In Rutger Bregman’s new book ‘Moral Ambition’, he cites a model with which you can determine which world problems you can best tackle if you want to have an impact. Problems must be extensive, underexposed and surmountable/solvable. He also reviews a number of great examples in which a big difference can be made by focusing on something very small or simple. For example, there is someone who focuses on the subject of lead poisoning, which is rather underexposed, but the estimated number of deaths per year is in the millions. And the approach can sometimes be as simple as asking governments to enforce the law so that lead-based paint is no longer sold.
With regard to the energy transition, you could say that there is no longer any question of underexposure. However, Bregman’s model can still be rightly applied to the subject of biodiversity. If we just look at the SDGs chosen by institutional investors (the chart below), it is striking how much focus there is on the energy transition with, among others, SDG 7 and SDG 13. It is also striking how underrepresented themes are within biodiversity with only limited attention paid to SDG 15 ‘Life on land’ and SDG 14 ‘Life below water’.
We have been digging into the subject of biodiversity for some time now. And compared to the relative unambiguity in the climate transition, biodiversity is so … diverse. What is immediately striking is that a lot of scientific research is being done into the various themes within biodiversity. These can be divided into [according to IPBES]: i) destruction/alteration of habitats, ii) pollution, iii) overexploitation, iv) invasive alien species, and v) climate change. There are voluminous reports on invasive alien species alone [very recently published] that contain a lot of insights and research. What you don’t learn from it, however, is how to connect that to investing. Which, by the way, may also be more difficult for this theme than, for example, for a theme such as habitat destruction.
And that brings us to the second book in this blog. A while ago we received the book ‘The hidden life of trees’ from Peter Wohlleben through Pymwymic (with thanks!). While reading (we must confess that we are not biologists) you quickly understand that you don’t understand anything yet. A forest is so much more than the trees. And there’s a lot more going on underground than you can perceive above ground (literally and figuratively). Just the ways in which trees (of the same species) support each other, the interaction with fungi in the soil, how long it takes before you can regrow the entire biodiversity that an (ancient) forest has, how trees relate to their descendants, how they jointly support a felled tree, how they protect themselves against animals that eat their leaves, how they communicate with each other, etc. And then comes mankind who cuts down the trees and then literally can’t see the forest for the (felled) trees.
The challenge now is to connect these insights with our ideas in the field of investing in sustainable forestry. Fortunately, there are plenty of opportunities here to make a positive contribution to biodiversity. So in that respect, we are able to see the forest again.
