When it comes to climate change, the drumbeats of danger barely cease. For example, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in 2023, “Earth’s average land and ocean surface temperature was the highest global temperature among all years in NOAA’s 1850-2023 climate record.” Looking ahead, there is a one-in three chance that 2024 will be warmer than 2023 and a 99 percent chance that 2024 will rank among the top five warmest years.

Incomprehensible, ungraspable – not only the world becoming warmer – but sea levels rising, ice sheets melting, lashing rains, weather warnings across the UK and barely any snow on the Alps. Yet, how to respond, how to process, absorb and take it in? As is said in French, the news is “bouleversant”, which means roughly “enough to turn you over.” Facts collect and compound and the question is whether they accelerate or paralyse our ability to act to address climate change. We have a need to know, but because solutions are elusive and costly, they tend to be postponed. Business, of course, has a special need to know and is quite astute to the challenges and complexities. According to the 2023 annual Risks Report from the World Economic Forum; “cost of living dominates global risks in the next two years while climate action failure dominates the next decade.” Climate risks are financial, operational, strategic and reputational and they transcend facts alone, going to the heart of any economic activity that brings people together and on which people depend, including the workplace. According to the 2023 survey Sustainability in the Workplace – conducted for Esker, a US-based tech company, covering 600 U.S. salaried workers – the survey reveals that, “employee expectations for sustainability in the workplace are heightening – and suggests that those companies that don’t deliver on these expectations may undermine their ability to recruit talent, attract investment, or win business as a vendor, partner or supplier.” Respondents were workers earning a minimum of USD 100,000 per year and 66 percent had a college degree – half were managers – and the report clearly signified that younger workers were “leading the charge.”

Climate change is now proximate, notably in the extremes of weather, that no longer qualify as odd. We hear more often of people we know losing their houses to fire, flooding or crazy surging storms. We can feel it as earthly temperatures vary wildly, sometimes within the safe confines of the four seasons we all recognise – the Four Seasons of composer Antonio Vivaldi – and every other artist in any culture who has ever contemplated seasons and for which every language has a word. But today’s weather extremes re-arrange our experience, creating even a fifth season, with bits snatched from the other four and occurring outside of any calendar. I wonder if any language yet has a word for this alien time of year? To an extent, climate change information may have reached a point of diminishing returns – we don’t need to know much more before we put addressing climate change at the heart of our economic efforts and open our eyes to the rewards. Climate change has become the hub of our wheel. On the employment front, changing climate presents a vast engineering problem, but also equally vast jobs creation potential for people with every level of skill. There is so much to redesign, retrofit, rehab, reinvent and reconstruct – an exciting expansive re-conception of how we organise our energy and energies. A thrilling recast, in fact, driven by the need to avert and stem risks. But perhaps more fundamentally, we also need to urgently to re-think how to value the invaluable natural resources on which our economic well-being depends. For this move is key to shifting the trillions of pounds of capital still needed to convert the global economy from high-carbon activities to low. Why would that capital move? Because the costs are too high of not doing so. Framing the situation more boldly, a July 2023 report from Private Equity International on investors and biodiversity said: “Without nature, global GDP would be zero.” Renowned economist Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta of the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge and author of the Dasgupta Review on the Economics of Biodiversity, puts the relationship between economics and nature in terms of “portfolio management” and the mismanagement of natural resources in terms of asset “depreciation.” Because to date our financial systems mostly do not integrate the economic cost of this depreciation or the value of nature’s services in the first place, that the environment could “default” – on its provision of services, remains a risk that is very easy to miss in our current economic calculations.

I worked closely with French ocean explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who opened my eyes originally to the absurdities of our pricing systems, relative to the stewardship of invaluable resources. In the US, vast oil reserves were discovered in Alaska and brought to market via a network of feeder pipelines from Prudhoe Bay, to be loaded on to oil tankers and shipped to points around the world. Estimates were that Prudhoe’s reserves would last about 25 years and serve as a “bridge” fuel for the next era of energy supply. When the Exxon Valdez infamously ran aground in Alaska in 1989, causing the largest oil spill in US history at the time, hundreds of activists headed to Prince William Sound, where the oil tanker lay stricken and seabirds and sea mammals, especially otters, swam into dank pools of heavy crude. Heartbreaking images of soiled and dying cormorants, gulls, otters and other sickened animals flooded the airwaves. Cousteau, however, seemed remote from the impact of the event and so I asked him, “Why aren’t you upset about this tragedy?” He quickly responded, “I am upset, but the real tragedy is taking that oil out of the ground at today’s prices.” Oil was oozing on the sea – as wasted there as it might have been when it reached its destination – America’s profligate energy waste was made possible by undervaluing nature and a sense of limitless rights of use. Since Cousteau’s remarks about the tragedy of undervalue though, I’ve tried to keep close to the price questions – not to debase the more metaphysical aspects of nature – but because under-pricing indicates disrespect. What is free, we take and to “price the priceless” is not to raise the cost of raw materials and economic inputs, but to entirely flip the way we value them, to invest more in protecting them than using them up. Even fossil fuels, which we have burned more or less willy-nilly since the dawn of the Industrial Age, have been victims of our failure to account for the irreplaceable in our pricing and accounting systems. Fossil fuels have also suffered our disrespect, through our energy wastage. We fell into a belief that sustainability was a plateau, if only we could reach it, but we haven’t yet. The planet’s resilience has been our illusion. If we can put meeting the climate change challenge at the center of our lives and imaginations, especially our economic and financial decision-making, we will gradually tilt the earth toward resolution.

This article is adapted from the book Preface of Pricing the Priceless: The Financial Transformation to Value the Planet, Solve the Climate Crisis and Protect our Most Precious Assets – published by Wiley.

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