Building financial literacy in the fight against climate change
Climate Change is the greatest challenge of our time, not just because of the urgency and the size of consequences but because of just how tangled, embedded, and interconnected the underlying issues are.
A significant part of this species level task we all have to understand and identify and dentangle these threads to surface the imperfect, yet powerful solutions that can make meaningful contributions towards a more sustainable society.
Denise Young, EHF Fellow from cohort 4, has been deep in this work, and has recently taken the leap into action, launched a new initiative working on a very specific, systemic solution.
Money matters
The financial sector has a huge role to play in our society, and perhaps understandably, has a terrible public image, especially since Occupy Wall Street and the 2008 global financial crisis. Coming from a long background in financial journalism and climate science communication, Denise began observing changes in the financial sector rapidly accelerate since the 2015 Paris Climate agreement. In Paris, the signal was made clear. The change we need to decarbonise our society will not and can not be made by governments alone. Non-state actors; cities, finance, business, civil society are the key to achieving the goals outlined in Paris in the 2015 agreement. The responsibility of the financial sector to be a meaningful driver of this change is huge, there is much work to do to realise this potential and there are some challenging roadblocks. Lack of neutral information about what is going on in terms of real changes, how financial institutions are ‘greening their business’ and what the downstream effects of this work are in wider society, mean consumers are often in the dark and organisations are slower to react.
“Lack of information is a real problem in green finance. Most of the information is already behind a paywall or distributed in expensive private, industry specific newsletters, so it pushes out the normal consumer - they don’t even know what there is to know”
Denise believes independent, objective information about the potential of the financial sector to drive change can play a big part in the solution.
“I want to demystify green finance so people can see how they can have direct influence on things like what goes into their pension fund, to insist on having fossil-free investment choices. Consumers need to know how the system works in order to have their say and make a difference.”
Creating new Climate narratives
Denise has grown her career translating complex challenges into digestible information designed to drive action. Starting professional life as a financial journalist for Reuters in Asia, she covered financial markets in HK, Thailand and Japan before transitioning into PR and storytelling for research groups working on agriculture, development and global health. Denise then landed in an international science organisation, doing climate communications for IPCC scientists and science advocacy for policy makers with the UN, to ensure policies are informed by scientific evidence.
She is now building on that background to focus on the financial sector as a lever for making faster change on Climate Action globally.
“To connect the hopes and aspirations of the end user of finance with the way big capital and big finance deploys their assets.”
“The work is to demystify green finance for general audiences and get beyond the view of ‘corporate greenwashing’ so consumers gain the literacy they need to understand how to leverage their role in the finance sector to drive change.”
This is tough but necessary work, deep inside one of the largest, most influential sectors on the planet, riddled with lobbies and vested interests. It begins with finding the actors who are genuinely trying to leverage the industry’s potential to create meaningful change, before articulating and sharing the information about how that can actually happen. For a movement to grow, it has to start with wider literacy.
The COVID catalyst
After brewing ideas about a podcast about climate change, finance and activism since late 2019 Denise entered lockdown in rural France with an editorially sound concept and all of a sudden high level guests from across the global finance industry were much more accessible and willing to say yes to a conversation.
With COVID-19 providing the ‘now or never’ backdrop, she stared down the lockdown productivity challenge to launch a new podcast called New Climate Capitalism. The first episodes are now live with globally leading guests from large financial institutions like Sony Kapoor, Managing Director of the Nordic Institute for Finance, Technology and Sustainability and David Klier, Head of Sustainable Finance at HSBC.
The series and audience is growing week to week.
What’s next?
The New Climate Capitalism podcast is being created as an editorial project in search of institutional partnerships with universities and business schools who are interested in co-producing content around green and sustainable finance. The finance sector laments that there are not enough qualified people available to work in the growing green finance area and a big part of this challenge is to create relevant learning resources. Denise is looking to co-produce content with research institutions, business schools and universities that are creating new courses and would like to get new ideas out there to future students as well as the curious general public. She wants to share new research, growing global trends and create widely accessible media content.
Having dived into the complexity, Denise has found a path of action with a clear goal: to grow the general literacy and agency of the end users of finance which is… everyone with a savings account that hopes to have both retirement savings and to live on a planet worth retiring to.
Journey with us
Impact is a journey and it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It takes a group of inspired, committed, and informed individuals to get a world-changing idea off the ground. You can help amplify EHF Fellow impact as they work to develop solutions to some of humanity’s biggest problems. Here is how you can join us in this work as we journey together on a path to a better world:
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