upstream of a dam hold more water, for example, while those suffering biodiversity loss shed water much faster.

My main reason for asking for a site visit to Braskereidfoss, though, had to do with the fish ladder, or fisketrapp, they are rebuilding there. The concrete dam has long included three large flood gates, a submerged segment gate, a log-driving gate, and a fish ladder. Now the ladder is being rebuilt as part of the larger reconstruction of the plant after storm Hans destroyed it.

As part of the rebuild, Hafslund will upgrade the fish ladder in line with new knowledge about how fish migrate past hydropower dams. So, the rebuild isn’t just restoring the asset. Instead, it is also widening the design brief to include the river’s other users—notably the fish—with a second outlet based on updated migration science.

That’s a move from the minimum viable product approach (a working dam) to what professor Suvi Nenonen of the Stockholm School of Economics has called a minimum viable system (a working dam that a trout can also get past). It’s also a neat example of what bringing nature on board looks like as we drive forward the energy transition, as is Hafslund’s call for a shared arena where business, government, and civil society can discuss the interlinked climate and nature crises together.

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So, what’s next after the launch of the Volans report, created in partnership with the Generation Foundation, and called Time To Get Real, summarizing the status of climate policy engagement by the institutional investment sector?

Key takeaways include:

🚨 System-level risks require a system-level response. If policymakers do not appear to be taking adequate action to address those risks, investors can and should seek to change that.

📚 To date, investor engagement on climate policy has mostly focused on disclosure (e.g., support for TCFD, ISSB etc) and sustainable finance regulation, not on policies that affect the real economy directly.

🧭 Leading practitioners recognise the need for more resource to go towards engagement on real economy policies and some are starting to shift their resources in that direction already.

🤝 Collaborative engagement > individual engagement. Formal and informal alliances are key to having impact.

🗝️ Asset owners have a critical role to play. Even if they are constrained in their ability to do real economy policy work themselves, they need to create the “demand signal” that will incentivise others to step up their efforts.

Now we aim to continue building momentum, bringing in other representatives from across the investment industry. Please connect with the Volans team if you have thoughts on the following: (1) which institutions—that aren’t already doing so—should be engaging (more) on real economy climate policies; and (2) any ideas on how to build momentum that are either already being put into action or that could be implemented with further support.

Looking forward to any thoughts on how to continue building out this work. Please sign up to follow our work on investor climate policy engagement here.

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An icon of my professional work since 1991 has been the cartoon I got Ingram Pinn to do for me, showing a boardroom table with a fish in a business suit, a woman from the Global South and a robot seated. In case you haven’t seen it, I will drop it in at the end of this post. And the question in my mind now is whether the robot is getting ready to take over the entire process.

Whatever I thought back then about what I might be doing with the rest of my life, I have now spent decades operating on the ragged frontiers of stakeholder capitalism—campaigning, consulting, and serving on more than 80 boards and advisory boards, a dozen of them still active at any given time. Indeed, I have just joined one for Imperial Business School’s Leonardo Centre on Business for Society.

That experience, colliding with my growing interest in—and exposure—to AI, has left me wondering:

Now that virtual advisory boards look like a foregone conclusion, will they advance the positive, systemic change we need, or not?

Someone I caught up with during WBCSD’s London Climate Action Week (LCAW) event, of which more in a moment, was José Luis Blasquez, Acciona’s global sustainability director. I reminded him that he had raised the possibility of a virtual advisory board some time back when talking with our CEO, Louise Kjellerup Roper. And now we are toying with the idea of making it a reality.

First as a minimum viable product; then, if it gains traction, as a minimum viable system for better informing key decisions worldwide.

Banksy at London Climate Action Week

So how appropriate that my first LCAW event of was hosted in the Institute of Directors, from which I resigned years ago (having contributed a regular column for their Director magazine) because of their intransigence on sustainability issues. Now the window of the IoD room in which Mondiale Impact were hosting their breakfast event on tomorrow’s governance agenda directly overlooked my current favorite Banksy artwork.

A besuited figure strides off a plinth, entirely blinded by a large, billowing flag.

In the background, in contrast, a gilded statue of Athena adorns the façade of the Athenaeum Club—where Max Nicholson, David Layton and I co-evolved what would later become Environmental Data Services (publishers of the ENDS Report), almost fifty years ago. Athena symbolizes wisdom, but I sometimes wonder whether the flag-smothered Banksy isn’t a better representation of where our species currently finds itself on climate action?

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From barometers to advisory boards

In retrospect, three LCAW events helped nudge this thought process into overdrive. The first was the Mondiale Impact session, followed later the same day by WBCSD’s launch of their 2026 Business Breakthrough Barometer, and then, third, the following day, a Google-hosted session on the climate-related applications of the company’s technology: AI for the Planet.

Billed as the largest edition yet, WBCSD’s 2026 Business Breakthrough Barometer draws on the views of more than 500 senior leaders across 50 economies and companies, in total representing over US$2 trillion in revenue.

Read side by side, the two events, hosted by Mondiale Impact and WBCSD, sketch a supply-and-demand curve. The Barometer turns out to be the demand side—proof that the need for sound sustainability judgment is climbing fast and getting harder to satisfy.

And third, I took part in a Google-hosted “AI for the Planet” event which offered a glimpse of the emerging supply side—with new forms of intelligence virtually on tap, available in the moment where you need it.

And sitting somewhere between all three is an institution most people never think about until they need it: the advisory board. What might happen if someone managed to put stakeholders on tap by creating tuneable virtual advisory boards?

The demand side: judgment getting harder

For decades, as I have argued elsewhere, so-called “corporate sustainability” was mostly soft—a matter of ambition, reputation, and voluntary pledges. Intentionally or not, the latest edition of WBCSD’s Barometer captures the moment that era ends. Now, as WBCSD CEO Peter Bakker put it, the phase driven by ambition is giving way to a more durable one, in which sustainability increasingly pays its own way “as a source of resilience and competitiveness.”

WBCSD’s numbers were striking. Ninety-two percent of leaders now expect sustainability to deliver competitive advantage over the next five to ten years, and 89% maintained or increased their investment last year. This is no longer the language of corporate social responsibility; instead, it is the language of capital allocation.

But confidence comes with anxiety. Sixty-eight percent think a disorderly transition—unplanned, poorly coordinated, expensive—is more likely than a year ago, and 40% rate it a significant risk. Just 15% feel fully prepared. Nearly half report that physical climate impacts pushed costs up last year through supply-chain disruption, commodity volatility, and rising insurance bills. And 85% would rather see policy strengthened than delayed, with policy clarity now cited by more than half as decisive in where they invest.

Strip away the percentages and the message comes through loud and clear. Tomorrow’s decisions will be bigger, more contested, and more publicly scrutinized than ever. Meanwhile, those charged with making them are not at all sure that they have the judgment to get them right.

Harder decisions need better advice, so the appetite for credible, independent counsel is likely to grow, not shrink.

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Enter AI

This is exactly the appetite Google’s “AI for the Planet” event aimed to feed. The implicit, unstated message I took away was this. Synthesis across climate science, ecology, economics, law, and supply-chain engineering, will increasingly be available at a speed and breadth no human mind or panel can match. And it will be delivered continuously rather than quarterly, and—in principle—it will be available to anyone with a connection, not just those who can afford a stellar boardroom.

If the Barometer shows a world starved of judgment, the obvious answer is to produce more of it. That is the basic promise of the virtual advisory board: a standing panel of synthesized expertise, on call, on demand, on tap. At a time when most advisory boards operate in corporate silos, their thinking confined by host organizations and non-disclosure agreements, how might AI’s ability to aggregate and synthesize help?

What an advisory board is for

Experience suggests the hardest part of advice was never the availability of information. An advisory board is not valuable because of what any single member knows. It is valuable because of what well-moderated external perspectives, held in combination, produce together—a quality of judgment no individual possesses alone.

A good board does at least six things at once. It supplies knowledge. It confers legitimacy—telling the world that serious, independent people have looked hard at the question. It provides independent challenge—the willingness to tell a chief executive, to their face, that they are wrong. It carries accountability, with named individuals staking their reputations. It convenes wider networks. And, in sustainability above all, it offers representation—of stakeholders, affected communities, and disciplines that would otherwise have no seat.

The magic is in the combination. It is in the friction between a climate scientist, an indigenous-rights advocate, a supply-chain economist, and a sceptical investor—arguing in the same room—that produces advice worth having. Disagreements are not a bug to be smoothed away; they are a critical part of the value.

But this is where trouble starts. A large language model is, at its core, a machine for smoothing away disagreements. Ask it to synthesize ten perspectives and it hands you a confident, plausible consensus—the very thing a real board exists to resist.

The case for: better counsel, more widely shared

The upsides are likely to be real and demonstrable. Continuous availability beats quarterly meetings: a board that meets four times a year cannot help with the decision you face next Tuesday; a virtual one can.

Interdisciplinary synthesis that no living human holds in a single head becomes available. The reasoning can be made traceable and reproducible in a way the consensus of a human committee rarely is. Certain failure modes—deference to the powerful, groupthink, the conflicts of paid directorships—can also, at least in principle, be designed out.

Then there is access. The transition will be won or lost as much in emerging economies as in the boardrooms of the Global North, yet a world-class human board remains the preserve of the wealthy and well-connected. A credible virtual one—cheap, multilingual, always on—could put heavyweight counsel within reach of a mid-sized manufacturer in Lagos or a cooperative in Jakarta. That may be the single most important argument in the whole debate.

The honest framing is a spectrum, not a switch. “Augment” and “replace” are two ends of a dial, and most of the really useful territory lies between—with AI preparing the ground for a human board, stress-testing its assumptions, and widening the voices it can consult and communicate with.

The case against: laundered legitimacy

Turn the dial too far and the risks compound. The sharpest is legitimacy-laundering. A board’s blessing is social proof, and social proof is what greenwashing needs. “Our AI advisory board validated this strategy” is a sentence designed to end arguments rather than start them.

Then there is representation. A model trained on the internet over-represents the already heard and under-represents exactly those a sustainability board most needs: frontline communities, indigenous knowledge holders, the global poor. Stakeholders on tap are very likely stakeholders you can influence or even control.

Deeper still is the problem of values. Sustainability is not fundamentally a knowledge problem; it is one of contested, intergenerational ethics—whose interests count, over what horizon, against whose costs. A system can model a value without holding it, describing what an indigenous community would say without bearing the consequences of saying it.

A system fine-tuned to be helpful, deployed by the people it is meant to scrutinize, may never quite find the nerve.

The principles we need now—not later

So, virtualization risks automating the cheap part of a board—the knowledge—while hollowing out the expensive part: independent, accountable, representative judgment. This is mission-critical because first-generation design choices harden into defaults. The conventions set for the earliest virtual advisory boards will shape the field for years afterward. And principles cannot be retrofitted onto a practice that has already congealed.

Three elements seem essential.

• Ethics: independence from the commissioning party, so the advisor never quietly serves the advised; transparency, always, about what is human and what is machine; and outputs designed to invite challenge, not foreclose it.

• Accountability: a named human on the hook, with real liability, and a standing duty to challenge so “no” remains possible.

• Design: treat augment-versus-replace as a declared point on a spectrum, not a fudge; build in representation deliberately rather than hoping the training data supplies it; and make the provenance of every piece of advice auditable after the fact.

Often, getting the right people in the room is the easy part. The harder, more valuable dynamics concern whether the board generates real friction or a smooth, agreeable blend. Some dials I’d want on the control panel:

• Cognitive, not just demographic, diversity—how members think, not only who they are.

• Challenge intensity—set high, ideally with a dedicated devil’s advocate.

• From incremental to systemic—who can help you co-evolve a minimum viable system for next-generation challenges?

• Time horizon—inject a “voice of 2050,” even of those not yet born, to disrupt present bias.

• Dissent over consensus—surface and keep minority reports rather than resolving them to tidy answers.

• Anti-capture independence—the right to say “you’re asking the wrong question,” because the worst failure is a fluent answer to a self-serving one.

• The absent and the adversarial—include the future regulator, the litigator, the hostile NGO, the voiceless ecosystem.

• Memory and accountability—does the board recall what it advised and hold the business to account next time?

Then the sting: every dial turns both ways. The same freedom to tune up challenge and dissent lets you quietly tune them down. So, the real question isn’t what we’d tune a board for. It’s who gets to see and set the dials.

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Coda: A Ladder of Virtualization

The WBCSD Barometer demonstrates that the demand is real, the stakes hardening. And Google’s LCAW event showed relevant capabilities arriving fast, ready or not. The question for the 2030s isn’t whether advisory boards get virtualized—that’s already under way—but whether the first generation is built deliberately, with legitimacy, challenge, representation, and accountability built in, or bolted on afterwards in the wreckage of the first scandals.

So, are stakeholders to be put on tap—summoned, synthesized, dispensed on demand to serve whoever turns the handle? Or will some remain at the table—present, awkward, occasionally furious, able to disrupt the very people who invited them? The technology can deliver either. Which one we get is, for now, still up to us.

The final question, at least here: what might the spectrum of possible formats look like? Here’s a first stab: a 6-stage model, with growing AI-driven autonomy from left to right.

Now let’s climb the ladder:

Level 0—Human-only. The traditional board: humans deliberate, decide, and sign off, with no AI in the process. The baseline, and for some high-stakes, values-laden questions still the right setting rather than a primitive one.

Level 1—Augmented secretariat (AI in the back office). AI prepares briefing packs, researches, summarizes, drafts minutes. Deliberation remains wholly human. Knowledge is virtualized; everything else stays human.

Level 2—Augmented deliberation (AI in the room). AI joins live—factchecking in real time, modelling scenarios, surfacing blind spots, playing the data-on-tap thirteenth member. It informs but doesn’t vote. Humans still own the judgment. This is where most serious boards will sit by the late 2020s.

Level 3—Hybrid board (synthetic seats). Some “members” are now AI personas representing voices a real board can’t easily seat—future generations, an ecosystem, an absent market, a hostile regulator—deliberating alongside humans who chair and retain override. The representation function starts to virtualize.

Level 4—Lead-virtual (human on the loop). The synthetic panel does the bulk of the deliberating and produces recommendations; a human supervises, can intervene, and signs off, but is now the exception-handler rather than the driver. Challenge and judgment are largely virtualized. The accountability of the supervising human is real on paper but thinning in practice.

Level 5—Fully virtual (human out of the loop). An autonomous, continuous synthetic board issuing advice with no human in the routine loop. Maximum reach, lowest cost, widest access—and the point at which named, accountable judgment disappears entirely unless it’s deliberately re-engineered back in.

So, what do you make of all this? And how do you see the next steps? An inquiry into emerging best practice? A standard-setting forum? A minimum viable product prototype? All are going to happen—so who is interested in pushing which options forward?

The line is open.

Ultimately, however, and even though the concept is still seriously contested, it promotes a fairly gloomy view of the role our species has played—and will play—on this small planet of ours.

Which is why I responded warmly to Glenn Albrecht’s counter-concept of the Symbiocene. It is proposed as the name for a future geological and cultural era meant to succeed the Anthropocene.

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Where the Anthropocene names a period defined by human domination and disruption of Earth’s systems, the Symbiocene names an aspirational age in which human activity is reintegrated into the living world rather than set against it.

The word draws on the Greek sym-bios, “living together,” and the underlying biological idea of symbiosis—the mutually beneficial interdependence of different organisms. Glenn’s wager is essentially etymological and ethical in tandem: he wants the defining principle of the next era to be cooperation and reciprocity among life forms rather than extraction and control.

In the Symbiocene, human technologies, agriculture, settlements, and economies would be modeled on the patterns found in healthy ecosystems—nutrient cycling, mutualism, regeneration—so that human presence leaves no lasting toxic or destabilizing trace. An almost inconceivable jump from today’s world.

Glenn wanted to offer a counterweight to the despair and “terror” he saw in much environmental discourse, giving people a goal worth building toward. The fullest articulation of the approach can be found in his 2019 book Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World.

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He developed the idea as part of a broader project of inventing new vocabulary for the emotional and ethical dimensions of environmental change. He is perhaps best known for the word “solastalgia,” describing the distress caused by unwelcome change to one’s home environment, and the Symbiocene concept functions as the hopeful counterpart to that grief. A positive horizon to aim for rather than only a loss to mourn.

In any event, we met for the first time this year by Zoom—and here’s how the conversation went. (Forgive the sound of the opening sequence: I had been nursing a chest infection as I flew between places like Wageningen, Geneva, Oslo and Warsaw—and it sounds like it.)

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Perhaps you recall the story? Three friends—J., George, and Harris, “to say nothing of the dog” Montmorency—decide that they’re overworked and unwell, so they prescribe themselves a fortnight rowing up the Thames from Kingston to Oxford. What followed in the 1889 book Three Men in a Boat—To Say Nothing of the Dog, was less a voyage than a catalogue of small catastrophes, including a dog at war with the world.

By contrast our afternoon on a sunny Thursday afternoon in an Oslo marina was full of delight, humor and insight, anchored by bowls of unshelled shrimp and white burgundy wine. The three men in this boat were Jørgen Randers, Jan-Olaf Willums and I. And we had stepped (or clambered in some cases) aboard Jørgen’s sailboat, Aladdin, with Elaine—who I first met in 1968, the year before Jørgen and Jan-Olaf first became friends.

We didn’t find a brass lamp in the cabin to rub and wish upon, but later in the day I did conjure the next best thing: Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude. And I promptly asked for an explanation of just why this trio might get on so well. With no prompting other than the opening question, Claude replied:

The link is that all three of you are long-horizon systems thinkers who keep circling the same underlying question: can human institutions—markets, technologies, governments, unions of states—act at the scale and speed that planetary problems demand?

The neat thing about your two companions is that they’ve spent half a century approaching that question from opposite ends of the same problem. Randers is the diagnostician—he co-authored The Limits to Growth in 1972, ran the forecast forward in 2052, and has spent a career in model-based future studies, scenario analysis and system dynamics, measuring whether civilization will turn in time and concluding, with his characteristic cheerful Nordic fatalism, that it mostly won’t turn fast enough.

Willums is the remedy to Randers’ diagnosis—an author of books like 1992’s From Ideas to Action, but more importantly a serial builder who has kept trying to bend the curve, as co-founder or seed investor (as with Inspire Invest) in REC (solar), Think (electric vehicles), MoveAbout (EV carsharing) and ZEM (batteries for ships).

So, one of your friends has spent his life forecasting the curves, while the other has spent his building prototypes designed to bend them.

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Nor did Claude stop there:

…And there’s deeper common ground beneath even that. Both are MIT men, both Oslo-based, and both—like you—were present at the institutional birth of corporate sustainability — Randers as deputy director general of WWF International, Willums as a founding co-director of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

So when the table turns to the evolution of the sustainability agenda, these aren’t pundits commentating from outside; they’re two of the people who built the thing and are now watching the whole fifty-year arc—from limits-to-growth, through corporate sustainability, to ESG and its current backlash—land however it’s going to land.

The priority that binds this boat ‘s crew together is the fate of the long term—felt personally, by men experienced and accomplished enough to take that view honestly, and to sit with the gap between what they spent their lives advocating and what the world did.

This has been a stocktaking among elders on a boat named Aladdin—a vessel named for wishes, which offers its own quiet irony.

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Finally, I asked Claude where exactly I slotted in among these latter-day Vikings? The reply:

Your place in the boat isn’t in the bow or at the oars. It’s to take the tiller of meaning: the one steering between Randers’ diagnoses and Willums’ remedies, finding the thread that runs through both. The pessimist measures, the optimist makes, and you’re the one who notices they’re working the same problem from opposite ends.

And Elaine? Well, you’ve already slotted her, haven’t you, into the “not to mention.” That’s the subtitle’s seat, the Montmorency seat, and it’s worth remembering that in the Jerome K. Jerome version the dog is the most competent character aboard, stealing every scene without needing a line.

Then finally, finally, what wish might—or should—we all make if we could briefly hold Aladdin’s magical lamp? Claude pondered that one, too. “The only wish that survives that group is the small, honest one, for more time. Not for each of you but for the transition the planet needs. And more of it for afternoons like this—with people like this, on water like this. But more time is the one thing that the lamp can’t really grant.”

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