Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism

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If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. FSIs need a better path forward, one that makes it easier to gather the data needed to build new frameworks while still meeting current regulatory expectations and requirements. Unfortunately, many financial institutions remain beholden to legacy platforms that weigh them down with unproductive tasks, such as manually compiling information from disparate sources and systems. Carney, M. (2015), “ Breaking the tragedy of the horizon”, speech at Lloyd’s of London, 29 September.

The underlying concept posits that from a Risk Management perspective Climate Change introduces (besides other changes and risks) a new type of Systemic Risk that involves interacting, nonlinear, fundamentally unpredictable, environmental, social, economic and geopolitical dynamics, which are irreversibly transformed by the growing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Green Swans is a delightful, disturbing, and hopeful read. As we enter what John refers to as the ‘Exponential Decade’ of the 2020s, the stakes couldn’t be higher for humanity and planet earth. During these turbulent and promising times, I for one am extremely grateful for the steady guidance, wisdom, brutal honesty, and insights John shares here. Drawing on his decades of thought leadership on the role of business in creating a better world, John at once validates the vital role that business will have in innovating and scaling new solutions, but also gives a clarion call—indeed an imperative challenge—to shift from stakeholder value to system value. Green Swans offers a blueprint for the future-fit businesses of tomorrow.”Dame Polly Courtice, Director of the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL). Also Founder Director of The Prince of Wales’s Business and Sustainability Programme, and Academic Director of the University’s Master of Studies in Sustainability Leadership. Although he admitted that it’s impossible to withdraw a management concept, Elkington said that his provocation simply was meant to challenge how people had embraced the triple bottom line and to question whether the concept was achieving what it originally was designed and intended to do.

But it’s more than merely the volume of initiatives. There’s a process too. As with many disruptive ideas, it starts with Rejection, the phase in which people simply reject the possibility of a Green Swan happening (think “people will never give up combustion engines”). They're character-forming, but we start to have to link up in very different ways," he said. "We have to break out of our sustainability reality bubble. That's beginning to happen fundamentally in the young people. It really keeps me moving forward. They think differently, and they're pretty optimistic. We can solve some of these problems, and they want to be part of that. It’s part of our role to help them do that." It’s finally time for another review of a book that we’ve read as part of our Nordic Sustainability book club. This time, we’ll talk about Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington – the “Godfather of Sustainability” himself. James Cameron, Chairman of the Overseas Development Institute, Founder of Climate Change Capital, and a former member of the UK Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Board. In essence, it is the ‘system value’ model that will best enable green swan dynamics. Hence, moving towards such a model must be a priority for businesses, if they are to be part of leading the change.

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Are others encouraged and rewarded for contributing enhancements, which then become available to everyone? It’s great that there are bailouts happening," he said, "because we need our economy to stay somewhat on its feet, but if taxpayers are going to underwrite private sector businesses, then we’ve got to ensure that there are conditions imposed on that money, which over time incentivizes decarbonization and the other stuff that we absolutely have to do. There’s probably no greater moment of leverage for our governments than this point in time." To speed up the journey towards this upgraded, regenerative form of capitalism, we need to embrace uncertainty, and dare to experiment with new economic and political models. In Elkington’s words, “we must move well beyond the development of new frameworks and tools, and towards new thinking, and critically, toward new operating systems for our economies.” Furthermore, he advises to use the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals as a North Star to guide the way forward.