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ESGgo at COP27- Financing Climate Change Mitigation

Watch the Financing 1.5 Degrees Panel from the 2022 Climate Action Sustainable Innovation Forum

During COP27 at the 2022 Climate Action Sustainable Innovation Forum, ESGgo's CEO Orly Glick spoke in a panel about financing climate change mitigation and how ESG relates to it all.

One key takeaway from the session was that it’s a data driven challenge and having standardized, comparable data is pivotal when setting sustainability KPI’s.

This session was moderated by Sean Kidney, CEO of Climate Bonds Initiative.

Other panel participants included:

Watch the full session below:



Session transcript:

Sean Kidney: Well, you've been hearing about the problems we face. We're gonna talk a little bit about financing the transition. To use those words of the previous speaker, how do we get to 1.5 degrees? I've got a fantastic panel coming up on the stage right now. And I'm told we're going to have a name above every chair, so we'll know where we're gonna sit. I'm waiting with bated breath for this, help me out. Please join me, everyone, up on the stage. I'm Sean Kidney. I'm the CEO of the Climate Bonds Initiative, we're the global NGO for Green Bonds, if you like. So that's one thing that we can do. But as you know, we've got rather a major challenge, on the mitigation side we are not doing very well. Emissions grew 6% last year, they should have gone down 8% on average, as they have to do every year this decade.

You sort of know what the challenge is. The IPCC tells us that unless we get emissions down 50% by 2030, not 2050, not 2040, but 2030, we're sort of toast; that's the minimum to avoid catastrophic climate change. And we do not want to start examining what we have to do to survive catastrophic climate change, partly because it's not certain we can survive. So that's the challenge we face; seven short years to get emissions down. Of course, for those of you that've been coming to COPS for many years, you know we've had this conversation many times. It's a bit dispiriting in some ways, you know? Since 1992 our climate side, or earlier I suspect, our climate side has been telling us we need to get emissions down. They've been very consistent, frankly, in the things we need to do; stop fossil fuels. Every year at COP, and at a government level, we've been saying to them, "Oh my God, that's so bad, isn't it? Oh we're all gonna die, my children!" But what about we just do this because that looks really hard. And they're the climate change plans we're pursuing, inadequate, manifestly inadequate to the challenge. We still don't have climate change plans, certainly on average, that are adequate to the nature of the challenge, although we're getting ramping up. That's the difficulty that we face now. Of course, because we've lost the fight to stop 1.5 degrees, we're still aiming at, it hoping that we're gonna be able to get direct air capture and a few other measures, reforestation to get emissions down again. We need the 1.5 target, but we're realistically gonna experience 1.5 the next few years, two degrees soon after, and God knows what that will bring. Pandemics, war, famine are how we've experienced climate change in past significant periods. We have to prepare for that while we're dealing with mitigation. That means the resilience agenda is even more important than it has been before, and this past summer in the north has shown us some of the beginning impacts. I just want you to think, Pakistan floods, Sichuan drought, drying up the Rhine, these are a result of emissions that were put in the atmosphere 30 years ago because the latency effect. The emissions we've put in the atmosphere since then, by the way, more than the previous 150 years, will continue to make climate change worse for the next 30 years, even if we stop emissions cold tomorrow morning at nine o'clock. Now that's a rather big challenge.

At the minimum we need to make sure we meet the IPCC's targets. We know it's gonna require a lot of capital. The McKinseys, the latest report on the topic, recommended or suggested $9.2 trillion of capital per annum of mitigation, good news was about two thirds is reordering of capital, instead of investing in freeways, invest in railways, that kind of idea. But there is a capex penalty. The good news is we have capital on the planet. We have more in the savings pools we've created over the 70 years, run by people like Mark at AIA, than we have ever had in history before. So there is capital around, of course, it's not necessarily in the right place, which is one of the things we have to talk about today. We know the world is convinced now change is coming, well at least investors are. The shape of the future has been decided, it will be clean and green. There's now an issue about how fast we're gonna get there, whether we're going to get there fast enough, which as we know is an existential issue for us. So far so good. What do we actually do now that tempo, that timeframe? I would like to ask a few of our speakers, let me introduce them first. I wanna ask Mark Konyn, who's this Chief Investment Officer of AIA Group in Asia to kick us off if I can. Mark has got a very special role here, he represents the asset management industry on fund managers, and by the way, this is a sector worth about $130 trillion globally of assets under management, so it's a very big chunk of the world economy. Mark, what do we do?

Mark Konyn: It's a great question and the way you describe the scenarios that we are facing sounds all doom and gloom. But I think it's about intent. And for us, you know, we talk about the finance sector and the roles and responsibilities we have, but to really get your shoulder behind this issue and to be able to position your asset program in a way that's consistent with the outcomes that we all hope for, you really have to talk about your organization being an organization of purpose. Because it's not just about putting in place remedial measures and trying to adopt best practices, you have to genuinely believe that this is what you stand for, that this is the objective of your organization. And as an asset owner, we're both an asset owner and an asset manager. But by an asset owner, what we mean, it's our balance sheet, it's our money, so we can dictate, if you like, we can mandate how those investments are deployed. So we've made our commitment to net zero. We have a further ambition to align all of our investment strategies with sustainable outcomes. And let me frame it for you a little bit, and this will help put it in context.

We are a life and health insurer, 60% of the world's population that are at risk from climate change live in Asia, they're our clients. So we go out to our clients, and it's a very tactile industry, we have insurance agents who are embedded in the communities where they operate. We mobilize savings, we aggregate savings, then we have a responsibility to deploy those savings. And because ostensibly our liabilities are very long dated, we need long dated assets so our money stays at work for a long time, and therefore when we think about firstly risks that are incumbent with deploying capital for the long term, we have to really take into account climate risk. So it's, if you like, it's fundamental to what we do. We have to work hard with the market to convince the market that these are assets that we want to buy. And I think we're mobilizing others in the finance community to take our aims alongside others much more seriously, and to think about deploying capital for long term outcomes. And that's our commitment ultimately to our policyholders.

Sean Kidney: So, you're not doing this for sentimental reasons, or to save the planet, you're doing this because it's part of your risk management strategy with your portfolios, right?

Mark Konyn: So it's our purpose because it's an existential risk. If we don't do it, we are basically reneging on a promise we have to our customers, but most importantly we are not acting in the interests of our customers, and ultimately our business will be in decline as a result. So we're not ensuring property and casualty because there it's very clear, if you don't think about climate when you are underwriting P&C, property and casualty risk, you're basically out of business because those risks will be uninsurable. But we are thinking much more long term, so it's, for us it's about deploying capital rather than underwriting the risks. The capital has to be deployed in a way which delivers long term outcomes, and therefore first and foremost risk, and then secondly, of course, we believe that it will deliver returns.

Sean Kidney: Now isn't that the way you'd like all our governments to act as well? Thinking for the long term and deploying capital and state sector assets accordingly? So one of my great hopes to be honest, Mark, is the fund management industry, the asset management, because of the long term horizons. So very interesting. I'd be interested to query you later about liability side, because you've gotta mutualize a lot of risk to get through this volatility of the 21st century. But let's move on to Lauren, because S&P, used to be called Standard and Poor's Global, has done a lot in the last few years to do things like integrate climate risk into credit ratings and so on. If we are trying to provide useful tools for the likes of AIA, what are you doing? And more to the point, what's your view on how we massively scale up capital flows in the near future?

Lauren Smart: Thanks Sean, it's great to be here. And it's great to see so many people. So I'm going to answer this question through a little back story. So for those of you who don't know, I became part of S&P through the acquisition of Trucost, which I joined as a startup about 20 years ago. And when we were growing the Trucost business, which is an environmental economics business and data business, we had no clients initially, not really much of a market, just a small group of us very committed to thinking, actually this is missing from financial decision making today. Roll onto 2016, we had a few clients, quite a few clients actually, which was great. We were embedding environmental data into financial decision making, but we were at a point whereby we were thinking that same question that you just posed to me; how do we scale, how do we take this to the next level? And the answer we felt was by making sure that we had our data and analytics in the workflows that our clients were using, and that meant mainstream workflows, and it meant all different parts of the capital market. So it means really making sure that it's easy and accessible to use environmental data in decision making. And we felt that S&P was the best home for our decision making, because S&P has a pretty unique situation in that all the different divisions of S&P, whether that be S&P global ratings, or whether it be SPDGI, our index business, whether it be now what's called our commodity insights business, or our market intelligence business, they're all dealing with all different parts of the capital markets, and that put us in an incredible opportunity to embed data in decision making. And as we move forward our aim is to make sure that that data evolves with the needs of the market, that we're always a few steps ahead, hopefully not more than a few, but a few steps ahead of what our clients might need in order to make those decisions. So what we're working on at the moment, obviously climate getting to net zero, how to understand physical risks associated with climate change, but also a really, really critical part of getting to net zero is nature. And I think one of the things that we've seen recently is we've got lots of conversations about nature, lots of conversations about net zero, and they can be siloed, but they can't be, they have to be brought together, because in order to get to net zero, nature based solutions are absolutely critical, and climate is part of nature, so that's a really key focus area as well at the moment.

Sean Kidney: And it's fantastic because you've got this title now, Chief Commercial Officer of Sustainable One. So what a road it's been since Trucost got going. Naoko Ishii is a friend of mine who I met when she was head of the Global Environment Facility. She's a former Deputy Minister of Finance in Japan, and now at the University of Tokyo in a senior role, although she tells me it's not so substantial on a day-to-day basis, but we'll hear about that in a minute. Naoko, you've been reflecting on this issue for a long time, what needs to be done? You know everything about the urgency. What needs to be done to make sure capital scales up adequately?

Naoko Ishii: Yeah, thank you. And the good afternoon everybody, so happy to be here. I have been quite frustrated with seeing that the all goodwill, or the good investment, the good projects, are still scattered, fragmented all over the world in isolation, not clearly able to adapt to the system change, which we are all talking about. Before the system, the moderator was talking about how difficult it is in the real economy transition, and yes, we need a transition, we need a system change over the real economy, which is already very complex. But the question for this panel is; what's the role of financial sector to facilitate that kind of transition to achieve 1.5 that already mentioned by you, but also Lauren, that it's not just carbon, it's actually the natural capital.

And you also mentioned the importance of adaptation. So that challenge we are facing, it's basically system collision of our current economic system, which has both real and financial in collision course with our natural capital, or the planetary boundaries. So how we can really transform our real economy and the financial sector, so that we can really tighten up the boundaries. From that point of view, maybe we can just to keep aside this real economy transition because it's already, you know, need a lot of discussion. But from financial sector point of view, I think it's time for us not to just try to aggregate that small scale projects in isolation, but think about what kind of system change financial sector needs, and from that point of view there are a few interesting, promising signs. And we have seen, like that disclosure is now capturing a lot of interest that the TCFD, now TNFD, and then maybe combines within the ISSB. And if the investors are really pushing this to us at the next level and make it more regulatory or mandatory, it's gonna be a big push for the financial resources to be deployed into the right direction, well, actually avoid being deployed in the wrong direction. So that's something I really wanna see, and that's already mentioned; that data is extremely important, and it's not just carbon, it's actually much more tougher to measure that the natural capital. So the data which is current actually mostly at the hand of the private sector, how to make it more accessible, and uploadable, and usable, that's another important challenge I think.

Sean Kidney: The data side is really important. Of course underpinning that has to be an idea of what we've gotta do so we can find the appropriate kind of data. We've had one win in the last few years, which is taxonomies, guidance around the world, including in Latin America, where Alex comes from, where we've been working via IDB, and Chile, and other countries on developing guidance which is science based, not politically compromised, I'm going to argue, although that can be a matter of debate in the audience. But Naoko, we are also talking about the role of development finance institutions, and I just want you to throw a couple of curve balls at Alex's way before I let you go, what do you think DFIs need to do to make a big difference in mobilizing capital? What's your view?

Naoko Ishii: I thought I already left the DFI world. But actually the one of the challenge of the DFI, particularly MDB, which I used to work for 18 years or so, is that still they are very much are organized by national silo, it's mostly that they are taking care at the national interest, but then now the issue we are facing is transnational, or global. So how we can this DFI become much more focusing on global commons, not just a national treasury, so that they have to shift the mentality, I think you are talking about too, that is this very important thing. Another thing is that instrument they do have is more like a small amount of grant, but mostly concessional loans, and which actually they may adapt to the debt burden sometimes, so how they can really team up with the other instruments, like the grant, and also that guarantee, and actually financial fee money, and how to create more like a branded finance scheme which is able to bring the policy makers, and then the investors, consumers, and the local community together so that this mechanism becomes more like a useful machine to address that system change, at either sector wise, or a local context.

Sean Kidney: That's a segue to Alex, Alex Rosa, Chief Strategy Officer of IDB invest, the private sector financing arm of the Inter-American Development Bank. Your thoughts?

Alexandre Meira da Rosa: Well, first, good afternoon and thank you Sean for the invitation. To start with I would say that I agree with Naoko very much on the point that we have to be less country oriented, and I think that the organizations are walking in that direction. We are at this very point discussing a new business vision with our board, and increasing our KPIs on crosscutting issues like climate change and gender is a central piece of it. But it also add that I think that we have a role in mobilization, of course. But that we have to enhance both at the project level and again at the business model level of the organization. Not only mobilization, innovation, and also the bridge that we can offer to investors, between them, and the government, and the civil societies in which they operate.

But maybe I would focus on mobilization, right? Which is probably the, not the easier one to tackle, but the easiest one to talk about because as you said, there's an entire industry, asset management industry, and here Mark represent them, looking for assets, for development assets, greener assets if you want. And we operate in Latin America, on the other hand we see this immense offering of opportunities without financing. So what is the gap there? That we have to help to close? First it's a symmetry of information. We operating in this region for 60 years now as a group, know those jurisdictions, know those sectors, way better than our partners and our colleagues sitting in London, or in Hong Kong, or in other places. So it's part of our job to make that bridge by helping countries to structure those projects better by bringing blended finance in, and I can talk a little bit on how we are doing this, but also de-risking much more. But for that we really have to rethink the way that DFIs and MDBs operate because we operate under a business model of investors. We originate and hold an asset for 20 something years. Whereas we think that we should now move to a model where we are originators, and we are originate and share those assets. Why I'm saying share and not sell? Because we believe that we shall hold part of those assets to ensure that the impact that we want them to achieve are indeed achieved. That the safeguards that we strive to comply are actually complied, because that will be a guarantee for our buyers of those assets as well. So we have to move in that direction and recycle our balance sheet much, much faster, that will allow us to have space on our balance sheet to assume more risks at the project level. Assume those level of risks just enough to crowd in external investors in those projects. So I think that we have to move more and more.

We at IDB, we are asking for a capital increase for our shareholders based on that proposition; saying to them, don't give me more money to do the very same thing we've been doing, give us more money to originate those assets and sell them, and bring in those resources that are looking for assets in Latin America and the Caribbean. I don't know how we are in time, but we can later talk about innovation and also this bridge that we can provide between investors, government, and civil society.

Sean Kidney: But I think this idea of origination and staying involved, but crowding in private sector finance is music to your ears Mark, right?

Mark Konyn: Absolutely. One of the problems you have is the lack of agency often that when banks originate, and syndicate, and sell, you basically are left holding the the can, and no interest left in the ongoing management, and yet there's a responsibility to service those loans. So certainly retaining some skin in the game is something that would greatly help. I mean, the whole concept of long term financing though, this is not something that's unique in terms of being a challenge just for climate related projects, it's for all projects. You know, we've, the financial system has been wholly dependent on the banking system to finance these types of projects, we need to move away from that, and access long-term capital, and get the balance right so that we do see a commitment in terms of long-term outcomes, which will then align with what we need for climate action.

Sean Kidney: Fantastic. All this of course is cleverly using the assets we have available to better manage risk for people who don't necessarily have the due diligence capability to manage risk on their own. Our public sector institutions have an incredible capacity to do that. And I'm gonna say, even for your current balance sheet, if you look at the G20 capital adequacy ratio paper, there's more we could do, right? So we need some decisions. But of course risk is more than just balance sheet management. And I want to bring in Orly Glick at the moment, from ESGgo, who's been developing artificial intelligence tools to assess risk. Tell us a bit about that, and tell us a bit about how we can use this, or how this can be material to rapidly growing capital flows towards climate.

Orly Glick: Sure. Thank you Sean, and thank you everybody for coming. So we've heard the word data, we've heard the word innovation, and measurement, and it's all about accountability. We can make the change, we can become net zero if we put KPIs in place and we measure ourselves. And I have the sin of, before founding ESGgo, of being an investor in public markets and in private markets, and so when I invested in assets, I was looking for measurements, and not always you are an expert on the content, and not every asset manager is an expert on climate change. And so if we build comparable data, if we build a common language that everybody can understand, and compare results, set KPIs, then we could achieve net zero. Now what is the problem with that? It's there's no comparable data at the moment, and it's very complex, and in order to create that and if I take a step back, we're looking at the data out there, there's many different reporting frameworks, and it's great, the IFRS is creating an international standard, but it's still taking a little bit of time. And then there is the data that is sitting in many different places in organizations and in cities, it's not standardized, there's many different units, many formulas, many calculations. If you have businesses or if you have organizations in different countries, you have different measurements. And so that's creating what I call data spaghetti; it's really hard to compare, and it's really hard to report, and it's really hard to improve this way. And we know the sentence, you know, if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. So the key to this is measurement. And so as data experts and as software experts, what we did is we studied all of this data spaghetti and we're trying to make it comparable and easy to use, using as you mentioned, machine learning to really make it comparable and set KPIs to make a real change.

Sean Kidney: We talked yesterday about the environment side, which is dominating, necessarily, the discussion. We are at a conference fundamentally about environment, but that doesn't exclude the social or the governance issues, right? This is, we need to encompass that. I mean, partly because we've lost a fight against climate change, we've got to to prepare our societies, which means physical resilience, but also social and economic resilience. But there's more to it than that you think, isn't there? In terms of the predictors of the right kind of resilience activity, tell us a bit more about that.

Orly Glick: Sure. So there's been a lot of politicizing of ESG in the past few months unfortunately, but if we're looking at sustainability, it has to be connected, and you alluded to that too, it has to be connected to diversity and to society as well. And a few weeks ago PWC released a survey. They surveyed 700 board members of companies with at least $1 billion in revenues, from 12 different industries. And the question was, how do you look at impact? And when we look at the female board members that replied, it was two thirds of female board members that said that impact is very important, and the environment is very important even on the expense of short term gains, two thirds of women board members, and it was 45% of male board members that said the same. So if we look at it, you know, in a logical way, if we have more women board members, we will push climate change, we will get to net zero faster. So I do think that there is a direct link between the S, or actually, this is actually the G. So there's a lot of misconception about what is G and what is S; there's two views, there's an impact view, and there's a risk view. G is not only policies, G is looking at board members, and it's looking at the board member diversity in terms of ethnic diversity, age diversity, and gender diversity. So if we need to have more women board members to push climate change, that's the G measuring that. And another interesting point is, if we want to have more women board members, we need to have more candidates, and we need to have more women in management, and that's the S. So the S is measuring how many women you have in top management, management, all other employees, and so you can look at the ratios and how companies are doing there. And it's not only gender, it's also many different ethnic diversities. So there is a direct relationship between all three letters.

Sean Kidney: So that's a pretty cool message to take away; fix climate change? Change your boards. I wouldn't have thought that before I came here today, so. But it is important to be thinking about all the aspects of change that are consistent where we need to go to, because where we need to go to is quite different to where we've been. The history of profitability will not necessarily be a guide to what's gonna be profitable and successful in the future. And one thing, a friend of mine, Frank Ellison, who's a European Central bank board member says, for central banks the past can no longer be a guide to the future, because of the nature of changes we're heading into now. We have to now look at actually a range of scenarios for constructing a more sustainable future. And Lauren, I wanna come back to you, because something that's happening in credit rating agencies, which is really cool worries the hell out of me, which is that credit rating agencies have over the last two or three years done an amazing job of started to bring in climate risk metrics of various sorts. So both mitigation, and you've been really important in the S&P world of bringing that discourse. And of course impact; risk. So we're now seeing downgrades happening around the world based on governments in particular that are more exposed to climate change, or maybe not taking steps like the Florida government that's been notched down two grades by Moody's, I'm told, I don't know about S&P, because of their lack of climate change preparedness. That's happening. But of course in terms of emerging markets where they need to raise, they're gonna need to raise a lot of capital to become more resilient, this is a negative problem, right? The cost of capital is going up, we need get them to raise more. How do we address this? How do we balance out the necessarily important risk metrics that are starting to be bought into credit rating agencies with getting people to do the right thing to make sure they don't get blindsided by the increased cost of capital that's coming from this good task. How do we do this?

Lauren Smart: So I think the key here is around having the right metrics to answer the specific question that you have. And so if we think about the history of the ESG world, it really was born out of listed equity, and being a responsible equity owner. Time has moved on, and I think we can all appreciate now that sustainability and ESG issues are not just the responsibility of the listed equity world, and also that all asset classes will be affected, and have opportunities both the risk and the impact. And so what we've seen over the last few years is a greater attention to detail to other asset classes. And different asset classes require different pieces of information. This is what I was saying about, it depends on the question you seek to answer; even within one asset class it's different. So for example, you may only be interested in the upside, alpha upside, from over a two year period, that's a certain type of information. You might be concerned about the probability of default over a five year period, that's a different piece of information. You might be concerned about the positive impact that a company has in the world, or you might be interested in the regulatory exposure from particular regulations that are coming out. All of these different things are entirely legitimate questions. And I think what we as a financial services provider, the challenge that's thrown to us is to provide the information, the data, the analytics, that enables us to have the toolkit for our clients to answer the questions that they are seeking to answer. And then I think there's probably no more capacity building that needs to be done to help different parts of the market, particularly in the newer areas, to understand what data points might be most useful. And I think, you know, one of the challenges that we've seen with the ESG bashing that we've seen has been a misunderstanding about what an ESG score is, but also a misunderstanding that it's a compilation of lots of different important pieces of data, and actually it's the underlying data, and understanding which you care about to answer your questions, and your workflows, and your needs that that is key. So there's a lot still to do, but I think we've made great progress since those early days of the just focusing on the listed equity large cap piece.

Mark Konyn: I couldn't agree more, because, you know, when you're a fixed income investor, mostly your heavy lifting is done at the outset when you underwrite the credit, particularly if you're a long term investor because you expect to hold that credit over the duration of the loan, and therefore you have to really ask yourself the question, what are the risks that this company is exposed to in terms of its business model? So I'll give you a great example, and I know it's controversial, because I've been on other panels today where others have had different views, but for us when we, anybody who's issuing credit in Asia has to come and see AIA, because we have the cash flow to fund. And when we underwrite, as I say, we hold those credits, or the anticipation is, we hold those credits for the duration, right? Until they mature. So the example I'm gonna give is on the, in the coal sector, both coal fired power stations and coal mining. And we took the decision over the last 12 months to basically divest completely from coal, and the reason here is that if we are holding those assets for 20, 25 years, and a company is raising capital, that capital will be put to use, the coal that it's producing, or the energy it's producing will come on stream in six, seven years time, and then we've got the full length of those assets to endure before we get paid back. So, you know, there's an old adage in investments if you're concerned about an asset, you don't wanna be running for the exit at the same time as everybody else. So we took the decision that the risk of stranded assets, regardless of what their transition path was, which we weren't convinced of, was just too high. We didn't want to be left holding debt with assets backing that debt that were then stranded. So I've heard a lot of stories today about decommissioning, and making it economically viable, and partnership with government, and all the rest of it, but at the end of the day, I've got a balance sheet to protect, I've got policy holders sitting behind that, and ESG is fundamental in how we assess credit.

Sean Kidney: And given the news that's coming out of the NIPCC there's conversations around methane and gas and it's the risk of climate change leakage factors across the life cycle. Can you see a situation where that will also become an issue for you?

Mark Konyn: What we want is firstly just transition. So we don't want a dislocation, particularly relating to the S, on the social side. And we've seen examples of that when there's been an energy transition in developed economies, where people have been dislocated from the labor force, so we don't want that. But what we wanna see, really, and this is where we engage with companies, we engage with over 1500 investee companies each year, with a range of questionnaires and direct contact. What we wanna see is their transition plan. And coming back to the data, you wanna see a commitment to disclosure, and a commitment to consistent measurement and disclosure, and let us judge whether we believe that transition plan is realistic, whether it's achievable, and then there's room for different energy mixes over time, that if we can see a way out for that just transition then we'll be willing to back it with capital. But if you've got a monoline business that's wholly dependent on a fossil fuel which is not eco-friendly, I don't see the transition.

Sean Kidney: And you'll hear at this conference lots of conversations about transitions, transitions planned, absolutely will need to do. What we also need is guidance about necessary ambition based on the science. In other words, is a steel company's transition plan that involves getting at net zero 2050 good enough? Or do they need to get there by 2035, based on the science and other issues? Well luckily we've got a lot of trajectories we can refer to now, and we can provide the kind of guidance that AIA can then use in their thinking. We need to wrap up, can you believe this? I'd like to ask Naoko to give us a few words, and then a last word for everyone, particularly Alex, God, I haven't even grilled him yet. Naoko, last thoughts. How do we do this really quickly? Your top two messages to the audience?

Naoko Ishii: One, let us not forget the natural capital. Still we do talk a lot about carbon counting, carbon measuring, carbon, which is important, but I think the real world also needs, and you need to take care of the value of natural capital, and it's much more difficult to measurement, but I think that we really need to work very, very hard to aiming at. And also the conversation, still focusing on risks, how to measure the value, the positive value of those and that capital feature are not priced yet. I know it's very difficult, but I think that we need to really work harder, and harder, and harder to get there, and with high ambition.

Sean Kidney: Alex. As representing a critical development finance institution, leave us with a couple of parting reflections on how we're gonna get there, and maybe, if we're gonna get there.

Alexandre Meira da Rosa: Well if I could name two or three issues, Sean, I would say, again, mobilizing the asset management resources around, as I said. The second one, develop and innovate on instruments, particularly on risk mitigation, As Naoko said, this is absolutely critical. And third, understand that public finance and policy still matters, and matters a lot, if you want to attract private capital. So thinking that we have the public sector to deal with is critical.

Sean Kidney: Orly, a parting thought.

Orly Glick: Maybe as a software company and AI experts, I would say that focus on measurements, data, and improving yourself. And personally, as a woman's CEO and a co-founder, it's not only about the E, it's about the S, and the G too.

Sean Kidney: Lauren.

Lauren Smart: We can only get to net zero with nature, the end.

Sean Kidney: Great (Mark) A final word.

Mark Konyn: I would say it's about accountability. So figure out who owns the money, whether it's the governments, the central banks, the reserve funds, the eight insurance companies, the pension funds, and hold them accountable.

Sean Kidney: Thank you to our panel. Give them a clap please. Thank you for being here today. Of course we are lucky in this room. We generally have the privilege, the opportunity, to do something, the bulk of the world does not have that chance, they will have to cope with what's gonna be a tough 21st century for human civilizations. So we have a duty, but also an extraordinary privilege, because there's something we can do. So I'm gonna say good luck and may the force be with you.