Spelade
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There’s one huge structural driver of unsustainability that ecological economists rarely talk about, is fiendishly complex, and deliberately opaque in part to avoid accountability. We’re talking about the financial sector. So we’re happy to welcome Katie Kedward onto the show to help talk us all through the key basics. Katie is a Research Fellow in Sustainable Finance at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at UCL, and we cover issues spanning the role of different actors throughout the financial sector, the limitations of current approaches to reduce its climate and biodiversity impacts, and the role of the state in shaping finance so it works for society. There were some technical difficulties in the recording so apologies for a small change in audio quality during the course of the interview. Sound quality rescued by Editor Aidan Knox.
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Currently markets determine most of what happens around us. But markets have no morals: everything is up for grabs. If you have the money, you can turn wetlands, forests, or any other biodiversity rich areas into mono-cultural agricultural lands, human habitats, or mines in the name of development. But can we and should we compensate this by making the developers pay for biodiversity conservation somewhere else? This is the central question around biodiversity offsetting andin his research, Sophus zu Ermgassen has been keen to understand if it is possible to design nature markets in a way that satisfies both ecological and financial objectives, and if not, what the alternative is. Sophus co-hosted Season 2 of Economics for Rebels and has asked his guests many exciting questions. In this opening episode to Season 3 we get to hear Sophus also as a guest. Edited by Aidan Knox.
